No, he said. It says open to any shooter. It says shooter. Ernest pinched the leather case between two fingers the way a man checks a horse blanket. Whose gun did you steal, girl?
Somebody behind her laughed. And then more of them did. Half the town had come out that morning to see the best shooting in the territory. And here at the start of it was something better than shooting, which was somebody being taken down a peg for free. Anna did not move her arm.
It's mine. That's a soldier's rifle. It's mine. Ernest took the entry sheet off the table and turned it over as though there might be something written on the back. Then he let it go.
It came down flat in the dirt at her feet, and he put the toe of his boot on the corner of it. Go home. This is not a church social. Men out here will be shooting at 900 yards by Saturday. You'll get hurt or worse, you'll waste my range officer's morning.
The laughing kept on a second and then thinned out because she had not answered and she had not gone red and she had not moved. Anna knelt down in the dirt in front of Ernest Foster and picked up the paper. She stood, smoothed it flat against her thigh, set it on the table in front of Otis, and put her $2 on top of it. Otis looked at the money. Then he looked up at Ernest, and he was not a young man and had not been afraid of anybody in about 30 years. $2 is $2, Otis said.
Write her down. I did not say to write her down. You said open to any shooter. It's on your own handb bill in your own name. Nailed up in four towns.
Otis dropped the coins in the box. Lane 12 misses. Lambert 300 yd five shots and it starts at 8. Ernest walked off toward the scoring table and he was smiling because a man like Ernest Foster does not lose an argument in front of a crowd. He simply decides to win it later.
Six weeks before that morning, there had been no rifle in Anna Lambert's life at all, and she had worked hard to keep it that way. Her place was eight miles up the Tongue River bottom, a saudi with a frame room built onto the front of it, a barn that leaned, 40 chickens, a garden, and a milk cow. Paul had filed on the quarter section the year they married and he built that frame room himself in one summer badly and it had never once been square and Anna had never once fixed it. Paul Lambert had scouted for the army out of Fort Kio for 9 years. A quiet man with big hands and a laugh you could hear across a corral.