They will be fortunate if they do not let off involuntarily after the word “trois,” but if they are of the sort who keep their finger outside the trigger guard till they have had a ten seconds’ aim, there will be no danger of that.
I have just been reading a book in which the hero “aimed for well over thirty seconds before firing straight at the light”; he must have had an arm of steel to be able to fire “straight at” it after aiming for over thirty seconds.
Another type of pupil is one who has shot both shotgun and rifle, but both on entirely different principles.
He is a splendid man with a shotgun, quick as lightning in snap-shooting, or a “tall” bird coming down wind.
He scorns to take advantage of a cantering hare, or a low bird. But the moment he has a pistol or rifle in his hands, he alters his method entirely.
Unless he is an officer who has had “field firing” practice, and a few rounds out of a revolver, he has only shot a rifle at a stationary bull’s-eye target, or at a stationary stag in Scotland, and all his shooting has been done in the prone position.
There is a convention in Scotland that a rifle shall not be fired at a deer unless the deer is absolutely stationary. A man shooting driven deer or deer galloping is according to this convention “not quite a sportsman,” though he may be a deadly shot at galloping deer.
It is called “not quite cricket.” That is not a happy simile; Cricketers do not, I am told, hit at a ball whilst it is stationary, but when at full speed.
“Not quite golf” seems to me more appropriate; in golf the poor little ball is treacherously hit whilst sitting on its little nest, basely built for it by the very hand that strikes it.
A man who is a crack shot with the gun, and who unfortunately is also a crack shot with the rifle in its restricted conventional sense, at slow deliberate aim, can perhaps be prepared for a duel by impressing on him to forget all he knows about rifle-shooting, and to imagine he is using a shotgun, but the moment he sees the back sight of his pistol in the actual duel, he will try to use it for deliberate aim and miss. The habit of a lifetime cannot be altered in half an hour.