Bill was true to his promise to teach Virginia to shoot. The next day he put up an empty can out from the door of the cabin and they had target practice.
First he showed her how to hold the weapon and to stand. "See the can just over the sights and press back gradually," he urged.
The first shot went wide of its mark. The second and third were no better. But by watching her closely, Bill found out her mistake.
"You flinch," he told her. "It's an old mistake among hunters—and the only way you can avoid it is by deepest concentration. Skill in hunting—as well as in everything else—depends upon throwing the whole energy of your mind and body into that one little part of an instant when you pull the trigger. It's all right to be excited before. You're not human if, the game knocked over, you're not excited after. But unless you can hold like iron for that fraction of a second, you can't shoot and you never can shoot."
"But I'm not excited now," she objected.
"You haven't got full discipline of your nerves, just the same. You're a little afraid of the sound and the explosion, and you flinch back—just a little movement of your hand—when you pull the trigger. If it is only an eighth of an inch here, it's quite a miss by the time the bullet gets out there. Try again, but convince yourself first that you won't flinch. You won't jerk or throw off your aim."
She lowered the weapon and rested her nerves. Then she quietly lifted the gun again. And the fourth bullet knocked the can spinning from the log.
The man shouted his approval, and her flushed face showed what a real triumph it was to her. Few of her lifelong accomplishments she had valued more. Yet it caused no self-wonder; she only knew that she respected and prized the good opinion of this stalwart woodsman, and by this one little act she had proved to him the cool, strong quality of her nerves.
And it was no little triumph. She had really learned the basic concept of good shooting,—to throw the whole force of the nervous system into the second firing. It was the same precept that makes toward all achievement. The fact that she had grasped it so quickly was a guaranty of her own metal. She felt something of that satisfaction that strong men feel when they prove, for their own eyes alone, their self-worth. It was the instinct that sends the self-indulgent business man, riding to his work in a limousine, into the depths of the dreadful wilderness to hunt, and that urges the tenderfoot to climb to the crest of the highest peaks.