ely his rifle, of which he was very fond,
and with which his aim was unerring, was in some manner mislaid on the
way, and when they arrived in the woods they were utterly without
weapons; but Mr. Munchausen was not the man to be daunted by any such
trifle as that, particularly while his friend had an old army musket,
a relic of the war, stored away in the attic of his woodland domicile.

"Th' only trouble with that ar musket," said the old guide, "ain't so
much that she won't shoot straight, nor that she's got a kick onto her
like an unbroke mule. What I'm most afeard 'on about your shootin'
with her ain't that I think she'll bust neither, for the fact is we
ain't got nothin' for to bust her with, seein' as how ammynition is
skeerce. I got powder, an' I got waddin', but I ain't got no shot."

"That doesn't make any difference," the Baron replied. "We can make
the shot. Have you got any plumbing in the camp? If you have, rip it
out, and I'll melt up a water-pipe into bullets."

"No, sir," retorted the old man. "Plumbin' is one of the things I came
here to escape from."

"Then," said the Baron, "I'll use my watch for ammunition. It is only
a three-dollar watch and I can spare it."

With this determination, Mr. Munchausen took his watch to pieces, an
ordinary time-piece of the old-fashioned kind, and, to make a long
story short, shot for several days with the component parts of that
useful affair rammed down into the barrel of the old musket. With the
stem-winding ball he killed an eagle; with pieces of the back cover
chopped up to a fineness of medium-sized shot he brought down several
other birds, but the great feat of all was when he started for moose
with nothing but the watch-spring in the barrel of the gun. Having
rolled it up as tight as he could, fastened it with a piece of twine,
and rammed it well into the gun, he set out to find the noble animal
upon whose life he had designs. After stalking the woods for several
hours, he came upon the tracks which told him that his prey was not
far off, and in a short while he caught sight of a magnificent
creature, his huge antlers held proudly up and his great eyes full of
defiance.

For a moment the Baron hesitated. The idea of destroying so beautiful
an animal seemed to be abhorrent to his nature, which, warrior-like as
he is, has something of the tenderness of a woman about it. A second
glance at the superb creature, however, changed all that, for the
Baron then sa