Marksman badge. This is the badge of the lowest qualification. Below this men are rated as "1st class," but receive no badge.
That night when the different divisions of the Denver's complement returned, tired and hungry, to their ship, Sergeant Battiste worked till late arranging the scores of those who had fired, and out of twenty aspirants for the honor all had qualified as marksmen and would shoot the following day. Of the twenty, the top notch shot was none other than Dick, and fighting for last place were Trumpeter Cabell and Private Jones, both with 323 points to their credit. Dick had made the excellent score of 449 out of a possible 500 points.
The Badge Awarded to Henry Cabell
The following evening when the shooting cohorts returned on board having finished the Sharpshooter's[#] Course, he was still leading the detachment with a total score of 586 points.
[#] This course consisted of ten shots slow fire at 800 yards, same at 1,000 yards, and ten shots rapid fire at 500 yards; a possible score being 150 points.
"The 1,000-yard range was my Waterloo to-day," he explained to First Sergeant Douglass, who did not have to fire, being already an expert rifleman; "a fellow needs a lot more practise than I've had to be able to find and hold the bull at that distance, especially if there is a 'fish tail'[#] wind blowing, as happened to-day. Anyway, I'm sure of my Maltese Cross; but I want to pull down that expert's badge to-morrow, for it's the finest of the lot."
[#] A wind coming from a direction nearly parallel with the flight of the bullet:--the course the bullet travels through the air is called its trajectory.
The expert rifleman's test consisted in first firing ten shots slow fire from 600 yards over an embankment at the silhouette of a kneeling figure of a man with his arm raised as in shooting. Then came five shots at 500 yards and five at 400 yards at the same figure, only in this shooting it bobbed up above the butts for five seconds and might show up at any point, with five-second intervals between appearances. Next, two strings of five shots each at the "ducks," or Target F, the silhouette of a man lying, are fired at 500 yards. These "ducks" are supposed to fall over when hit, and at 300 and 200 yards the target first fired at, Target E, is pulled across the range on a track fifty yards long, in thirty seconds, while ten shots are being fired. Every hit counts one point, and the firer must make twenty-five hits out of fifty shots to qualify.
