It wasn’t particularly pride that had made me learn to shoot straight. When Uncle Abner sent me out to get a mess of half a dozen squirrels, he used to give me six bullets, and no more, in an old rifle heavy enough to make my shoulder ache even now when I think about it. He didn’t ask questions, because he wasn’t a talkative man. But if I came back with four squirrels or even five, he reached for the hickory. After one of his hidings, I had to sit down and think - or stand up and think, because sitting wasn’t particularly comfortable. You can’t catch squirrels with your hands. When you’re sent to shoot them, you have to shoot them. So I had to practice, and I had no bullets to practice with. What could I do? Practice without them, of course. That may sound like nonsense to men of this day, but marksmanship isn’t weighed by the pound, as powder and bullets are. I’ve seen a great many men in these times who have burned up a thousand dollars’ worth of good ammunition and who are still ten-cent marksmen - and that with rifles so light and which shoot so straight they hit the mark of their own free will, and with ammunition so clean and so cheap that every ten-year-old boy can keep his .22 rifle “in board and room.”
No, the average fellow in these days says to himself with his rifle at his shoulder: “I want to hit the target.” But for my part, I had to say: “I dare not miss it.” I have had some compliments in my time for quick shooting and for straight shooting, but my schooling came from Virginia and Uncle Abner who taught his lessons with a hickory - not a switch, but a stick that was a handful.
I used to lie on my belly, when I was too young to hold the heavy rifle steady, and draw my bead on some small thing - the head of a nail, a bit of shining stone - anything would do. I drew my bead, until I could say: “You’re dead!” I kept at it for hours - because, when I had bullets, every bullet had to mean a life. Afterward, for almost half a day at a time, as I grew bigger and stronger, I learned to snatch that big rifle to my shoulder and hold it there with hands turned into stone until the line of light on the top of the rifle barrel ran straight out into the heart of the target. Speed was necessary, too. Squirrels don’t stand still, daydreaming and talking about the weather. They give you a glimpse of their head one minute and the fluff of their tail the next as they drift through the branches of a tree. I had to get hands as sensitive as the fingers of a crooked gambler and as steady as rock. And I got them. I got them by those years of steady practice with an empty gun. Even when times grew better with me, I don’t think that I have spent a hundred rounds of ammunition in my entire life for the sake of practice.
But pistol ammunition was cheaper than rifle food, and Uncle Abner used to give me a pistol, as often as not, and send me off to bring in the family meal with that. Now, a pistol is far different from a rifle. I think that with a rifle almost anyone can be trained to become a first-rate shot through constant practice - granting a background of steady nerves. But steady nerves and practice will never make a pistol expert. Rifle shooting is a science; pistol or revolver shooting is an art. One comes from the head, and one comes from the heart. Any blockhead can learn to run a camera well enough to pass muster - i f he tries to learn - but only a few can draw a picture, and one man in a century can really put paint on canvas as it should be put. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that what the camera is to the oil painting, the rifle is to the revolver. I have seen hundreds of men so really expert with a rifle that it is not extravagant to call them “dead shots.” What came in line with their sights was actually dead before they pulled a trigger. But in all my experience I have come into contact, personally, with only three true artists with the revolver, in spite of the fact that in my day I have been from cow camp to mining ground to gambling hell where every man wore at least one Colt, and where only the fools failed to practice every day if they valued their lives.
There are many reasons for this, and I think the most important reason is the six shots which lie in the Colt cylinder. Samuel Colt was a great genius, of course, but, when he gave men six chances instead of one, he divided their surety into six parts. In an oil painting every stroke ought to count. The result is that I have seen more than one barroom brawl where twenty Colts were chattering, where the mirrors and the furniture and the bar and the windows were blown to pieces - but where the total casualties were only one or two dead. People are too much abused with fiction which tells of deadly revolver play. I believe that it takes twenty revolver shots, even at close range, to accomplish what one rifle bullet brings about. On the whole, I think the old-school revolver play where the gun was fired from the shoulder and in line with the eye actually caused more execution. Afterward speed became the thing, and men shot from the elbow and then from the wrist.
But all of these schools of shooting were wrong. There is one perfect way of drawing and shooting a revolver, and that is with the fingers only, A mere flexion and twist of the fingers ought to snatch the revolver out of the holster and fire it. But this can only be done by men who have practiced constantly and who have, in addition, a certain genius born in their eyes and in their hands. In my entire life, as I have said, I have only known three great artists with the revolver. One was the great Andy McGruder, one was Chuck Morris, and the third was - myself!
This vanity will perhaps not be pardoned, but at least I say the words honestly. And, once again, I attribute my skill with a revolver to Uncle Abner, who made me turn bullets even from a pistol into dead squirrels or dead birds, as the case might be. I had to learn young, and childhood is the time for schooling, whether in books or in guns. I had another advantage. I learned in the hardest of all schools, with an old, badly-balanced pistol, so that, when I took the Colt from the hand of Chris Hudson, it seemed like a part of my body. I felt that I could not fail with it.
I must apologize for this long digression, but, because guns, unfortunately, were to play such a large part in my history, I thought that I would explain why it was that I had a certain skill with them. Indeed, after I went into the West, I never improved in anything except in learning to draw a revolver. I was only sixteen when I started to master that phase of the art, but even then I was almost too old. I could manage to make my draw as fast as poor old Andy McGruder, perhaps, but I never could achieve that flashing light magic with which Chuck Morris could get his weapon out of leather.
Now, after all this talk, I must come back to the point at which Chris Hudson, standing there in the street in Boonville, said to me: “Can you shoot straight?”
He might as well have asked me if I could speak English or eat food. I was not vain about my skill. It was so much a part of me and of my life that I had hardly had a chance to contrast my marksmanship with that of other people. I simply answered: “I usually hit the spot.”
He gave me one of those side-ripping glances of his. Then he handed me the Colt and said: “There’s a bit of a broken bottle over by the fence. Don’t let that hold you back. You’ve got six chances in that gun.”
As I have said, the balance of that Colt, conceived by an inventor who was a genius, was like a miracle to me. It was not one of those Colts everyone else has seen so often. It was not one of those double-action bits of magic that answer the finger as thought answers the eye. It was an old single-action gun, but, after all, it was a Colt, and from the first that was a wonderful gun. A glow went over me as I looked down at it. I glanced for a moment at the mechanism. I saw how the cylinder worked. I tried the weight of it in my hand. Then I tipped up the muzzle and fired.