"Say, Herb," said Roy, as soon as the two had got well away from the office, "that guy thought I could shoot, too, but I didn't tell him so. I only bragged you up."
"Too much; I don't like it, Roy. But it's natural; you will blarney, you dear, old chump. You made it so strong that I guess he thought we're an entire regiment of experts. Well, you can't help it now. The only thing to do is for you to learn to shoot."
"But could I, Herb?"
"Of course."
"Glory be! Hearken, me lad! Come along. I'm goin' to get me a rifle and ammunition and you get your gun and we'll go out and blow the face off of nature. I'll buy your ammunition and you teach me; see? Come on."
In vain Herbert protested that it was needless to spend money for a gun; that Roy could practise with Herb's own, a splendid repeating weapon, of .30-caliber, won by the boy at the individual shoot of the Interstate Prep School Match a month before.
No; Roy must have his own gun.
From tiny boyhood, when a chummy father had put into the youngster's hands his first air-gun, Herbert had shown a marked genius, if it may be so called, for aiming straight and knowing just when to press a trigger. Then, with his first cartridge gun, a light target 22, which he had brought to school and taken on many a hike into the broad country, the boy had become, as Roy put it, almost unreasonably expert, knocking acorns and chestnut burs from high limbs, cutting tall weeds and hanging vines in half with the first shot, tossing a stone or a tin can in air with one hand and nine times out of ten plunking it fairly before it reached the ground.
But with all this ability to put a bullet just where he wanted it to go, the lad was unwilling to use his skill in taking the life of any creature. He would not kill even a hawk or a crow, though sometimes sorely tempted to try a shot at such birds on the wing. Once he sat on a log, with rifle across his knees, while a fox leaped on a fence not forty yards away and stood balancing and curious for half a minute.
"We've got no real right to kill these things," he said to Roy, who was always with him. "They've got as much right to live as we have and they were here before we were. A fellow might shoot something if he were hungry, but not decently just for sport. These animals, birds and things, are getting too scarce as it is."