Many a day have I played truant, and half the darkies on the plantation would be searching for me, while I, in the seventh heaven of delight, was with Jerry in his skiff following up the diving ducks whose wings were broken. I had a little single barrel that would make the water splash, and that was about all.
It was my one thought by day and dream by night to possess a gun big enough to kill the ducks at a fair distance—not a swivel by any manner of means—I had not the slightest desire to be behind that huge piece of ordnance when it went off. I wanted one that could strike a flock at eighty and a hundred yards. I never divulged my thoughts at home. I was that unfortunate “ne’er do weel,” known as the only son, and such an intimation would have raised hysterics at the female end of the house, and something worse at the male end of the mansion, for my paternal ancestor was a retired officer of the navy, and when he was excited his speech savored of the forecastle more than the cabin, and his actions became alarming.
A kind fate threw into my hands just such a weapon as my soul longed for, and I look back to it now with the same affection that a man of many affaires de cœur recalls the memory of his first love.
To make a long, rambling story short, my father bought, as a curiosity, a long Dutch ducking gun, that was intended to be fired from the shoulder by a man of stalwart build. Loading it carefully, the captain told the overseer, named Robinson, to fire it. This individual was a tall, ungainly lopsided man, who got sideways over the ground like a crab. He had a slatternly wife, with the most vivid, burning red hair I ever saw, and a large, callow brood of vividly headed children.
I suppose Robinson fired the gun, for it was brought back by his eldest hope, who said something about “Dad’s laid up; somethin’ or nuther kicked him;” but no attention was paid to what he said.
My father, accompanied by his youthful likeness, set out to try the gun himself. He made me fasten a piece of paper to the side of the ice-house, and then raised the long weapon slowly until he caught sight, and then pulled. I saw him spin around from the force of the blow, and utter the most blood-curdling curses against the gun, and next seizing the harmless piece and striking it against a tree, he broke the stock short off, then throwing the barrel down, he walked wrathfully away. I picked up the pieces tenderly, and carried them to Uncle Peter, the plantation carpenter, and told him I would give him a quart of that liquor he most loved in the world if he would patch it up. Uncle Peter agreed, if I would pledge myself to keep his share in the affair secret. Of course I promised.
What with braces, screws, clamps, rivets, the old piece was reconstructed, and I was as proud of it as a girl of her first long dress, or a spinster with a beau. It was about eight feet long, with a bore about the size of a Queen Anne musketoon. The barrel was slightly curved outside. The trigger was hard to pull, but the springs were good, and every time the flint fell a handful of sparks would be generated.
But, shades of Vulcan, how that ancient gun did kick! No vicious army mule, no bucking broncho, no Five Points billy-goat ever were productive of more sudden shocks. While the recoil was not so great as that of the famous gun that left the load stationary while it lodged the man who fired it in the fork of the tree two hundred yards in the rear, yet, like a champion pugilist, it sent every one to grass who tackled it. Uncle Peter was laid out. Sandy, steadying himself with his crutch planted firmly in the ground—a human tripod—was spun around and hurled to mother earth, as Hercules threw Antæus. Jack, the giant of the plantation, who led the cradlers in the harvest field, and pulled one end of the seine against six on the other side, tackled that weapon, and he, too, for the first time in his life, was vanquished. Though this piece could not quite rival the matchlock that belonged to Artemus Ward’s grandfather, which would not only knock the shootist over, but club him when he was down, still it put every man who fired it on the invalid list for the balance of the day.
OLD JERRY AND THE DUCK GUN.