This Bill Bennett was a good deal of a marksman, and one day while attending a county fair, where he had imbibed a considerable measure of bottled-up unsteadiness, he came reeling along to a group of men who were engaged in shooting at a target. The range was long, and the price paid by each contestant for a chance to display his skill, or lack of it, was a dollar a shot, but the prize was a fat ox, which was destined to go to the first who made a bull's-eye. As yet none had succeeded in making the lucky shot.
Bill staggered into position, and threw down a ten-dollar bill for ten shots. The attendants steadied him sufficiently to confine his wild target practice to that part of the sky and horizon where the target was located.
Bill had wasted nine shots without coming within speaking distance of the target, which to his drunken sight appeared to be double. Rolling like a ship in a storm, Bill brought the gun to his shoulder for the last round, declaring, "By gum, I'm agoing to hit one of them targets this time."
And he did. As they went sailing by, he let blaze at them, and behold, it was a bull's-eye! Bill had won the ox on a one-to-a-million chance.
In the old pioneer days of Maine, when it was still a province of Massachusetts, a young French officer had an altercation with the chief of the Oldtown Indians, and according to the custom of the times, challenged the Red Man to fight a duel with him.
The old Indian, according to the courtesies of the game, was allowed the choice of weapons, and he chose two kegs of gunpowder. Each was to sit upon a keg, with the bung out. Then two pistols were to be discharged in succession. On the firing of the first pistol, two iron pokers, heated to a white heat, were to be laid upon a table beside the duelists, which was to be immediately followed by the discharge of the second pistol. At this signal they were each to seize a poker and thrust it into the bung-hole of the keg on which his adversary was sitting, the old Indian calculating that he would be quicker than the Frenchman.
But the Frenchman had a little calculation of his own, and he figured out something that the Indian had doubtless not thought of. This was that the explosion of either keg would be certain to explode the other.