By the fourth, the crowd had quit talking altogether, and you could hear the flags on the pit poles. Somewhere behind the wagons, a baby was crying, and its mother was doing nothing about it because she had forgotten she was holding it. Fifth shot center. 50 Out of 50 in 51 seconds off the bare ground with no glass and no spotter and nobody's voice in her ear. Anna got up, worked the block, put the empty in her pocket, and walked back to her wagon.
On the platform, Ernest held his field glasses up 10 seconds after there was nothing left to look at. When he lowered them, his face had gone very smooth and pleasant. The men who worked for him would have told you that was the thing to watch for. Yates, round two tomorrow. Move it out to 600.
It's published at 400. The Sheridan men came up for 400 600 and put it on the west flat. The west flat was where the wind came off the divide every afternoon of the year without one single exception. Mr. Foster, my range, Ernest said.
My money, my rules. That afternoon, the flat looked like a fair. Bees on spits and a fiddle going and children running the length of the empty firing line. Anna sat on the tailgate of her wagon with the sharps across her knees and a rag and a can of oil, and she cleaned it the way Paul had cleaned it. Men walked past and slowed down and did not stop.
50 Yards off at the edge of the wagon yard, an old man stopped walking. He was in his 60s, gray all through the beard, in a mended cavalry coat with the buttons changed out. His name was Leonard Hail, and he came up from Sheridan every fall for this match. Because he had no wife anymore and no reason not to, he stood in the middle of the yard with people going around him on both sides, looking at a woman on a tailgate, oiling the wrist of a sharps rifle with a silver plate led into the stock. He stood there a long time.
Then he went back to his camp without eating. The wind on the west flat the next morning came out of the southwest at 12 to 15 miles an hour. Gusting, it crossed the firing line at an angle that would put a bullet 4 ft off the plate at 600 yd if a man did not do something about it. 12 Shooters, 10 shots a piece, no time limit. It went badly for almost everybody.
The Sheridan men had come up expecting 400 yardds on still ground, and they had brought the wrong sights and the wrong nerves. One of them went clean off the plate twice and walked away from the line and did not come back. Carl shot a 74 and was not pleased about it and said so. Ernest, shooting late with his spotter, calling every shot into his ear, put up a 78, and the crowd gave him a long hand for it and he had it coming. 78 In that wind was real shooting.
Anna was on lane four. Before she went down on the mat, a man from the scoring table stood over her and pointed at her barrel. What's that thread? That's an instrument. It's a thread.