Then, for five mornings running, we took them out one at a time and put them in a trap. Round about were a lot of boys, some with old tin cans to bang upon, some with handfuls of sand to throw at the pigeon directly the trap was sprung, and so on. We used these birds at the match for my opponent to shoot at, and, naturally when the trap was sprung there each pigeon thought that the same sort of thing was going to happen, and was up and away like a rocket.
As a result my opponent only got two out of eleven birds. I got nine, and scooped in a lot of bets at long odds, for nearly everybody made sure the other chap was going to win. “Where on earth did you get these birds from, Carlton?” asked my opponent over the lunch that followed; “I’d like to buy some.”
Billy Grant, the open champion of Scotland, and the proprietor of the King Edward Hotel, Bath Lane, Newcastle, saw me shoot a couple of times, and presumably he rather liked my form. Anyway, he made me join the Hotspur Gun Club, and suggested to me that I should go in training with him. “We can make a tidy bit of money,” he said, “and we’ll go halves in everything.”
I agreed, and I may say at once that between us we never lost. At the big shoot for the Sterling Cup presented by the Club, and open to all the North of England, held on February 4th, 1909, I killed twenty-two birds out of twenty-three. This was accounted a wonderful performance for a novice.
For the benefit of those who are not familiar with pigeon shooting, I may explain that one is faced by five traps, and the man who is shooting does not know out of which trap the bird will be released. The pigeon must be killed within the thirty-five yards’ boundary.
As I was only a novice nobody took much notice of me at the start, but after I had shot twelve birds running the “bookies,” and others who had bets on, began to look a bit worried, and some of them started making remarks with a view to putting me off my aim. “I’ll take three to one you don’t kill this bird,” one of them would call out, just as I had my gun in readiness to shoot. I would turn half round to take the bet, and then get ready again, when another one would call out, “I’ll take three to one you don’t kill,” and the whole performance would be gone over again.
This sort of thing was, of course, very disconcerting, but I went on killing my birds, and by and by there were only two of us left in. When we had each shot twenty birds, my opponent missed his twenty-first, and I had only to kill mine to win. I shot my bird, but it dropped just outside the boundary.
CARLTON AND BILLY GRANT, THE OPEN CHAMPION PIGEON SHOT OF SCOTLAND
The excitement was now intense. It was my opponent’s turn to shoot. He fired, and again he missed his bird. Again I had only to kill mine to win, and the bookies started once more renewing their attempts to put me off my aim. So I lined them all up—there were six or eight of them—and laid them £3 to £1 each that I killed. Then I took up my position on the mark, the string was pulled, and I killed my bird within a yard of the trap.