“And when it’s all gone, what do you do?”

“Make more power by means of a small dynamo.”

“And does it shoot lead bullets?”

“Not at all.  There are no bullets used.”

“Then how does it kill?”

“By means of a concentrated charge of electricity which is shot from the barrel with great force.  You can’t see it, yet it is there.  It’s just as if you concentrated a charge of electricity of five thousand volts into a small globule the size of a bullet.  That flies through space, strikes the object aimed at and—­well, we’ll see what it does in a minute.  Mr. Jackson, just put that steel plate up in front of the scarecrow; will you?”

The engineer proceeded to put into place a section of steel armor-plate before the stuffed figure.

“You don’t mean to say you’re going to shoot through that, do you?” asked Ned in surprise.

“Surely.  The electric bullets will pierce anything.  They’ll go through a brick wall as easily as the x-rays do.  That’s one valuable feature of my rifle.  You don’t have to see the object you aim at.  In fact you can fire through a house, and kill something on the other side.”

“I should think that would be dangerous.”

“It would be, only I can calculate exactly, by means of an automatic arrangement, just how far the charge of electricity will go.  It stops short just at the limit of the range, and is not effective beyond that.  Otherwise, if I did not limit it and if I fired at the scarecrow, through the piece of steel, and the bullet hit the figure, it would go on, passing through whatever else was in the way, until its power was lost.  I use the term ‘bullet,’ though as I said, it isn’t properly one.”

“By Jove, Tom, it certainly is a dangerous weapon!”

“Yes, the range-limit idea is a new one.  That’s what I’ve been working on lately.  There are other features of the gun which I’ll explain later, particularly the power it has to shoot out luminous bars of light.  But now we’ll see what it will do to the image.”

Tom took his place at the end of the range, and began to adjust some valves and levers.  In spite of the fact that the gun was larger than an ordinary rifle, it was not as heavy as the United States Army weapon.

Tom aimed at the armor-plate, and, by means of an arrangement on the rifle, he could tell exactly when he was pointing at the scarecrow, even though he could not see it.

“Here she goes!” he suddenly exclaimed.

Ned watched his chum.  The young inventor pressed a small button at the side of the rifle barrel, about where the trigger should have been.  There was no sound, no smoke, no flame and not the slightest jar.

Yet as Ned watched he saw the steel plate move slightly.  The next instant the scarecrow figure seemed to fly all to pieces.  There was a shower of straw, rags and old clothes, which fell in a shapeless heap at the end of the range.