The reader has already conceived the idea of this
experiment. These rash men were wondering already
whether it were not possible to leap an engine flying
over the Chamoguin ravine, as Eclipse or Flying Childers
might have leaped the brook at the bottom of it. Joslyn
believed implicitly, as I found in talk with him,
the received statement of conversation, that Eclipse, at
a single bound, sprang forty feet. "If Eclipse, who
weighed perhaps one thousand two hundred, would spring
forty feet, could not my train, weighing two hundred
tons, spring a hundred times as far?" asked he
triumphantly. At least, he said that he said this to
Todhunter. They went into more careful studies of
projectiles, to see if it could or could not.
The article on "Gunnery" gave them just one of those
convenient tables which are the blessing of wise men and
learned men, and which lead half-trained men to their
ruin. They found that for their "range," which was, as
they supposed, eleven hundred yards, the elevation of a
forty-two pounder was one degree and a third; of a nine-
pounder, three degrees. The elevation for a railway
train, alas! no man had calculated. But this had
occurred to both of them from the beginning. In
descending the grade, at the spot where, on his little
map, Joslyn made the more westerly X, they were more than
eleven hundred feet above the spot where he had made his
second, or easterly X.
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