The high shooter off today's board against one other. Five shots a piece. Cold barrels, no sighting shots, no aggregate carried forward. Everything on the day. He let that sit and under the fourth article of the match rules as sponsor of this event and a two-time winner of it, I am taking the second place myself.
He got a hand for that. Not from everybody, but he got one because half that crowd had known Ernest for 15 years and thought they were watching a proud man step into a fight, which is a thing men admire. Carl was not one of them. He was at the foot of the platform with his hat in his hand and he said it loud enough for 30 people to hear. You wrote her out of it.
I did not write anybody out of anything, Carl. She's got 148 on that board. She's 20 points clear of the field and you just threw the board away. Carl turned and said the rest of it to the crowd, which is the only reason we know the words because 40 people repeated them afterward. He isn't raising the bar.
He's building a wall and he's building it for one person. Ernest smiled and put the trumpet down and went to his dinner. Otis entered the change in the book because entering things in the book was his job. Then he sat with the pen over the page long enough that the boy holding the ink got tired of holding it. Carl came to her wagon after dark and he did not bring sympathy.
He set his spotting glass on the tailgate. 900 Yd cold barrel. One string of five. He said you cannot read your own Mirage at 900 and hold a sight picture at the same time. Nobody can.
He's got Ames on his glass and Ames has been calling wind on this flat since 84. I know what he's got. Then let me lie down beside you. Anna did not answer. She stood in the dark with her hand on the wagon box.
And the thing that came up in her was so old and so far down that for a second she could not have told you what year it was. There had been one man in her life who lay at her shoulder while she shot. He had bled on her sleeve. Nobody since in six years, and she had built a whole life out of small arrangements to make sure of it. I don't shoot with somebody beside me.
Then you'll lose. I know. Carl picked up his glass. He got about four steps before she said it. What time?