There was something wrong with that rifle and she was the only person in Montana territory who knew what it was. That is not quite true. There was one other man who knew and that October he was riding up from Sheridan the way he did every fall and he had no idea what he was riding toward. She took it out to the river bottom the next morning with 11 cartridges, which was all there was in the box, and set a tin plate against a cutbank at 200 yd, and lay down in the grass. She missed.
She missed the cutbank. Anna lay there with her face against the stock and her heart going like a bird in a sack, and understood that 3 years is a long time, and that she was going to lose her house. Then she did what Paul had taught her to do when a shot got away, which was nothing. She did not reload. She lay still and breathed and let the shaking work out of her arms.
She listened to the river. And after a while, there was a sound in her head. That was his voice. Because that is how the dead talk to you in instructions. You don't have to be quick.
He used to say, "Anybody can be quick. You have to be still. The second shot took the plate off the bank. So did the third. She walked out and set it at 300 yards and found it with one shot and did not miss again.
And by the ninth cartridge, she had stopped thinking about the bank entirely, which frightened her worse than missing had. Before she left, she did one more thing in the barn out of a habit older than she could account for. She cut a 6-in length of white thread off a spool and tied it to the front sight base of the barrel. One knot tight. It hung there and moved when the air moved.
It was a trick Paul had off an old buffalo man on the Republican. It will tell you more about a crosswind than any instrument a man can buy, and there is not a range officer alive who can rule it off a rifle. She stopped at Martha Foley's about the chickens. Martha was 70 and had buried two husbands and did not ask a single question she was not entitled to. She looked at the case on the wagon seat.
Went in the house, came out with a jar of pears and put it in the box under the seat and did not say anything about that either. In town, she bought two boxes of cartridges for $3.40. That left $8. Two of it was the entry fee, and the rest had to feed her and the horse for three days and get her home. Then she drove out to the flats to shoot for $400 against 40 men who would have paid money to watch her fail.
The first round started at 8. A steel silhouette at 300 yards, five shots, one minute. Center scored 10. The outer ring eight. Anything else?