Dance on the Wind (10 page)

“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.”