Dance on the Wind

3

Titus slapped at a big blue-black fly droning in the hot, sticky air right in front of his nose. Noisy enough with all the clatter and racket, all the people moving past, with beeves mooing, pigs grunting, and sheep baaing. Yet none of it bothered him—except for the incessant, bothersome drone of that fly.

Then he had it, snapping his hand around the pesky insect in a blur. When he opened his palm, there it lay, stunned, wings flitting lamely, buzzing inconstantly. Without remorse he slapped the palm against the side of his old britches, swiped off the hand on the pants, then closed his eyes again after tugging down the old floppy-brimmed wool-felt hat.

It wasn’t cool here, even tucked back in the shade. But at least beneath this weeping willow he found it was a damned sight less hot than out there in the late-summer sun where the afternoon dragged on and on. He had a little time to rest before the next relay of shooters was due on the firing line at three. Right square in the hottest part of the day. The ten competitors who qualified from these last five relays would all compete come early evening after the sun began to sink and the air might cool to something bearable.

As for Titus, it had proved to be a long day already.

Last night he hadn’t been able to sleep all that well—not that sleeping rolled up in his blankets on the ground had ever bothered him. No, it was more that his excitement, anticipation, eagerness to be about this contest kept him tossing until he finally drifted off sometime shortly before the sun made its appearance that Saturday in mid-August.

“These dog days,” is what his mother muttered repeatedly, no matter was she at home or here at the fair.

Dog days came once a year, visited upon northern Kentucky with summer’s last vengeful fare-thee-well. Here after the crops were all in the fields, growing to beat the band, and just before that slick-eyed schoolmaster would again ring his bell signaling that first day of school for the new year, eager to get in a few weeks of book learning before classes would be suspended while the young boys stayed to home, helping out in the fields during the harvest time. Only when the crops had been gathered and all was securely put up would the farmers think of sending their children back to school.

Dog days. Beside him lay the old redbone, his hunting partner of the last handful of years. Tongue lolling, eyes glazed in fatigued stupor, the hound lay on his back upon the patch of shady grass, his belly exposed. Gnats swarmed in clouds around his watery eyes. The dog snorted at them, dragged a paw down his long muzzle in frustration, then rolled onto his side to plop a leg over his nose.

Nearby the rhythmic booming continued nonstop from the long firing line staked out at the edge of the meadow. Interposed between each rumble of the muzzle loaders he heard the squeals of children at play, the giggles of the young girls eyeing the summer’s crop of prospective beaux, and the laughter of adults passing this way and that among the meandering knots of marquees and wall tents, canvas awnings, and fire-smudged lean-tos stretched across a modest framework of poles. From every one a barker gave nearly the same call—something to entice passersby into viewing their wares: baked goods, fruits and vegetables, needlework, woolens, leather goods, harness and plowshares, woodwork, ironmongery, all of it for sale at this once-a-year carnival begun long ago.

The Boone County Longhunters Fair—a celebration of the county’s own namesake and his blazing of a trail into this land of the canebrakes—was held on this same ground this time every year to insure the greatest turnout, and therefore sales, for each of the merchants who traveled here from as far away as Pittsburgh and as nearby as Cincinnati. Besides, a person had the opportunity to browse past the displays of fine mercantile goods spread out atop crates and display tables by the local merchants of Rabbit Hash, Belleview, and Petersburg, and even this sprawling village of Burlington as well, not to mention what many of the poorer families set out atop worn blankets spread upon the ground before their lean-tos, hoping to sell their modest, homemade crafts.

This carnival of baking, quilting, and other contests each summer brought a growing throng here to Burlington for the better part of three or four days. Families arrived on the fairgrounds to select a spot down by one of the two creeks, perhaps choosing something back against the woods, and there raised their tents and dug their fire pits. Friends greeted friends they had not seen for an entire year. Men hailed one another and spoke of their crops, their hogs and sheep. Women shared recipes and spoke of loved ones gone to their reward with the past winter. Children frolicked and dogs scampered with abandon through the meadow until fair officials came through, as they always did, ordering all animals tied up in camp.

That’s why Tink had a short length of rope loosely knotted around his neck, the end of the loop stuffed into Titus’s belt. Just so the old hound wouldn’t get himself into trouble, maybe even shot by some man whose wife screamed out that a dog had just run off with their supper, plucked right from the fireside. Such a thing had happened at noon, and the squire of Burlington, along with his duly elected town constable, had to pull that dead dog’s owner off the dog killer for the sake of not charting up more of a human toll than the town fathers counted on every year.

For certain, there was plenty of celebration flowing free enough. The wines and brandies and beers brewed every year for just this festival were most often consumed in moderate quantities. Just enough to enliven each festive night’s music and dancing. Still, there were always a few of the young wags who could not hold their liquor and ended up taking offense at some snub, those who got nasty and often pulled up a chunk of firewood, if not a knife, to settle whatever wrong they believed done them. Most times others merely pulled the quarrelers off to opposite sides of the sprawling camping grounds, where they could cool down and eventually sleep off their revelry. Rarely was the constable called in to hustle someone off to his modest jail.

But this shooting of a man’s hunting dog was considered by many serious enough an offense to warrant the owner shooting the dog killer. Both had been dragged away to jail minutes ago, there to languish for the rest of the fair, one offender in each of the constable’s two cells, where they could glare at one another, curse a blue streak if they chose, and likely try their marksmanship spitting at one another between a set of crude iron bars.

After that pair of scrappers had been dragged off in irons, the fair quickly resumed its atmosphere of merriment and music, a celebration of rural frontier life at its best. Back on the shooting range, the judges returned to their task of determining who was to be known as the best shot in Boone County.

It was serious, this shooting contest held each summer. Merchants in nearby Burlington put up the finest in the way of a purse for the winner, with a few prizes donated for second, third, and fourth places—those who had been bested. Serious enough business that the contest had long had three divisions: one contest held between all those men who were clearly long in the tooth yet still possessed a clear eye and a steady hand; another match that allowed the county’s youth to pit their skills one against the other; and the final competition—the annual fair’s most-watched event—pitting young men from sixteen and up from all the farms and towns to compete for the right to be known as Boone County’s best marksman.

For the last three summers Titus had carried home his prizes from the fair, taking first place against the county’s other youth each August. For the last two years how he had looked forward to this seventeenth summer: eligible to match his skill against the finest marksmen he had watched shoot ever since he was a wee lad big enough to load his own rifle.

In the last few months Thaddeus Bass had been preaching to his son, “It makes little shake what those men do toeing that line and firing their muskets at a distant mark. No, Titus—in life what matters only is what a man does to provide for those who count on him.”

More than just about anything, Titus wanted to change his father’s tune—to have his pap pound him on the back gleefully once he won the shooting contest and say that, yes, there was something worthwhile in being the best, after all, something worthwhile in his son having a dream different from his own. He knew he could never be what his father wanted him to be, for he realized he was not stamped to walk the same path his pap had taken. So it was that this year Titus carried great hope in his heart that once he proved himself not only capable, but the best, his father would finally relent and remove the tight harness he had buckled around his eldest son.

“Titus?”

He pushed back the floppy brim and gazed up at the sound of her voice. The summer’s light lit the copper strands in her dusty hair with tongues of flame. How he stirred to see her, gratified she had come to find him.

“Amy. I looked for you this morning down at the shooting line.”

With a shrug she replied, “Helping mama with her baking. Lunch is done and the other’ns’re all fed, so she said I could come look you up for a bit. Leastwise till it’s time to go help her put supper together. The young’uns is going crazy—running here and there.”

He shifted himself up against the tree and pulled the hat off his head, pushing back a thick shock of dark, damp hair out of his eyes. “I … I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Something been … what I been meaning to ask for last couple weeks.”

“Yes?” she prodded, settling near his knee, her legs folded to the side in that way of hers that hid her bare feet and ankles beneath her faded dress, one of her mother’s best.

“You …,” he started, then cleared his throat as his eyes retreated from her face and he went to scratching at the old hound’s ear. For some time now he’d been brooding on just how to get this said—choosing his words carefully from what he realized was a most limited vocabulary of a young man totally ignorant of such mysteries in life. “I figure a girl knows about such things. ’Specially you since’t you was around when all your brothers and sisters was borned, and it seems only natural that a girl pays proper attention to such things.”

Her eyes darted back and forth between his. “What you wanna ask me, Titus?”

Again he looked into those green eyes. “T-tell me how a woman knows she’s gonna have a baby.”

Her cheeks flushed with a tint of pale strawberry, and her eyes dropped a moment. Amy yanked up a tall blade of grass and brought it to her lips. Sucking on the green shoot, she finally said, “If a woman ain’t with child, once a moon she gets a visit of a particular ailment, Titus.”

“Ailment? Like’n you got the ague?”

“Not ’sactly. She don’t feel so good. Her belly gives her fits, cramping up—like that.”

He shook his head, still bewildered. “So?”

“So if she’s gonna have a baby—like you said—those visits once a moon don’t come to trouble her.”

Still he was having trouble making the connection, unable to fathom what it all meant as he sat there in the shady, sticky heat of that August afternoon. Nonetheless, he leaned toward her, undeterred from his quest. “You saying if she don’t have that visit for two or three months, that woman knows she carrying a child?”

“That, and my mama was always sick for the first few months she was about to have another young’un.”

“Sick?”

“Like”—and she rubbed her belly—“the heaves and all that.”

He nodded. “Oh.”

“Why you wanna know about that, Titus?”

Looking away now that she had asked a question, his eyes crawled to the canopy of long weeping-willow branches swaying on the hot breeze. “You … Amy—have you got your visit … since we—since we … there at the swimming hole. Have you?”

“Is that what you’re asking about?” she replied, wideeyed and gaping in surprise. “Y’ was thinking I’m carrying your baby?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I need to know.”

“I ain’t had my visit since we was at the swimming hole, Titus. I’m telling you, jus’ so you’ll know.”

He swallowed hard. There it was—as unexpected and bad a piece of news as any could have been. And he suddenly felt a little hotter, a little more suffocated by the damp heat.

“Then you might’n be carrying m-my baby?”

Placing a hand gently over her abdomen, she said, “If’n it’s a baby, it’s your baby, Titus.”

He wagged his head, feeling dizzied by the announcement. “My baby.”

Amy patted the back of his hand, then held it in hers. “Mama says a woman don’t necessarily get herself with child every time she’s with a man. Don’t always happen.”

“Just when you don’t get your visit each moon.”

“Right,” she answered. “Things gotta be right, I guess, atween a man and a woman for a baby to grow in the woman’s belly.”

He was confused again. “Things gotta be right?”

With a shrug Amy replied, “I s’pose my mama meant that the man and woman loved the other, they was married. Maybeso like us, they gonna get married.”

“G-gonna get married,” he repeated with a mumble.

“If … if I was carrying your baby, I’d be right happy, Titus.”

“Happy?”

“We could have a head start on our life together that way—getting our family going early on.”

“Family.”

Just the sound of it rang with such finality.

But he had climbed atop her for only a few seconds, for what seemed like the blink of an eye, one thump of his leaping heart—and for that fleeting moment he might now have a baby to feed and clothe and care for until it was growed up enough to go out on its own. Like he damn well was this very summer.

Beyond a row of chestnut trees a bell rang out, tolling six gongs.

He sat up straighter, listening and counting each toll of the nearby bell. “I’ll have to go in a half hour.”

“Why?”

“They was calling the fellas for the final relay.”

“The championship?”

“Yes,” he replied, taking the longrifle into his hands and laying it across his lap. The old hound stirred. Tink looked at Titus beneath a drooping eyelid, then rolled over and went back to sleep. “Time come soon for me to show ’em all what I’m made of.”

“I already know what you’re made of. Gonna be so proud of you, Titus,” Amy declared with a smile. “You doing this for the both of us.” Then she glanced down at her belly. “Maybe even the three of us.”

“Three?” His throat seized, feeling more constricted at that moment than when he had tasted the corn mash a friend of his pap’s had brewed up for this year’s fair.

“Could be,” she answered. “You know how it is when a man and a woman love each other and wanna be husband and wife. It’s how we was at the swimming hole a couple weeks back.”

“I … I—”

She prodded him coyly, “You remember, don’t you?”

“Ain’t never gonna forget.”

He pulled a gay red bandanna from a front pocket of his britches and swiped it across his forehead, glad it was so hot that she wouldn’t ever tell how it made him sweat just talking about this with her.

“In a way,” Amy said, her voice softer now, those big doe eyes of hers darting left and right before she leaned forward confidentially, “I’ve been thinking on how good that made me feel—how I’d like to feel that good again sometime soon.”

“S-soon?”

“Maybe real soon,” Amy answered, leaning back and bringing her legs under her to rise. “Maybeso tonight: you come look me up over to my folks’ tent after supper chores is done.”

“Tonight. Yes.”

He rose unsteadily beside her, his temples pounding, hoping it was just the heat that made his head swim on rising waves of pressure. Then she was pressed against him, rubbing a breast against his arm. He looked down at the contours of her straining beneath the thin fabric of her dress.

“You want to touch ’em again, don’t you, Titus?”

“I, I surely would.”

Planting a kiss lightly on the singed redness of his hairless cheek, Amy giggled and turned away. Over her shoulder she said, “Look me up, Titus—an’ we’ll sneak off so you can do all the touching you want.”

Godamighty!

He watched her sway side to side, moving off through the grass and sunlight toward the bustle and din of the fair, her long skirt sweeping this way then that as she threw those rounded hips of hers about. It made his mouth go dry just remembering how those hips felt in his hands, how he hadn’t just held them, more even than a frantic grope, but had clawed at them as he attempted to drive himself into her there in the cool black water of that stream.

Into … inside … he never had been inside her, if there was an inside to women. Maybe there wasn’t and everything was all outside, like he was. And a man was just s’posed to get his pecker laid down atween their legs, getting hisself pointed just right afore he shot. And that was what made babies grow: was when a man shot center—the way he was determined to shoot center this evening—and his juices landed in just the right place on a woman’s privates.

And then he felt some self-imposed embarrassment, just in thinking about it. There was no one he could ask. Nary a friend from the Rabbit Hash school he dared mention his fears to. Sure was he that they were as ignorant of such primal matters as he was. No father he could present himself to and ask for answers to such vital questions. Maybe only Amy herself held the key.

He’d have to learn the mysteries from her—if he dared.

Dared … because he was scared, frightened right down to the soles of his feet that he had put her with child already. Lying down atop a gal and pointing his pecker in the right direction, then shooting center to make a real mess on her, to make a mess of their lives.

It was one bit of marksmanship Titus wasn’t all that sure he was so proud of right now as he leaned over and nuzzled the redbone hound.

“C’mon, you ol’ ranger. Time for me to take you back to the folks afore I mosey off to the shooting range.”

Tink whimpered a bit, mostly howled as he leaped against the length of rope tied around his neck when Titus left him behind, secured to a tree beside his folks’ pair of poor lean-tos.

Thaddeus had pitched their camp right beside a Cincinnati pot merchant who was selling his kettles and ovens beneath an awning of bright-blue Russian sheeting. In cherrywood boxes he also displayed the medicinais he had to sell, English ague and fever drops, as well as butter tubs and cream jugs made of fired and painted clays. On the other side of them sat the red-trimmed marquee tent of a glassman from Pittsburgh. Here in the first decade of the nineteenth century glass was relatively plentiful, not yet overly priced for those settlers pushing against the western frontier. Forty of the twelve-by-twelve-inch panes sold for fourteen shillings, little more than a nickel apiece.

Titus had to force himself to turn his back on the disappointed dog and walk away hurriedly, as sorry as he felt leaving Tink behind at camp. But trouble it would be with the dog at the shooting line, the noise and the press of people. The match would be tough enough for him to concentrate on without Tink lolling there between his legs the way he’d done that morning during the qualifying relays.

“Titus!”

He turned.

“You didn’t even gimme a kiss good-bye,” Betsey Bass scolded her son as she stopped before him.

“Ain’t good-bye, Mam.”

She brushed her fingers along his cheek. “You’re away to the big match, ain’tcha?”

Titus nodded. “Where’s pap?”

She shrugged, saying, “Don’t know. Went off with some others to go talk seeds, they was when I last saw ’em.” And she leaned up on the toes of her worn, scuffed boots to kiss his cheek. “That’s for luck, Titus. You go show ’em.”

“I will, Mam. You gonna come, ain’tcha?”

“Course, son. I’ll be there shortly.”

“An’ pap? He coming to watch me win?”

His mother’s lips quivered in deliberation before she answered. “I’m sure he’ll be looking in on the match, Titus. Now, you go show ’em your best.”

He set off again toward the shooting range on the far side of the meadow, where they fired into the side of a tall, wooded hill. He hoped his father would show, knowing the odds were against it. Touching his cheek where his mother had planted her lips, it made him wonder—when a man got old enough to be having girls kissing on him, was he too old for his mam to kiss on him then?

He was sure it sounded right—that there came a time when mothers should damn well stop embarrassing their sons by kissing them like they were children—then thought on fathers and their children. He struggled to recall any embrace from his pap, trying desperately to remember if he had seen his father hug his other three children. A kiss from Thaddeus—why, that was purely out of the question! A man, leastways the men Titus knew of, they never would be caught kissing. Not a woman, and surely not one of their children.

The sun had settled so that the bottom of its orb rested on the tops of the far trees back of the range. It would be warm on his neck. Already a crowd had gathered, knots of spectators sprinkled here and there, most all of them settled on the grass in the shade of trees and brush, a few standing. Some of those were women who sported new bonnets of the brightest calicoes and ginghams. Perhaps an arm wrapped around a husband or a sweetheart who wore his finest drop-shoulder shirt. As Titus stepped into line at the judges’ table, he looked down at his own faded hickory shirt, spun and woven from the Basses’ own flax and wool by his mother, then dyed a light brown with the natural dye of walnut shells she saved for just such a purpose. Folks on this frontier rarely called such cloth linsey-woolsey. Instead, what they wove to clothe their family they called mixed cloth.

Maybeso with his prize money he would have enough to buy himself a new shirt for this coming year’s schooling, his last. Mayhaps enough even to buy his mam something pretty. And a special gift for Amy.

“You’re the Bass boy, ain’t you?”

He nodded to the man seated in a straight-backed, cane-bottomed chair behind the table where sat several inkwells and packets of ink powder amid large sheets of lined foolscap where names and numbers had been inscribed. “Yes, sir.”

“Titus?”

“Yes.”

The man nodded to his assistant, who hoisted a burlap bag across the table with the clatter of wood and said, “Like I’m telling every one of you last ten fellers, we’ll start off at twelve rods. Each shooter will have one chance’t at his target. If he don’t hit it—he’s out, and the rest go on to the next targets set up two rods farther on. In this-a-way, we keep going till there’s only one feller.”

“And he’s the champeen.”

The man smiled. “That’s right. Like you been last couple years to the junior side of the shooting.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“Your targets,” the man replied. “You go and mark each of ’em in the same way. With your initials. Or your mark, if you prefer: a scratch, a line, or carve your hull name if’n you want. But we must all be able to tell just whose target it is in the case of a dispute.”

“They’re all like this,” said the sharp-nosed farmer assisting the shooting judge. He held up a square of rough-hewn hardwood, less than a foot on each side and no more than two inches thick. At the center of the block a small circle had been blackened by smudging a candle’s flame against the flat surface.

“The range judges check every target after all the shooters is finished at a certain distance. Them what qualifies, anyway. If there’s a hole inside the black—you go on with the others. If we cain’t find no hole in the wood, or you didn’t get in the black—”

“I go home empty-handed,” Titus finished. “What if I put one on the line?”

The sharp-nosed assistant answered, “It don’t count.”

And the judge added, “You got to make it a clean shot in the black smudge.”

“Certain enough.” Hoisting his bag off the table, Titus said, “I’m ready.”

“In just a shake now we’ll call out for to start,” the judge replied as Bass started away, motioning the tall man forward who had been standing behind Titus in that short line of finalists.

For the better part of a half hour Titus kept his eyes moving across the crowd continuing to grow in the shade of that rim of trees swaying with the gentle, warm breezes. None of his family had shown, not any uncles nor cousins. Disappointed, he tried telling himself it made no difference about them—not one of them saw any value in the things Titus held to be important. Nonetheless, with every minute that crawled by that late-summer afternoon, he found his young heart sinking lower and lower.

“You gone and set yourself up prime for taking a fall, Titus,” he murmured to himself.

All through the years he had competed in the youngsters’ matches, Titus had hoped his family would attend the shooting, supporting him as one behind their own. But time and again his father and mother had made their excuses, saying there were other more pressing concerns they had need of attending to at the same hour the matches were held. Matters of seed and discussions of weather cycles. Something, anything more important than coming to see their son strive to do his best. If only once a year he tried so hard to be the best.

So it was he had promised himself that this year it would be different for his family, convincing himself they would all show up now that he was shooting with the finest marksmen in the county. No longer among the boys, now he would stand at the same line with the menfolk, ready to show one and all that he had the stuff of a winner. And surely his pap would finally see he was worthy of his love.

At long last his father would congratulate him for a job well-done, would put his arms around his son and tell him how proud he was of him. Mayhaps even tell his first-born son just how much he loved him.

“It’s all right, Pap,” Titus whispered to himself aloud, still snared in his reverie as the judge called out for the contestants to move up to the shooting line. “I know how hard it is for a man to say such a thing to his young’un. Just you being here tells me enough—”

“You coming, boy?”

Titus suddenly snapped to with a shake of his head. Before him stood one of the shooters, a tall, lanky, bearded man with a graceful fullstock slung at the end of his arm.

“Me? I’m coming,” he answered, striving to make his voice sound as low as possible—angry at his shame to be caught talking to himself, off in another world.

Eight shooters waited for him and the tall marksman to reach the line.

“You’re ’llowed to grease your bar’l ’tween each shot—with a patch if you’re of a mind to,” one of the judges kicked off.

“Other’n that,” the first judge said, “it’s pretty much straight-up shooting. Off-hand. No rest. You can take your time on each target. Ain’t being judged on how fast you shoot or load. Just how pretty you make each shot.”

“Let’s get on with it,” one of the older men said with an impatient growl.

Titus nodded and moved off to the right end of the line.

Out close to seventy yards across the grass, which barely undulated in the faint breeze, stood a crude framework. As the judges called out names of the ten contestants from left to right, two men were placing the corresponding wood targets atop the highest plank on that framework. The shooters spread out a little more along the firing line as the crowd fell to a hush. That pair of range marshals scampered off to the side in different directions.

“Finish loading your weapons—then fire at will,” said the man who had registered Titus for the contest.

Bass stood at the end of the line, his target the last on the right. Titus pulled the stopper from the large powder horn he had made himself of a scraped bullhorn, and measured out his charge of black powder into a section of deer antler hollowed out to hold just the proper number of the coarse black grains he used shot after shot.

From this twelve rods—he ciphered as he stuffed the stopper back into the narrow end of the powder horn—it would take little to put a ball from his grandpap’s .42-caliber fullstock into that black circle of candle smudge. With the round ball of soft lead barely started down the swaged muzzle of the barrel, Titus pulled the long hickory ramrod free of the thimbles along the bottom of the forestock. He gave a push, moving the ball partway down the barrel, the lead sphere surrounded by a linen patch cut just a bit larger than the outer circumference of the muzzle itself, that piece of cloth soaked in the oil rendered down from a black bear he had taken not far from Amy’s swimming hole early last winter. One of the few he figured hadn’t been killed or run out of that part of the Ohio River country.

His mother had taken the thick yellowish fleece Titus had sliced away from the connective tissue between the hide and muscle, melting it into an oil in one of her cast-iron kettles over low heat on a trivet she swung over the coals he tended in their fireplace. It was something she had not done very often for her husband, seeing how little he hunted for the family. Thaddeus had harumped several times during the rendering process, content to leave that as his only comment from the chair where he rocked on the uneven plank floor while repairing broken leather harness using a big glover’s needle threaded with thick strips of waxed linen.

“Waste of time, that oil,” Thaddeus had said. “A lot of work for little gain.”

Titus remembered again that winter’s evening and how he had realized his father’s skimpy appreciation for the pleasure a person might reap from a task far from work, a task taken on for little more than its own sake. To accomplish nothing productive but for the joy of the task itself. With his father, and his mother most times as well, everything had to serve a purpose, every day’s value weighed only by what had been accomplished before one laid one’s weary body down that night.

As he threaded the ramrod back into its thimbles below the barrel of the fullstock, Titus knew he would never be a man such as his father—at least the sort who found little joy in each day’s modest passing for its own sake.

Thumbing the dragon’s-head hammer back to half cock, he snapped forward the frizzen a Belleview gunsmith had resoled two years before so that it would once again bestow a plentiful shower of sparks into the pan where Titus now sprinkled a dusting of the fine-grained priming powder from the smaller of the two horns hanging from his possibles pouch slung over his left shoulder.

By the time the youngster brought the frizzen back down over the pan and dragged the hammer back to full cock, two shooters had taken their crack at those first targets.

He raised the butt to the curve of his shoulder and nestled it in against the thin strap of muscle beneath the worn, much-washed hickory shirt his mother had made him years before.

Another of the finalists touched off his shot. The firing line began to drift with the gray gauze of powder smoke suspended on the heavy, muggy air.

Titus laid his cheek along the smooth half heart of the small cheekpiece carved into the buttstock, trying hard to shut out the sounds of the nearby crowd murmuring, laughing, cheering on their favorites, the clamor of children at play, the unsteady and surprising boom of other shooters firing their rifles behind him. If he wasn’t careful, Titus reminded himself, some man’s shot just might surprise him, and he would end up jerking on the trigger instead of concentrating on nothing more than his own squeezing caress of the trigger.

When his longrifle went off, he watched through the curl of gray muzzle smoke while his target went spinning to the ground. As he brought the weapon’s buttstock down to rest upon his instep, Titus turned slightly, finding the other nine shooters watching him as if he were delaying them.

“’Bout time, boy,” harped one.

Another cried out, “You may look young as a pup an’ wet behin’t the ears—but you take much time to shoot as a ol’t lady!”

Some of the nearby crowd roared in approval. While most of the other shooters finished reloading without a complaint, a few guffawed at Titus’s expense before they went about their own business.

Again his eyes anxiously raked the crowd, searching for family. Not finding any, he dropped his gaze back to his shooting pouch, where he raised the tiny iron pick he used to probe and clean the vent hole bored in the breech, then put his pan brush to work. He had crafted it last winter from the hump bristles taken off that bear.

“It’s awright,” he confided to himself, lips barely moving as he screwed a jag onto the end of his wiping stick. “Likely they’re running late still. That’un was just the first shot, anyways. They’ll be coming along directly.”

As he drove a greased patch down the length of the barrel, then pulled it free of the muzzle coated with a thick swirl of powder smudge, the youth glanced downrange at the men who were hefting the framework back another two rods—some eleven yards—to the next set of distance stakes driven into the meadow. For the first time he noticed those wooden shafts some four feet tall, standing at regular intervals, each one topped with a long strip of pale cloth barely nudged by the wispy breeze.

With the ten new targets lined up and his assistants dashing off the range, the judge hollered, “Fire when ready!”

Titus finished seating the ball and patch against the breech, then brought the hammer back to full cock before the first shooter touched off. Sporadic cheers erupted for a few of the contestants as they struck their mark across that fourteen rods.

Then sixteen. And finally eighteen rods—a hundred yards of meadow. And that’s when their number began to dwindle.

At twenty rods one old shooter missed his black smudge.

Two more rods from that, another pair just grazed the rim of that black smudge with their shots—not near good enough to stay on with the other seven.

At twenty-four rods they lost a man who jerk-fired and missed his chunk of wood entirely.

As Titus stood reloading to fire at twenty-six rods, he looked over the crowd once more, expecting to find his family standing somewhere near, to be close at hand, there to cheer on one of their own. Still he could not find them as he ran the ramrod home through its thimbles, then stole another look at the crowd directly behind him to be certain.

When he turned back to gaze downrange, Titus felt about as alone as he had ever felt in his seventeen summers. What he did this afternoon was damned important—yet evidently not important enough for his father to give off talking of seed and sheep and hogs, or his mother to leave off chatting about babes and spinning, baking and midwifing….

Then he saw her, squeezing right through the tight first row of spectators.

Amy raised her arm and waved.

Silently he mouthed the words across the distance. “Where’s my pap?”

With a shrug of her shoulders the young woman held up her empty hands and shook her head.

“Damn them anyway,” he grumbled, turning from her. “Just teach me to do for myself from now on, that’s what it does.”

Bringing his rifle down to reload for the relay at twenty-eight rods, his eyes glanced her way, finding Amy clapping, raising her arm to wave when she found him sneaking a look in her direction. He tried to smile, if only to speak his thanks in that simple way, then primed the pan as disappointment soured his stomach.

Already two more shooters had trudged away from the firing line, leaving only four to aim at those shrinking black circles burned into wood planks set atop the stands 150 yards away.

As he brought his rifle away from his shoulder after that next shot, he heard another man curse at the unfairness of some judge’s call while he trudged off in noisy protest. Just when he was about to drop his eyes to set about reloading, Titus noticed something out of place downrange as the targets were being moved out to thirty rods, drawing ever closer to the far side of the long meadow. It was the way he had learned to hunt: spotting something not quite right, not quite in place. A color where it shouldn’t be, some shape out of the ordinary. And if you paid close enough attention, you were bound to discover some game hiding among that patch of brush, lying to against those shadows.

While most others might find a tree stand or lie in wait for their quarry to come down a game trail to them—young Titus Bass had taught himself to track his prey, to stalk, eyes moving constantly, searching for something that just did not fit.

For all this time he hadn’t even noticed it here at this end of the meadow where the firing line had been staked out with a long piece of hemp string. The breeze hardly stirred the frayed cuffs of his drop-front britches, hardly tousled the long hair that hung in brown curls spilling down the back of his neck. But off yonder, 160 yards away, those cloth strips knotted to the tops of the tall stakes told him more than just where the targets were to be placed every two rods across the meadow. The strips fluttered, raised, flapped out straight, snapping in an eddy of wind tormenting the far end of the range.

He glanced to his left as he snapped the frizzen down over the pan, wondering if any of the three others had recognized what he had, if any of them paid the slightest heed. Two of them were intent on brushing out a pan or reloading. Only one, the tall shooter, stared downrange with knowing intensity. As Titus watched him, the lanky frontiersman slowly tore his eyes off the distance to find the youth regarding him.

Within his dark beard the man grinned so slightly, Titus wasn’t sure it was a grin at all. Maybe nothing more than a squint there in the late-afternoon light. Nothing more. But no—the youth decided—the eyes had smiled, if nothing else.

Titus thought he’d sight in on his target, get his range down, and fix on where to hold the front blade in that notch filed in his rear sight—holding just so and high enough.

He brought his rifle to his shoulder and settled it in, snugging his cheek down on the smooth curly-maple of that half heart. He blinked and found that tiny black smudge way off there, all but blotted out by the front blade. He let out half a breath. Beginning to squeeze on the trigger. Then quickly flicked his eyes over to see what the cloth strip was doing on that faraway stake closest to the targets. Eyes back on the front blade he used to cover the black circle.

Continuing to squeeze ever so slightly, he blinked again and watched the strip flutter out of the corner of his eye. Titus went back to concentrating on his sight picture, then once more glanced at the strip as it suddenly dropped like a cow’s tail after shooing a bothersome fly.

Readjusting his sight picture, Bass squeezed a little more insistently. Afraid to hurry, but knowing if he didn’t get his shot off at that moment, the breeze might again rise.

Another shot echoed his, fired almost simultaneously. Without realizing what he was doing he turned to look at the tall man, saw those eyes smile. Plain as sun, it was he who had fired just as Bass had touched off his shot.

“Shooter two—drop off!” came the judge’s cry as he relayed the determination of those range marshals far downrange using small red flags as semaphore.

“And shooter seven—you drop off!”

“What?”

“Seven missed the circle,” the judge repeated. “Last two shooters can reload.”

Titus watched the judge turn away, then focused his attention on the far end of the meadow where the range officers were again moving the framework back. Just two targets now. Flicking a glance at the tall man, he found the smile gone out of those eyes. Nothing there but concentration.

“You can do it, Titus!”

He jerked up in surprise, finding Amy bouncing on her bare feet at the fringe of the crowd, her hands cupped around her mouth as she cheered him on. For a fleeting moment he remembered how he had cupped his hands around those breasts that heaved now with every leap she took.

He promised himself he would win this match and they would celebrate tonight, his skin against hers. That hunger suddenly reminded him that she might very well be carrying his child, and all anticipation of being with her, getting his hands back on those breasts, of laying his own hardness down between her legs and finding such exquisite release inside the fuzzy smoothness of her thighs—it all flew off with the great flapping of a monstrous pair of wings.

He turned his eyes from her, his ears echoing with the crowd’s clapping, rolling over them in a continuous din now.

“Load up, son,” the tall man instructed.

Titus jerked about, finding him standing a few yards off, both wrists looped over the upright muzzle of his rifle.

“W-waiting on me?”

“’Pears it’s just the two of us now.”

“I see that,” he snapped testily.

“Don’t take offense, young’un,” the tall man replied with a shrug. “Weren’t hurrying you none. Take your time. I wanna whip you fair and square.”

That rankled Titus good. He growled, “Pretty damned sure you’re gonna whip me, are you?”

“Don’t forget to prime that rifle,” the man said smoothly, in a friendly sort of way. “A hang-fire sure gonna make you more nervous’n you are right now.”

“I ain’t nervous!” Bass snarled, jabbing the cleaning patch down the barrel. “Whyn’t you just leave me be?”

“I can do that,” he replied, turning away. “Meant no offense.”

“Just leave off me, will you? I come here to shoot, not to jaw with the likes of you.”

Taking his big, low-crowned felt hat off his head and dragging a shirtsleeve across his forehead, the tall man turned back to repeat, “I just wanna beat you fair and square. ’Cause I’m a better shot. Ain’t good to beat you ’cause you done something wrong. A good, hard victory is better’n a easy win any day. So you take your time.”

“I don’t need no more time to beat you,” Titus replied, jabbing the stopper back in his priming horn. He snapped the frizzen over the powder in the pan.

“That’s odd, young’un,” the tall man said with a sigh as he brought his rifle up. “From what I been seeing of your shootin’—looked to be you knew the difference atween firing quick … and firing smart.”

“I’m just as smart as you, any day.” And Bass turned his back on the tall man, dragging the hammer back to full cock and nestling the weapon into his shoulder.

His right eye watered. He blinked twice, trying to clear it. Thirty-two rods, 170 yards, was a tall order. And rattled the way he was, that made him think on the man he was trying to beat. It was down to the two of them now, their targets out there across the entirety of this grassy meadow on the outskirts of Burlington, Kentucky.

That far cloth strip was dancing, not near as much as were the others in that thirty-two rods. But he knew enough that the lead ball would have to cut itself through a lot of crosswind to reach that distant target. He inched the muzzle a wee bit farther to the left. Then feared he was holding too far off the target, was allowing too much for that breeze.

Licking his dry lips, Titus glanced at the long procession of stakes where the cloth strips fluttered between him and the far target. He let half his breath out and began to squeeze, flicking his eyes again to that distant flutter. Against his cheek the air moved. All around him the crowd fell to a muted hush. Dogs barked and yowled behind them, off somewhere in that great camp. He vowed to allow none of it to distract him.

Would no longer let his family’s lack of caring matter. Only, absolutely only thing to dwell on was this shot—this shot to win. The first shooter ever to win at sixteen years old.

The distant cloth fluttered down like a red-elm leaf drifting slowly to the autumn grass. The tall man’s gun roared.

Titus fired a heartbeat later.

Behind him arose a loud groan.

His heart rising to his throat, the youth strained to see through the gauzy strips of their gray gunsmoke. The murmurs grew louder. It looked as if his target had fallen, hit by his ball. But the spectators were grumbling, disappointed—for there in the distance atop that wooden frame sat the tall man’s target.

“Y-you didn’t hit yours!” Titus exclaimed, his mouth going dry with the realization he had won.

“Looks like you beat me, young’un.” The tall man stepped over to Titus and held out his hand. “Fair and square.”

Taking the man’s hand, he began to shake, jubilance at his victory just beginning to sink in.

“Hold on!”

They both turned at the shrill cry from the judge. Across the meadow the range marshals waved their little red flags back and forth. The judge turned to both shooters as an ominous silence descended upon the crowd.

“You fellers stay put. We’ll see what they need me for.”

For those long moments Titus tried to remember to breathe. So close to winning … it all seemed so cruel to drag out his victory with this little drama down there near the targets. Certain that he had hit his, for it had spun off to land in the grass while the tall man’s hadn’t budged at all.

Now the judge was returning, the two range officers close behind him.

“It’s over,” the man hollered as he came up.

Behind the shooters some of the crowd roared their approval while the rest pressed in, hundreds of curious gawkers wanting in on the reason for the delay.

“We have us a for-certain winner,” the judge added, coming to a halt, the pair of officers at his elbows.

Both nodded as if they had had themselves a hand in deciding its finality.

The judge held up one of the two targets, a bullet hole plainly visible just outside the black smudge. “This’un here’s marked for shooter number ten—the young’un here.”

“He didn’t hit his mark, did he?” a voice asked behind them.

“No, he didn’t,” the judge replied. “But if the only other shooter left in the match didn’t hit his target at all, then the contest would go to the man who at least hit closest to the mark.”

“Hear! Hear!” a few shouted. “The boy won it!”

There was a surge of movement at the edge of that jostling crowd pressing in on the shooters and judges. Amy slipped through them and stopped at Titus’s side, gripping his left arm in her two hands, eyes bright and moist, dancing with glee at his victory. She rose on her toes to plant a kiss on Titus’s cheek.

“Only problem is,” the judge continued, holding up both the targets and waving them to get the crowd to quiet down, “we can’t for the life of us figure out why shooter eight’s target didn’t fall.”

The tall man leaned forward, reaching for the wood plank. “Didn’t hit it at all?”

“That’s what we thought at first,” the judge replied, handing the shooter his target. “The men here thort you’d missed your target clean. ’Cause it didn’t fall off the stand. Meaning the boy here beat you.”

“Yeah, but lookee there, will you?” the tall man declared, holding his target up high at the end of his arm so the crowd could see. He stuffed a little finger through the hole.

Titus’s heart sank.

“Near square onto the middle,” the judge said. “An’ for some reason your target just got itself notched down in that stand so that it couldn’t fall. No matter—as you can all see, this man’s shot went through the black while the young’un’s here didn’t but nudge the black.”

One of the range officers immediately leaped forward to hoist the tall man’s arm, and the crowd instantly raised its boisterous agreement.

“We got us a new champeen!”

Amy was squeezing his arm as folks shoved past, anxious to press in on the winner.

“You done just fine, Titus,” she tried to cheer him. “Second outta all them shooters your first year, and shooting all that way over yonder—why, my pa said he ain’t seen such shooting since he can remember.”

“How come I don’t feel just fine, then, Amy?” he whimpered.

“Maybe you gotta learn how to win.”

He jerked up to find the tall man, his hand held out before him.

“Just like a man’s gotta learn how to lose. You damned near shot the pants off me, boy.” He was smiling broadly now as he pushed that floppy felt hat way back on his head. “Ain’t been that skairt of losing for a long, long time. Purty, it was: the way you know how to handle that ol’ squirrel gun of yours.”

“It were my grandpap’s.”

He pushed his hand closer to the youth. “What’s the name you go by, young feller?”

Titus finally seized the man’s hand again and shook hard, one sturdy pump of his arm. “Titus Bass, mister.”

“Nice to meet you, Titus Bass. A good grip you got.” He brushed the brim of his hat with a pair of fingers for Amy, then quickly looked back at Titus, eyes twinkling. “My friends call me Levi Gamble.”