Page:Bedford-Jones--Boy Scouts of the Air at Cape Peril.djvu/113

 And, in spite of all their urging, he wouldn't.

"To kill time, tell you what I will do, though," he conceded when all were standing on the porch after the meal was finished. "I'll try you with a little pistol practice, that's what I'll do."

This was reasonably consoling. So, fetching his automatic and a box of shells and adding to his equipment a dozen apples from the store-room, he issued out on the lawn, where the eager scouts were awaiting him.

Placing one of the smaller apples on a convenient post and taking his stand at fifty paces distance he squinted an eye, aimed, and in three shots had plugged the target into fragments.

Loud applause from the two spectators greeted this feat.

"How did you get to be such a crack shot?" Cat wanted to know.

"You see it was this way," confided the Tarheel. "Down home on the Pasquotank the musskeeters grow so almighty big and get so monstrous vicious I had to lay in bed of a night and have my fun wingin' 'em with a pistol. They were the size of Scuppernong grapes, and that's no fairy tale."