February, 1918 
FOREST AND STREAM 
99 
HOW THE FINAL SHOT MEASURES THE MAN 
THE RIFLEMAN WHO CAN “GET THERE” WITH HIS LAST CARTRIDGE 
IS A FIGHTER IN THE HIGHEST AND TRUEST SENSE OF THE WORD 
By CAPTAIN ROY S. TINNEY 
O NE lazy January afternoon I was 
sprawled out under a shelter tent 
with my eye glued to the small end 
of a three-foot range glass, calling the hits 
as the disks came up and spotting the 
misses by the puffs of dust the bullets 
raised in the desert sand. Beside me was 
a sun-baked captain of infantry who is now 
serving “over there” with an eagle on his 
shoulder straps, and because our patch of 
shade was not large enough to accommo¬ 
date a third man, the company commander 
was keeping the score himself and making 
marginal notes on the work of his men 
as they came up for long range practice. 
One man had just made nine consecutive 
bull’s-eyes at a thousand yards. 
“Now he’s due to miss,” grunted my 
companion. 
“Why?” 
“Because it’s the last shot and it takes 
more nerve to fire the last shot of a per¬ 
fect string than most human animals pos¬ 
sess. See, he’s dopin’ the mirage and 
mussin’ with his gun. The boy’s fussed, 
just like you or I’d be, and he’s goin’ to 
try so hard this time that he’ll overdo it 
and slide out of the black. He’s tied the 
Sergeant for first place and that shot will 
mean the difference between a clean win 
and a doubtful shoot off, and nobody en¬ 
joys a shoot off, except the spectators. 
“Never mind the glass, watch the kid, 
he’s getting ready to shoot and his position 
isn’t just right. I tell you he’ll miss.” 
But the boy lying just beyond us didn’t 
shoot, he opened his bolt, changed his po¬ 
sition and readjusted his sling. 
“Too much fussing,” growled his com¬ 
mander, “he hasn’t a ghost of a chance, 
either now or in the shoot off; those nine 
bulls have unnerved him, same as they’ve 
got our goats, time and time again.” 
Presently the rifle spoke followed by the 
hollow “thuck” of the punctured atmos¬ 
phere as the air came together around the 
streak of partial vacuum caused by the 
speeding ball. The target sank into the 
ground and the pit service seemed to be 
unnecessarily slow. There was not a sound 
to break the dead, desert silence, no one 
stirred, then slowly a white disk rose up 
and eclipsed the bull. The boy had won 
the match and the first to congratulate 
him was the old Sergeant. 
“Sure to miss,” I chuckled as the captain 
crawled out in the Mexican sunshine. 
“Nothin’ sure in this doggone country,” 
replied the K. O. as he turned away, "noth¬ 
in’ ’cept we’ll never get south of the line.” 
I had been teaching a few of the men a 
new prone position, one that is very-low 
and very steady, a pose that is not exactly 
“permissible” in a national competition, but 
great for real work. The boy was my star 
pupil, so I was well pleased. But the old 
captain was right, the last shot takes a heap 
of nerve—call it grit or stamina or any¬ 
thing you like—its all the same. The man 
who can “get there” with his last cartridge 
is more than a rifleman, he’s a fighter in 
the highest and truest sense of the word. 
He is in a class where unfortunately there 
is very little competition. 
While I was packing up the scope and 
score sheets a pair of feet appeared in 
front of the puptent and were identified by 
old Ike Walton’s soft, Texas drawl. 
“Bwana, y’ otta be proud o’ that kid, 
he sho’ is a credit to yo' trainin’. Minit I 
saw him get inta action I says to myself, 
‘that’s Bwana’s work, that is, ’cause he’s 
the only man in the desert that uses that 
fool, go-to’ bed shootin’ position,’ but it 
works all right and the kid’s got the right 
brand o’ guts, and guts is somethin’ that 
trainin’ can improve, but no amount o’ 
coachin’ can supply. 
“Quit fussin’ there, you old horntoad, 
and come t’ chow, my stomach’s beginnin’ 
t’ believe ma throat’s cut.” 
Any time you get a sneaking suspicion 
that you are a helluvafella with the rifle, 
just try some 200 yard work from the 
standing off-hand position on the eight- 
inch bull of the military “A” target. If 
your first ten shots are all inside the 26- 
inch four ring and a few pass through 
the black, you are doing very well and 
need not be ashamed to shoot in any com¬ 
pany, unless you should encounter some 
old Schuetzen bug with sixteen pounds of 
wood and steel wrought into a work of 
art, then beware, for the chances are good 
that the old boy will be able to keep his 
bullets well inside of a 12-inch circle all 
afternoon, and between shots he will clean 
his gun and tell you interesting anecdotes 
about Billy Hayes and Doc Hudson, 
Charlie Parker and Dick Young, John 
Rebhan and a lot of other old timers who 
made history on the German-Ring target, 
the military “A” and the Standard Ameri¬ 
can. But when a mere man like yourself, 
shooting an ordinary military or sporting 
rifle equipped with practical sights and a 
sensible trigger pull, can make scores that 
never drop below the “40” mark and oc¬ 
casionally go up to “47,” you are doing 
good work and will always be found among 
the “first ten,” but the real test is to keep 
the red.disk out of sight entirely.* 
T O accomplish this a man must possess 
that sixth sense which only comes 
from years of careful training and 
intelligent observation, that perfect co¬ 
ordination between mind and body that 
'enables him to get on the bull’s-eye and 
shoot before he gets off, as it is absolutely 
impossible to hold like a rock in the stand¬ 
ing off-hand position. 
Not long ago a friend of mine jettisoned 
his conceit at the 200 yard line and came 
back to the range house in the proper 
* On the military targets a “5” or bull’s- 
eye is signaled by a white disk; a “4” or 
center by a red disk; a “3” or magpie by a 
black cross, and a “2” or outer by a black 
disk. 
frame of mind to receive helpful sugges¬ 
tions, so I turned him over to Pop Young, 
he being the best off-hand artist in our 
outfit. The first thing Pop did was to lead 
his pupil to the fifty-foot range, put up a 
reduced “A” target with a one-inch bull, 
the one used in the Junior Marksman and 
Yeoman courses, and started in on the 
technique of position. It seems to be the 
common failing of all tyros and some older 
shots, to hopelessly overestimate their abil¬ 
ity. Pop’s pupil took one look at the fifty- 
foot target and declared it was shame to 
do it, at that distance. 
“Try it,” suggested Pop, and right there 
and then one man discovered that the mini¬ 
ature target requires just as good holding 
as the full distance, also he began to ap¬ 
preciate the standing position as a means 
of developing control and trigger squeeze. 
S O I would suggest that the next time 
some friend treats the good old shoot¬ 
in’ game with patronizing condescen¬ 
sion, just lead him out in the back yard, put 
up one of those kid targets, hand him a 
“twenty-two” and defy him to muss up the 
black spot. ‘The chances are his ten shots 
will wander all over the paper and if he 
blames it on the gun, he is a mere blow-hard 
and deserves no further attention. But as I 
said before the crucial test is to make ten 
bulls in a line. I can remember with start¬ 
ling vividness one certain morning when I 
put nine bullets through the black and 
placed the tenth just an inch off at exactly 
three o’clock, how that red disk opened 
the vials of my wrath and caused the blue 
smoke to curl up from the firing line. I 
also remember that when I paused for 
breath a low laugh caused me to turn and 
there stood the last person in the world 
I expected to meet. 
“Really,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know 
it was in you and I don’t blame you one 
bit.” 
A few minutes later Ike Walton, then in 
his seventy-first year, opened up with that 
old .45 calibre, officers’ model Springfield 
of his and succeeded where I had failed. 
Some incurable humorist had entered the 
old man as a joke, and he won the match 
against a full field of cracks, both military 
and civilian. 
A review of the score board showed that 
all the top men, except Ike, had fallen 
down on the last three shots, as the scores 
read, “50-49-48-47-47,” etc. It takes nerve 
to fire that last cartridge, the sort of nerve 
that decides battles and wins wars, and I 
speak for a revival of the old stand-up- 
and-shoot-’em game as it is, in my opin¬ 
ion, the best known way to develop this all 
important quality. I am not advising a re¬ 
turn to the slow moving Schuetzen rifle 
where the bullet is wrapped in a didy and 
fed down the muzzle by a set of special 
tools, a shell of powder inserted in the 
breech and the bore carefully bathed be¬ 
tween each discharge ; instead do the work 
(continued on page 113) 
