, as if wondering if it might be worth
while to bother with such scum as we. Then they wheeled and
started for us. Not a moment must be lost. I started for _them_.
I passed them at a rattling gait, and as I went by I flung out a
hair-lifting soul-scorching thirteen-jointed insult which made
the king's effort poor and cheap by comparison. I got it out of
the nineteenth century where they know how. They had such headway
that they were nearly to the king before they could check up;
then, frantic with rage, they stood up their horses on their hind
hoofs and whirled them around, and the next moment here they came,
breast to breast. I was seventy yards off, then, and scrambling up
a great bowlder at the roadside. When they were within thirty
yards of me they let their long lances droop to a level, depressed
their mailed heads, and so, with their horse-hair plumes streaming
straight out behind, most gallant to see, this lightning express
came tearing for me! When they were within fifteen yards, I sent
that bomb with a sure aim, and it struck the ground just under
the horses' noses.

Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see. It resembled
a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi; and during the next
fifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic
fragments of knights and hardware and horse-flesh. I say we,
for the king joined the audience, of course, as soon as he had got
his breath again. There was a hole there which would afford steady
work for all the people in that region for some years to come
--in trying to explain it, I mean; as for filling it up, that service
would be comparatively prompt, and would fall to the lot of a
select few--peasants of that seignory; and they wouldn't get
anything for it, either.

But I explained it to the king myself. I said it was done with a
dynamite bomb. This information did him no damage, because it
left him as intelligent as he was before. However, it was a noble
miracle, in his eyes, and was another settler for Merlin. I thought
it well enough to explain that this was a miracle of so rare a sort
that it couldn't be done except when the atmospheric conditions
were just right. Otherwise he would be encoring it every time we
had a good subject, and that would be inconvenient, because I
hadn't any more bombs along.

CHAPTER XXVIII

DRILLING THE KING

On the morning of the fourth day, when it was just sunrise, and we
had been tramping an