The taper burned with a flaring brilliancy but without odour.
Then Selwyn placed several cubes in a mortar, pounded them to powder with an iron pestle, and, measuring out the tiniest pinch--scarcely enough to cover the point of a penknife, placed a few grains in several paper cartridges.

Two wads followed the powder, then an ounce and a half of shot, then a wad, and then the crimping.
The guests stepped gratefully outside; Selwyn, using a light fowling-piece, made pattern after pattern for them; and then they all trooped solemnly indoors again; and Selwyn froze Chaosite and boiled it and baked it and melted it and took all sorts of hair-raising liberties with it; and after that he ground it to powder, placed a few generous pinches in a small hand-grenade, and affixed a primer, the secret composition of which he alone knew.

That was the key to the secret--the composition of the primer charge.
"I used to play base-ball in college," he observed smiling--"and I used to be a pretty good shot with a snowball." They followed him to the cliff's edge, always with great respect for the awful stuff he handled with such apparent carelessness.

There was a black sea-soaked rock jutting out above the waves; Selwyn pointed at it, poised himself, and, with the long, overhand, straight throw of a trained ball player, sent the grenade like a bullet at the rock.
There came a blinding flash, a stunning, clean-cut report--but what the others took to be a vast column of black smoke was really a pillar of dust--all that was left of the rock.

And this slowly floated, settling like mist over the waves, leaving nothing where the rock had been.
"I think," said Edgerton Lawn, wiping the starting perspiration from his forehead, "that you have made good, Captain Selwyn.