Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1892 — A Fine Rifle Shot. [ARTICLE]

A Fine Rifle Shot.

■“The best rifle shot I ever saw was an East Tennesseean who acted as scout for the army of the Cumberland,” said Major R. B. Baer at the Southern. “His name was Brownlow, but whether he was a relative of the fighting parson of that name Ido not know. Brownlow was a tall, lank specimen of humanity and looked like a typical frontiersman. He wore a coonskin cap and carried a rifle a foot longer than himself, with which he could put half an ounce of lead squarely between a man’s eyes at a distance of nearly half a mile. He fought for sheer love of it, was always hunting for victims, and used to boast that he averaged a dozen a week. He hung on the enemy’s picket lines night and day, and when Old Tom,’ as he called his lingering eternity of a gun, cracked there was certain to be a death. One day, during a sharp skirmish, Brownlow ensconced himself in a big cottonwood tree and was dirojppaaag Confederates as fast as he could feed bullets to ‘Old Tom,’ when a Mississippi sharpshooter made a sneak for another tall cottonwood about six hundred yards distant. The Tennesseean sped him, there were two puffs of smoke from among the freen leaves and the two killers came own head first, with their long deer rifles rattling after them.—[St. Louis Globe-Democrat.