Gunplay

“ Yes, for I like your way of asking, though, in my opinion, a pistol duel is a barbarous affair. I accept, but on the following conditions: You must bring two pistols, charge them in my presence, and give me the choice. If the first shot is a miss, we will fight with swords till the first blood or to the death, whichever you prefer. Call for me at three o'clock, and choose some place where we shall be secure from the law. ”

“ There are other men, again, who are dead pistol shots when allowed to draw deliberately and take aim slowly and fire at leisure ; but when compelled to use the pistol instantly in some imminent peril, the only time they are ever really required to use it, they are slow, awkward, and embarrassed.
Let us for a moment follow the fortunes of these two men before us : the one lying bleeding on the ground, and the other flying down and across the hill, firing, and trying to hold his spirited horse to the work. ”

“ They were equipped with rifle barrels and hair triggers, and were inlaid richly with silver, and more than once had been used on the field of honor. Whenever my grandfather went out for a walk, or to play whist at the house of a neighbor, I would get down these pistols and fight duels with myself in front of the looking-glass. With my left hand I would hold the handkerchief above my head, and with the other clutch the pistol at my side, and then, at the word, and as the handkerchief fluttered to the floor, I would take careful aim and pull the trigger. ”

“ Many splendid emanations of genius are left to us, consisting of complex mechanism for gunnery. The most perfect we have ever seen, is a pistol made in Spain about the end of the seventeenth century. By moving a lever towards the butt-end, while the muzzle is depressed, the lock is primed, half-cocked, and the hammer shut down; return the lever, the powder is in the breech, and the ball before it. ”

“ Those at the front strove madly to retreat from the fire-spitting guns in their very faces, and those in the rear pressed as madly forward to the attack. The bullets from the big 45:90's drove through half a dozen men at a shot, and the passageway, gorged with surging, helpless men, became a shambles. The rifles, pumped without aim into the mass, withered it away like a machine gun, and against that steady stream of death no man could advance. ”

“ To learn the science of accurate shooting by constant practice in a gallery especially prepared for that purpose, the target being inanimate and incapable of retaliation, may, and often does, result in aptitude with the revolver and the rifle. To preserve this cleverness, however, the conditions must always be the same. The proper light must fall correctly upon the target; nothing to disturb the serenity of the surroundings or to distract the attention of the shooter must be permitted.
A grade higher comes the hunter. His targets are living, breathing objects. ”

“ When your hand moves, it'll be as fast as the jump of a spark! And when that hand moves, the gun is going to come out clean in it. It's got to come out with it! You hear? It's got to! Your fingertips catch under the butt; they flick up. They don't draw the gun; they throw it out of the holster; they pitch the muzzle up, and the butt comes smack back against the palm of your hand. And in the same part of a second you pull the trigger. ”

“ Just so with the bullet sent from the pistol; under the management of a skillful performer it goes in obedience to an unconscious calculation, and [315] not in obedience to the squinting of one eye along the barrel. Sight-taking won’t do in either case; the good marble player would be a hopeless failure if he held up his arm to his line of vision and took sight every time he went to “shoot”—the pistol-shooter who performs upon the same plan is invariably a marksman of sterling uncertainty, to say the least. ”

“ Only one green hand labored under the delusion that a long aim can do aught but “wobble the eyes.” As each flung himself prostrate, with a grave intentness of expression and a certain precipitancy of gesture, it might have seemed some strange act of worship, but for the gun resting upon a log placed for the purpose, sixty yards from the mark,—the customary distance in shooting-matches with the old-fashioned rifle,—and the sudden sharp crack of the report. ”

“ The movement is so instantaneous that the quickest eye cannot follow it, and the explosion of the pistol at the same moment aids still further to baffle the vigilance of the spectators, to whom it appears as if the borrowed watch had really passed from the pistol to the face of the target. ”

“ A man who is a crack shot with the gun, and who unfortunately is also a crack shot with the rifle in its restricted conventional sense, at slow deliberate aim, can perhaps be prepared for a duel by impressing on him to forget all he knows about rifle-shooting, and to imagine he is using a shotgun, but the moment he sees the back sight of his pistol in the actual duel, he will try to use it for deliberate aim and miss. ”

“ Should any reluctance, or hesitation, be shewn by the injured party, to accept these bills, he is shewn into a long room, with a target at the end of it, and several pistols lying about, where he is given to understand these sharpers practice a considerable time of the day in shooting at a mark, and have arrived to such perfection in this exercise, that either of them can shoot a pistol ball within an inch of the mark, from the common distance taken by duellists. ”

“ The second, in presenting the pistol to his friend, should never put it in his pistol hand, but should place it in the other, which is grasped midway the barrel, with muzzle pointing in the contrary way to that which he is to fire, informing him that his pistol is loaded and ready for use. Before the word is given, the principal grasps the butt firmly in his pistol hand, and brings it round, with the muzzle downward, to the fighting position. ”

“ March and shoot, shoot and march! The enemy’s shot rain hard; our bullets fly windward. The battle has become fierce.
Until we have pierced the body of the foe with our shot, we must continue to harass them with our fire. The bayonet is the finishing touch; the guns must play a large part in a battle. So, therefore, we must be very careful in shooting. When the fighting once begins, we begin to dance from the top of the head to the tip of the toe, we lose ourselves in excitement, but that does not do. ”

“ The infantry drew nearer, passing on the road just below the gun position, stricken, beaten, war-dulled—and dismayed. It does not take many minutes of fighting in the open against machine-guns [Pg 206] to break the spirit and numb the hope of victory. A machine-gun spitting 600 bullets to the minute, swaying its muzzle from side to side like a jet of murder, is the material embodiment of the very spirit of slaughter. ”

“ So now this is the queer position of affairs: we fire a pistol shot off at 12 midnight to-night by arrangement, and they reply with some shots over our heads, after which things continue to hum as before. You have no idea how pleasant everything seems with no rifle bullets or shells flying about. ”

“ Now and then one waits with the butt on his hip: one swings his gun anyhow in one hand like an umbrella: a third tosses it over his shoulder with the hammers down and the trigger-guard up, and jerks the muzzle over when the game rises. Except in snap-shooting, when the gun must of necessity be held already half-way to the shoulder, it matters very little which the sportsman does, nor from what position he raises his gun. ”

“ With each of the four guns firing at the rate of eight hundred shots a minute, the bullets formed a canopy over the heads of the men at the foot of the hill. A Gatling gun in action is a sight to remember; so thick and fast do the bullets fly that one can actually see the stream of lead leaving the gun and, as if handling a hose, train it on any desired point. ”

“ The rising sound of the reports told plainly of the swinging muzzle, and officers and men dropped flat in the mud and waited till the sweeping bullets had passed over their heads. Men may work on and 'chance it' against rifle fire alone, but the sweep of a machine-gun is beyond chance, and very near to the certainty of sudden death to all in the circle of its swing. ”

“ Since our recent talk in the gymnasium we have been practising, at all odd minutes, how to hold and sight the guns, and how to pull the trigger. Never before coming here had I heard of the squeeze, in which (of another kind) all army men are popularly supposed to be proficient by nature, but which here is technically a special study. The greenhorn naturally supposes that all he has to do with the gun is, like Stephen in the classic rhyme, to “p’int de gun, pull on de trigger.” 97 But since the ordinary pull is a jerk that affects the aim, some genius has invented the new method. ”

“ High against the chimney, on two dogwood forks, rested the long rifle with its fishtail sight and the brass plate on the stock for the bullets and the "patching." Below it hung the old powder-horn, its wooden plug dangling from a string,—tools of the long ago. Closing one's eyes one could see the tall grandsires fighting in the beech forest, a brown patch of hide sighted over the brass knife-blade bead, and death, and to load again with the flat neck of the bullet set in the palm of the hand and covered with powder. ”

“ The gas lit up in full glare myriads of revolvers grouped in the form of lustres, whilst groups of pistols, and candelabra formed of muskets bound together, completed this magnificent display of brilliance. Models of cannon, bronze castings, sights covered with dents, plates battered by the shots of the Gun Club, assortments of rammers and sponges, chaplets of shells, wreaths of projectiles, garlands of howitzers—in short, all the apparatus of the artillerist, enchanted the eye by this wonderful arrangement and induced a kind of belief that their real purpose was ornamental rather than deadly. ”

“ The number of duels each gun was in was carefully counted, every scar got in battle was treasured, and the men around their camp-fires, at their scanty messes, or on the march, bragged of them among themselves and avouched them as witnesses. New recruits coming in to fill the gaps made by the killed and disabled, readily fell in with the common mood and caught the spirit like a contagion. It was not an uncommon thing for a wheel to be smashed in by a shell, but if it happened to one gun oftener than to another there was envy. ”

“ The eyes stare at the expressionless breech of the gun until, tiring of that, they stare at the red wheel above the ammunition hoist. Often they stare at the bugler as he passes the open door of the casemate, and prayers go up that ultimately he may sound the “Secure.” ”

“ He looked, too, at the one gun, scarred and dented and pitted and pocked with splinter marks and bullet holes, at each little pile of breech-blocks and sights and fittings that lay spread out on handkerchiefs and haversacks and rags in the place of the other guns; and he noticed that dirty and dusty and dishevelled as the men might be, the gun parts were speckless and dustless, clean and shining with oil. ”

“ The five rose up to sitting positions against the board wall, and everyone held across his knees a long, slender barreled rifle, with the muzzle pointing toward the forest. All accomplished marksmen, it would only be a matter of a moment for the stock to leap to the shoulder, the eye to glance down the barrel, the finger to pull the trigger, and the unerring bullet to leap forth. ”

“ The shooter cocks the rifle and aims at a target a foot high on the other side of the room, and when his aim is satisfactory, pulls the trigger. When this is done an electrical connection is made which shoots forward the rod which is on the standard, so that its point punches a hole in a miniature target like a visiting card, which is placed in front of it, which hole is mathematically on the same relative place on the card target as would have been made in the target at which the shooter was aiming if he had a bullet in his rifle. ”

“ There stand the guns one after another slewed across the narrow road, almost blocking it with their length. Wicked they look in their dusty greenish paint, with an occasional glint of steel where it has been scraped off. Even to the uninitiated these quick-firers have a more venomous appearance than the simple old guns; for, with their long, low-hung bodies peering mysteriously from behind their shields, they look like monstrous grasshoppers crouching on a hill. Ugly and venomous looking, they are the pride of their owners. ”

“ Almost every pioneer followed one of these methods, and no more deadly marksmen at short range ever sighted along a gun barrel. They could drive a nail in with a bullet; they could split the bullet, at a dozen paces, on the edge of an ax; they could pick the gray squirrel out of the tallest hickory at eighty, at a hundred yards, when, lying flat to the limb, it presented a target not higher than an inch.
The Duke took down the rifle. ”

“ For forest or jungle shooting a 10- or 12-bore Paradox gun is an admirable weapon, capable of use as a rifle against large and dangerous animals, or as an ordinary shot gun for small game. A double barrelled rifle is essential for dangerous game, the saving of time, short as it is, in merely shifting the finger from one trigger to another, being an enormous advantage as compared with the action of ejecting and re-loading from a magazine. ”