And he could shoot better than any officer he ever worked for. And he knew it and never said it. He died three winters back 11 miles from his own barn when his horse put a foot in a badger hole on the lip of a and went over with him underneath. He was not killed by an enemy. He was not killed doing anything at all.
And there is no arranging that into a shape that makes sense. And Anna had quit trying by the second winter. What she had left was the quarter section, the note the bank held on it, and a rifle in a case in the hoft. For three years she made the payments, eggs in town on Saturdays, mending from the boarding house and the barracks, a calf once a season. And every quarter she rode in and put the money in Arthur Kimell's hand at the bank herself, so no man from that bank would ever have to come out the road and ask her for it.
That mattered to her more than it should have. She knew it did. She did it anyway. Then came the winter of 87, which anybody who lived through it will tell you about at length. It took half her hens and the roof off the barn, and the summer after it did not rain, and the mending dried up, too, because when a country is broke, everybody sews their own.
The letter came the second week of September, two paragraphs. It used the word foreclosure twice and it said the balance of $400 was due in full on the 1st of November. Anna read it standing at the kitchen table. Then she sat down at the kitchen table. Then she got the coffee tin off the shelf and counted $11.40 onto the oil cloth and counted it again the way people do.
She rode in that Saturday with four dozen eggs and saw the hand billill nailed to the post outside the Merkantile. The Kuster County rifle match. Three rounds over two days on the flats east of town. Put up and paid for by Mr. Ernest Foster.
First prize $500. $2 to enter. Open to any shooter. She read it. She sold her eggs. She rode home and did the chores and then she stood in the dark barn about 20 minutes doing nothing at all and then went and got the ladder.
The case was under a tarp in the loft where she had put it the week after the funeral and it came down heavier than she remembered. She opened it on the kitchen table and the smell came up out of the lining. Oil and old leather and the particular dust of the Powder River country. For a moment Anna had to put both hands flat on the table. It was a sharps 45 caliber heavy octagon barrel tang sight checkered stock worth more money than everything else in that house together.
It was not a rifle a scout buys. Set into the wrist of the stock was an oval plate of German silver and cut into the plate were four lines. Presented to Paul Lambert Wolf Crossing, June 1882, 900 yd. Anna looked at it a while. Then she closed the case.