The six men who came over went deliberately to work in a very
characteristic way. They split into pairs, and each pair got, by some
means binoculars. After a quarter of an hour they settled down to
work, lying on their stomachs. First they stripped off their slouch
hats and hung them up elsewhere, but instead of putting them a few
feet to the right or left as everybody else, with a vague idea of Red
Indian warfare, within our lines had been doing, they placed them in
such a way as to attract the enemy's fire and make the enemy disclose
himself, which is quite a different matter. This they did by adding
their coats and decorating adjacent trees with them so far away from
where they lay that there could be no chance of the enemy's bad
shooting hitting them by mistake--as had been the case elsewhere where
this device had been tried.

All this by-play took some time, but at last they were ready--one man
armed with a pair of binoculars and the other with the American naval
rifle--the Lee straight-pull, which fires the thinnest pin of a
cartridge I have seen and has but a two-pound trigger pull. Even then
nothing was done for perhaps another ten minutes, and in some cases
for half an hour; it varied according to individual requirements. Then
when the quarry was located by the man with the binoculars, and the
man with the rifle had finished asking a lot of playful questions so
as to gain time, the first shots were fired. The marines armed with
binoculars were not unduly elated by any one shot, but merely reported
progress in a characteristic American fashion--that is, by a system of
chaffing. This provided tonic, and presently the bullets crept in so
close to the marks that all chaff was forgotten. Sometimes it took an
hour, or even two, to bring down a single man; but no matter how long
the time necessary might be, the Americans stayed patiently with their
man until the sniper's life's blood was drilled out of him by these