“Yes. But don’t go for a bull, and don’t go too close for fear he turns sharp round an’ catches you on his horns. You know the bulls are apt to do that sometimes.”
“Trust me, lad, I’ll keep clear o’ the bulls.”
“And you understand how to re-load?” asked the boy.
“O yes, all right. Dan put me thro’ the gunnery practice on the way out, an’ I went through it creditably. Only a slight hitch now and then. Two or three balls in the mouth ready to spit into the gun—”
“Not all at once, though, Jenkins.”
“In course not, lad: one at a time: no ramming; hit the butt on the saddle; blaze away; one down, another come on—eh?”
“That’s it,” said Archie, eager for the fray. “How I wish Dan had let me have a gun!”
“Safer not, lad. An’ keep well in rear, for I may be apt to fire wide in the heat of action.”
With this final caution, the mariner put his gun on full cock, shook the reins, and trotted quietly forward until he saw that the buffalo had observed him. Then, as he afterwards expressed it, he “clapped on all sail-stuns’ls alow and aloft, and sky-scrapers—and went into action like a true blue British tar, with little Archie Sinclair full sail astern.”
He did not, however, come out of action with as much éclat as he went into it, but justice obliges us to admit that he came out victorious.