The reason is obvious; for duelling a man has to snap shoot. All other pistol shooting, with very few exceptions, is very artificial and has been done in deliberate shooting at small black bull's-eyes just as rifle shooting was spoilt.

I used to struggle with these minute sights at moving objects and rapid fire, and I am sure my record scores would have been much better if I had in those days known of the French duelling pistol sights and if, which is very doubtful, these sights had been pa.s.sed as "military sights" which was an arbitrary term in England, changing from year to year.

The ordinary pistol sights, as placed even now on the latest patterns of automatics, are the worst that one can imagine.

What one wants is a front sight which shows up instantly against any object; large so that it is the most prominent object in aiming, and a back sight with so big a U in it that you instantly get the front sight centrally in it.

These conditions are fulfilled only by the French duelling sights. The front sight is a silver ball without stalk, as large as and similar to the one on a shotgun.

Shotgun men found this the best sight and shotgun shooting is snap shooting like pistol shooting is or ought to be. Now compare this with the sights on other pistols, especially military ones. They have a high knife blade, black front sight. The target pistols have a microscopic black bead on a very thin stalk which gets bent out of position at the least rough usage.

For a hind sight there is a minute indentation in the bar of the hind sight.

When added to this you are expected to see this microscopic dot, or a problematic part of the knife edge front sight (this latter worn to an indistinct grey by friction) into a slight notch which you would need a magnifying gla.s.s to find, and which is much too small to hold the front sight in, and to do all this in a black cellar so dark that you have to light a match to look for a cartridge if you drop it you can easily see that men give up pistol shooting in disgust and want some sport where there is light and air, and in which they do not have to tire their eyes out to look for the front sight and a target at the end of a coal cellar.

Whatever pistol you use, have it fitted with a big silver front bead sight placed close to the barrel, no matter how large it is, if your eyesight needs it large to see instantly in a bad light.

Have the back sight with a big U in it so that you see daylight all round it when aiming with fully stretched arm.

This front sight cannot be altered but the back sight can be made higher or lower to suit your style of aiming. At first you do not know if your bad shots are due to the sights not being suitable for you, or not being properly adjusted, or to your wobbly aim. There is no use going further into the matter now, but later I will show you how you can alter the sights to your own individual peculiarities.

What I want to impress is, that from the very beginning, you should not worry yourself with the sights you find on pistols; get your gunmaker to put on duelling pistol sights before you begin to learn. Tell him you want them for taking a full sight in daylight at twenty yards. Let him read this chapter and he will understand what you require.

Always press straight back on your trigger, do not push it off to the left, or jerk at it.

In rifle shooting the left hand steadies the rifle and prevents this tendency to push off to one side and also in a measure counteracts the effects of s.n.a.t.c.hing or jerking at the trigger.

The pistol has no left hand to steady it. The right hand has not only to aim the pistol, but also to counteract the effect of any jerk, s.n.a.t.c.h, or push to one side from defective trigger pressing.

It is as well to put in an empty cartridge case and to practise pressing the trigger and trying to have the pistol still aligned on the object the moment the hammer has fallen. Aim and press that trigger at your own eye reflected in a gla.s.s and you can see if you pull off your aim.

By doing this you can detect any jerk to the right or left, or up or down.

With an automatic there is a tendency to jerk down so that it is very important not to get into this habit in the preliminary practice with a single-shot pistol.

When you get to grouping your shots well together, you can have your back sight altered so as to put this group into the centre of the object you want to hit, if it does not already go there.

The great thing is to make as close a group of shots as you can; if you group a dozen shots all in a bunch it is good shooting. It does not matter if they are not on the object you want to hit. That is merely a matter of having the back sight raised or lowered to cause the group to go higher or lower accordingly.

Raising the back sight makes the group higher; lowering the back sight makes the group lower.

Putting the back sight over to the right makes the group go to the right; putting the back sight over to the left makes the group go to the left.

You should be cautious however about this lateral adjustment. It is better to correct your tendency to jerk to either side than to make the pistol conform to your bad trigger pressing.

When giving instructions on learning to shoot in an early chapter, I took it for granted that the learner is using a pistol he is reliably informed shoots where the sights are pointed.

A beginner cannot know himself whether the fault is his or the pistol's when he makes a bad shot, so he gets into a hopeless tangle when using a pistol wrongly sighted.

An expert after a shot or two to find how the pistol is sighted can make allowance for the error in the sights. I saw a man make a marvellous score with a double barrelled rifle. I said to him how well the barrels shot together and he answered, "I had to aim two inches higher and to the left with the left barrel than with the right barrel." It was the man who was marvellous not the rifle.

When a man begins to become expert he knows when his "let off" has been correct and that, if the bullet goes wide in such a case, it is not his fault, but the fault of the pistol.

The modern single-shot pistol and automatic pistol are almost invariably very accurate, so if the bullet goes wrong when the pistol is "let off"

correctly, it is the fault of the sights.

Shots wide to the right or left mean in each case that the sights are not adjusted centrally to the barrel.

The front sight, being a fixture, is very unlikely to be at fault, but the back sight may have got moved to one side.

The back sight has generally a scratch made from its base onto the barrel, and if this scratch does not coincide then the sight has shifted and it must be knocked into place.

When the back sight is central and the bullets do not group to either side of the mark, but where you aim, then fix the back sight permanently and immovable.

A _movable_ back sight is a constant annoyance and I never understand why makers put it so. You shoot badly and after wasting a lot of shots, find your back sight has shifted un.o.bserved to one side. I lost a stag recently owing to the back sight of my rifle getting knocked off, being wedged only in a slot instead of being screwed in.

Have this back sight absolutely central. If you shoot to one side correct your way of letting off. Do not shift the back sight to avoid the trouble of learning to let off properly.

If you do, you will be like a man driving who, instead of straightening his horse's mouth, puts one rein at the cheek and the other at the bottom bar and makes the horse go worse and more lopsided every day till the horse is incurably crooked.

If you keep on shifting the back sight to counteract your bad let off, you will end by not being able to let off properly.

If you shoot too high all you have to do is to file down the U in the hind sight, a little at a time, until it is right. If you shoot too low, you will have to get a higher back sight put in and file that down gradually till you get it right.

The place to aim at is exactly where you want the ball to hit, seeing the whole of the ball of the front sight in the U of the back sight. Keep on working at the back sight till you arrive at this result.

If in target shooting you aim at the bottom edge of the bull's-eye, you will require a different adjustment of sights for each size of bull's-eye.

A two-inch bull's-eye at twenty yards requires the pistol to shoot one inch higher than the aim so as to put the bullet in the centre of the two-inch disc when aimed at its bottom edge, and if the bull's-eye is four inches the pistol would have to be sighted to shoot two inches higher at the same distance to hit the centre.

As natural objects are not at all of the same size, and you cannot carry twenty pistols shooting to various heights to choose from, it is best to have the pistol sighted to hit the _exact spot_ you aim at, and then it does not matter if you are shooting at an elephant or a mouse, you can hit the spot.

The tendency to "duck" and flinch at the noise and recoil makes beginners put their shots very low.

The revolver used to make men shoot high, the automatic shoots low as a rule from muzzle heaviness, the wrong angle the stock is placed at, and the uneven blow back (which latter I will explain later).

Single-shot pistols are generally of American make and it is very curious what defects they have in comparison with the French duelling pistol.

To begin with they have a stock too much at right angles to the barrel and much too small and narrow.

Next, the trigger is in the wrong place. The proper place for the trigger is so that you can just reach it with the first joint of the outstretched first finger. Pressing the trigger with the second finger is a ridiculous habit and, with an automatic pistol, results in making the pistol jamb burn the first finger with the ejecting cartridges.

The American single-shot pistols have the trigger so close to the hand that the trigger finger has to curl around the trigger beyond the second joint.

I never could understand how Chevalier Ira Paine, with his big hand, managed to shoot American single-shot pistols.

The trigger being too close not only makes pressing it difficult but makes it so that, instead of straight back, it has to be pressed to the left and sends the bullet to the left.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COLT AUTOMATIC PISTOL, MILITARY MODEL, CALIBRE .45]