Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/583

Rh Shoot Your Deer from Horseback How a Young Woman of Kentucky

with This Saddle Gun Rose to Great Heights

��IX the Southern part of the United States

��game is sometimes shot from horseback. Only experienced hunters can handle a horse and keep a gun steady at the same time. In order that the "tenderfoots" of a party may do some of the shooting too, a West Virginian has de- \ised a saddle-mount

r their guns. By its

.cans a gun can be -wept in almost any position and steadied until fired.

This is accomplished,

- the illustration shows, Dy a treble-jointed mounting. The first joint is a swivel, allow- ing the gun to be swept horizontally. The sec- r)nd, a ball-and-socket

lint, permits motion in a vertical direction. The last of the joints enables the entire gun to be moved sidewise with respect to the horse. The ball-and-socket, of course, allows ver>' fine adjustments to be easily made; so that between the three joints, a gun can readily be aimed in the exact direction that would be required and held perfectly steady until fired.

���) lot. Film Jjerv-.

��Her first job was paintmg seventy- five smokestacks for a distilling company. She did it practically alone and in a satisfactory manner

���Three different joints on the gun saddle enable the gun to be swept in any direction

��i. ^ women, but nerve for the men" was the un- expressed distinction drawn before the days of the sufi'ragette and of the great war. Although the female of the species may still scream at sight of a mouse, she has proved equal to so many emergencies that it can no longer be said that "nerves" are her dis- tinguishing characteris- tic.

A case in point is the young Kentuckian in the accompanying photograph. She is

Miss Mayme Pixley, and she became a steeple- jack by chance, not by choice. Her father,

who is the senior mem- ber of the present steeplejack partnership, had a contract for paint- ing seventh-five smoke- stacks for a large dis- tilling company, when he fell and broke his leg. The Pixleys felt that they could not afford to lose that contract, so Mayme (we like the Broadway spelling of her name) stepped into the breach — or rather into the breeches — and proved that she could wield a paint- brush as efficiently at the top of a smoke- stack as she could around the table-legs in the kitchen.

She finished all of the sevent>-five stacks and received the full con- tract price. That w as six years ago. Mavme is still rising in the world upon occasion, with her paint-pots swinging beside her and her father meeting her strokes on the opposite side of the stacks.

Although she does not claim to be a "new woman" or to have very ad- vanced ideas on the question of woman's place in the world, Mayme believes that a mere matter of skirts should not be allowed to stand in the way of work to be donQ if one is able to do it. • '

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