The crowd shifted. That is the ugly truth of it. A good many of them shifted because he had given them a reason, and a crowd will nearly always take one. Anna stood in the grass at lane two with the rifle in her hands. And she opened her mouth to say the thing she had said 6 years ago outside a tent on the Powder River, which was Paul's name.
She never got it out because an old man in a mended cavalry coat came out of the crowd and walked onto the firing line which nobody is allowed to do and Otis saw him coming and did not stop him. Read it, Leonard said. Ernest looked at him. Who are you? Leonard Hail.
Sergeant, second cavalry, 31 years, discharged 1884. He did not have a trumpet and he did not need one because in a silence like that an old sergeant's voice will go a/4 mile. You want to know whose rifle that is? It's cut into the stock in letters a half inch deep. Have her hold it up and read it out and then I'll tell this crowd what is wrong with it.
Anna turned her head and looked at him for the first time and 400 people watched a woman who had not changed expression in 3 days go white to the lips. Ma'am, Leonard said, "Hold it up." She did not. So he told them anyway. That plate says, presented to Paul Lambert, Wolf Crossing, June of 1882, 900 yards. Leonard turned around so that he was speaking to the crowd and not to Ernest.
And that is the detail every single person there remembered. I was at Wolf Crossing. 11 Of us pinned in the open two days. No water, two men dead. Paul Lambert was the scout on that detail and he was the best rifle shot I ever served with.
And I want that said first. He let that stand. And Paul Lambert lay on the ground beside me the whole of that second night with a bullet through his shoulder and his arm swelled black to the elbow and he could not lift a cup, let alone a rifle. At first light, his wife took that gun out of his hands. She went up the slope with it and lay in those rocks an hour and made that shot over the top of him at 900 yd and broke the whole thing open.
Nine men walked out of that draw who were not going to. Nobody made a sound. They cut his name into that plate because there was no place on an army form to write hers. Leonard Hail said. Two captains sat in a tent and argued about it for an hour and could not solve it.