"Is that so? Well, you see, I never used that kind of a gun before, and--"
"Here comes Nap! Big rabbit. There's a chance for you. Take him on the run."
He tried. That is, he raised Jim's gun, and blazed away with one barrel, but all the harm he did that rabbit was to knock down a whole bunch of bright red mountain-ash berries from a branch twenty feet above him.
"Quick, Charley! Your other barrel. He's turning on Nap, around those sumac bushes."
Charley had held his gun a little loosely, and it had given him a smart kick in consequence; but he saw what Jim meant, and his reputation as a sportsman was at stake. He knew, too, that Jim was trying his best not to laugh, and he was determined to get that rabbit.
Rabbit and dog seemed somehow to come within range of that gun at the same instant, just as it went off. It was a grand good thing for old Nap that his master's city cousin aimed so high, and that the gun kicked again. As it was, the astonished dog was now making the snow fly in a whirl, as he dashed around in it after the tip of his tail, where one of the little leaden pellets had struck him.
That was only for a moment, however, and then he came gravely marching across the crust, and looked up in the faces of the boys, one after the other, as much as if he was asking, "Which of you was green enough to take me for a rabbit?"
He had not been very badly hurt, except, perhaps, in his sense of justice; but now Charley suddenly gave a shout, and sprang forward.
"Fact," said Jim; "so you did. Come here, Nap. Poor fellow! How's your old tail now?"
Charley was back in a twinkling with his own rabbit and the one Jim had killed, but there was a wide difference between them. There was shot enough in the latter to have killed half a dozen, while all the mark they could find on Charley's game was one little spot at the roots of his ears.
"So much for making the shot scatter. If I hadn't put in a double load of shot, you'd have lost 'em both."
"I mean that rabbit and old Napoleon Bonaparte. Come on now. Your gun's all right. Let's try the other side of the swamp."
He pointed out a rabbit, sitting among some bushes, on the way, and Charley's gun went off finely, now that the powder had been put in first.