One was snapping photos; the other "just walking around." Two tourists, indistinguishable from the dozens to be found any day outside the White House. But confronted with a bullet-spraying assailant, Harry Rakosky and Ken Davis proved their mettle:

Rakosky hit him high and Davis hit him low.Hunkered behind separate concrete barriers and not even aware of each other's presence, the two men - by coincidence both with security experience - acted on the same impulse Saturday to subdue a gunman firing on the White House. They sprang and tackled him to the ground.

But relating his story to The Associated Press the next day, Ra-kos-ky, 34, of San Antonio, said he didn't regard himself as a hero. "I'm not one on tootin' my own horn," he said.

"I was just walking around," Rakosky said. "I wasn't even trying to find the White House. I just happened on it."

"I think the Lord had me at the right place at the right time. I'm real thankful to him that nobody got hurt."

Rakosky said that as he was walking by the White House, he heard what he thought were firecrackers and saw "a whole mass of kids" coming toward him.

He crouched behind a concrete post while the gunman - identified by the authorities as Francisco Martin Duran, 26, of Colorado Springs, Colo. - emptied a Chinese SKS semiautomatic rifle. Rakosky then saw the assailant walking in front of him, fumbling with his weapon, and thought he was trying either to unjam it or reload it.

"I thought that would be a good time to take him out," Rakosky said. "I thought, it's now or never. Then I ran as fast as I could and I tackled the guy."

He hit Duran shoulder-high, knocked him to the ground, "and then held him as tight as I could."

Davis, 24, of Hagerstown, Md., the other hero of Saturday's attack, said he was momentarily transfixed by the unexpected gunfire.

"A man was pulling a rifle out of his trench coat," he told the AP. "I thought it was an AK-47. I stood there facing him. I was dumbfounded. I thought, What could be done about this?"

"He pointed the gun at me, holding it at waist level. I just kind of froze. I backed up into Pennsylvania Avenue. He turned back toward the White House and re-sumed firing. Then he kept firing as he was walking."

Davis came behind Rakosky. "It was spontaneous. We just both took off," Davis said. "He was maybe 50 feet to 100 feet away. I ran right toward him. Harry hit him high, in the back. I grabbed his legs as he went down. He kicked a tiny bit and stopped. The barrel was against his side, pointing up."

The gunman didn't say a word, Rakosky said. "His look was more bewildered, like, `Why did you do that? Why did you stop me?' "

At that point, Robert Haines, a self-styled presidential candidate, jumped in and tried to grab the gun, Davis said. "We held him (the gunman) down until the Secret Service took him into custody," Haines said.