The town supported a first-class hardware store and its stock of guns was sufficient for the most exacting selection to be made therefrom. When the boys reached their room in the dormitory an hour later and the new gun was unpacked, Herb took it up and toyed with it lovingly. It was one of the most modern of sporting rifles, also shooting a 30-30-160 cartridge, the first figure referring to the caliber, the second to the grains of powder by weight and the third to grains of lead. The workmanship, the finish, the design were perfect.
Herb, perforce, must make potent remarks concerning the weapon.
"Now you have something that you can rely on whenever you look over the barrel and press the trigger in the right way. It'll do the trick and never fail you if you treat it as it deserves; keep it clean. Remember to do that. We'll take the stock off, unlimber the breech, warm all the parts and run melted vaseline all through it; then, when it gets cold, that sticks in there as grease, which beats any liquid oil all to pieces. In the barrel only always use but a drop or two of oil on your rag or brush and with that brass-jointed cleaning rod you can clean from either end. If you use an iron rod, clean only from the breech end; I'll bet they'll tell us that in the army.
"And, Roy, you've got to be careful how you shoot, what you shoot at and what's back of it around here. If it goes off accidentally some old time, or there isn't anything back of what you shoot at to stop the bullet, why, the blamed thing is apt to go on and kill a cow in the next county. These steel-jacketed bullets will punch through six inches of seasoned oak, twice as much pine, and clean through an ordinary tree of green wood. But say, Roy, you don't care how you spend your money; a thousand cartridges! I'll use about two hundred of them and I want to pay you——"
"You go plumb to smash; will you? Pay nothin'! Ain't you goin' to teach me how to hit a bumble-bee at half a mile? We'll start to-morrow and work regular until Commencement."
It was even so, except the bumble-bee stunt. Excellence generally follows determination where all else is favorable, and Roy possessed good eyes, steady nerves and faith in his own ability and that of his teacher. The result was that before the cartridges were half spent the one-time disinterested greenhorn was that no longer; he could put ten shots within a six-inch circle and do it pretty quickly, too, and he had completely fallen in love with what he called "the fun and fine art of firearms; hooray!"
But however interested he became in his own efforts, it was as nothing to his intense delight over Herbert's wonderful skill. He ran back and forth between target and gunner like a playful dog chasing a thrown stick.
"Ye've got the center pushed into one big hole now!" he would shout, "and ye've got only one or mebbe two outside the center and none near the ring! It's wonderful! I might shoot lead enough into yon old quarry bank to make a ten-million-dollar mine of it and never be as certain of hittin' the center as what you are each time you let her go. Shooters, like poets, are sure born and not made."
The departure from dear old Brighton, the saying of farewells that might be final, the leaving of scenes that would always be reminiscent of happy days and worthy efforts with benefits for life, came all too soon.