The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

"That air purty long shootin'; air you certain the bullet'll carry up?"

"Quite certain," replied the Duke.

The old man bobbed his chin, and pointed his finger down the mountain to a dead tree, standing like a mile post on the road.

"When they come up to that air fir," he said, "draw a bead on'em."

The Duke of Dorset elevated the sights for five hundred yards, and the two men waited without a word for the tiny toy figures on the velvet ribbon to approach. The knoll on which they stood was elevated above the surrounding wilderness of tree tops. Below, these deep green tops sloped, as though clipped beautifully with some gigantic shears. It was like looking downward over a green cloth with an indolent sun, softened by haze, lying on its surface. The Duke of Dorset stood with one foot advanced, the weight of his body resting on the foot that was behind the other, in the common attitude of one oppressed by fatigue. The old circuit rider stood beside him, bare-headed, his hat on the ground, a faint breeze stirring his gray hair.

The brooding, lonely silence of the afternoon lay on the world. A vagrant breath of wind moved on the ridge, idly through the tops of the ancient firs, but it did not descend into the forest. There, under the blue nimbus, nothing moved but the quaint figures traveling on the long brown band. When these two figures began to come up the last sweep of the road toward the dead fir, the Duke of Dorset raised the rifle to his shoulder. The old circuit rider watched him; he observed that the man's hand was unsteady, and that the muzzle of the gun wavered.

"Stranger," he said, "air you one of them shots that wobbles onto your mark?"

Now, there was among the frontiersmen, in the day of the hair trigger, a school of wilderness hunters, to be found at every shooting match, who maintained that no man could hold steadily on an object. They asserted that the muzzle of the rifle should be allowed to move, either in a straight line up or down onto the target, or across it in the arc of a circle. The trigger to be pulled when the line of sight touched on the target. The first disciples of this school were called the "line shots," and the second the "wobblers." Almost every pioneer followed one of these methods, and no more deadly marksmen at short range ever sighted along a gun barrel. They could drive a nail in with a bullet; they could split the bullet, at a dozen paces, on the edge of an ax; they could pick the gray squirrel out of the tallest hickory at eighty, at a hundred yards, when, lying flat to the limb, it presented a target not higher than an inch.

The Duke took down the rifle. He understood the delicate reference to his nerves.

"Perhaps I would better lie down," he said. Then his eye caught the bullet swinging to its leather string at the old man's middle, and he remembered the history of it. He handed the rifle to the mountaineer. "I am not fit to-day," he said; "will you try?" And he explained the mechanism of the rifle.