Time was when trap-shooting appealed to me. I have shot pigeons at Monte, at Ostend, and here in England at Hurlingham at the Gun Club, also at Hendon, but it has always struck me as being a cold-blooded form of amusement—its warmest supporters can hardly call it sport. Not that there is more cruelty connected with pigeon-shooting than with game-shooting, as some would have us believe. Indeed, I have always contended that trap-shooting is less cruel than game-shooting, for pigeon-shooters are one and all first-rate shots—if they were not they would lose heavily and soon give up the game—with the result that the greater proportion of the birds shot at are killed outright, a thing that cannot be said of game, where one’s tailor sometimes takes out a licence.
But why is it, I wonder, that pigeon-shooters, considered collectively, are such dreadful-looking men? I have often wondered, and I am by no means the only man who has noticed this feature of pigeon-shooters. Glancing carelessly at the crowd seated near me now, it struck me forcibly that I had rarely set eyes on such a dissipated-looking set. Men of middle age, most of them, obese, fat-faced, with puffy eyes and sagging skin, they looked capable of any villainy, and might well have been addicted to every known vice.
One man in particular arrested my attention. His age was difficult to place. Lying, rather than sitting, back in a softly-padded leather chair, with crossed legs, and with one arm hanging loosely over the arm of the chair, he talked in a singularly ugly voice between his yellow teeth, which clenched a long cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth.
“Another twist, and he would have cleared the boundary,” he was saying to his companion, a good-looking English lad of five-or-six-and-twenty. “The second barrel cut him to pieces; it’s extraordinary what a lot of shot a blue-rock can carry away. How did you come out on the day?”
“Badly—shocking,” answered the young man. “I backed the guns to start with, and you know how badly the whole lot of you shot. Then I started backing the bird, and you began to kill every time. My luck was out to-day—dead out.”
I saw his friend smile.
“Dago was the one lucky man this afternoon, I should say,” the first speaker remarked presently. “But there—he’s always lucky.”
Instantly my interest was aroused. “Dago!” Could it be—surely—?
“Yes, he’s lucky enough,” the other answered. Then, after a pause he added: “That’s a man I can’t stand.”
“Can’t stand? Why?”