"The devil!" cried Harry, "that is too bad!"

"Never mind," said the Commodore, "Frank will manage him."

As he spoke a second bird got up, and crossed Forester in the same
manner, Draw doing precisely as he had done before; but, this time,
missing the quail clear, which Forester turned over.

"Load quick! and step up to that fellow. He will run, I think!" said
Archer.

"Ay! ay!" responded Frank, and, having rammed down his charge like
lightning, moved forward, before he had put the cap on the barrel he had
fired.

Just as he took the cap out of his pocket between his finger and thumb,
a second quail rose. As cool and self-possessed as it is possible to
conceive, Frank cocked the left hand barrel with his little finger,
still holding the cap between his forefinger and thumb, and actually
contrived to bring up the gun, some how or other, and to kill the bird,
pulling the trigger with his middle finger.

At the report a third quail sprang, close under his feet; and, still
unshaken, he capped the right hand barrel, fired, and the bird towered!

"Mark! mark! Tom--ma-ark Timothy!" shouted Harry and A--- in a breath.

"That bird is as dead as Hannibal now!" added Archer, as, having spun up
three hundred feet into the air, and flown twice as many hundred yards,
it turned over, and fell plumb, like a stone, through the clear
atmosphere.

"Ayse gotten that chap marked doon roight, ayse warrant un!" shouted
Timothy from the hill side, where with some trouble, he was holding in
the obstreperous spaniels. "He's doon in a roight laine atwixt 't gray
stean and yon hoigh ashen tree."

"Did you ever see such admirable shooting, though?" asked A---, in a low
voice. "I did not know Forester shot like that."

"Some times he does. When he's cool. He is not certain; that is his only
fault. One day he is the coolest man I ever saw in a field, and the next
the most impetuous; but when he is cool, he shoots splendidly. As you
say, A---, I never saw anything better done in my life. It was the
perfection of coolness and quickness combined."

"I cannot conceive how it was done at all. How he brought up and fired
that first barrel with a cap between his thumb and forefinger! Why, I
could not fire a gun so, in cold blood!"

"Nor could he, probably. Deliberate promptitude is the thing! Well, Tom,
what do you think of that? Wasn't that pretty shooting?"

"It was so, pretty shootin'," responded the fat man, quite delighted out
of