Winchester 1886 (19 page)

The Winchester felt right in his hands. The captain kept grinning, figuring he had already won that fifty-five dollars.

“Oh, I don't know, Captain Lincoln,” Chase said casually. “How about if we make it five hundred, sir?”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE

“Fifty-two . . . fifty-three . . .” Captain Wilbur Lincoln, eyes red, face pale, countenance embarrassed, had to dig for change. Quarters and dimes and finally, pennies. “Fifty-four . . . fifty-five.” He sighed.

Sergeant Jay Chase beamed and slid the much heavier pouch back into the deep pockets of his trousers. “Thank you, Captain Lincoln.”

The captain turned to a young lieutenant, probably fresh out of West Point, with fuzz for a mustache and pimples on his cheeks. “Don't worry, Mr. Rush, I will pay you back come payday.”

“Whenever you can afford to, Captain Lincoln.” The green pup of an Army officer grinned at the sergeant. “I bet on the winner.”

Chase had to laugh as he took the Model 1886 Winchester from Trooper Eustis.

“You bet on him?” Captain Lincoln found that hard to believe.

“Yes, sir,” the kid beamed. “You're darn-tooting I did. I saw Sergeant Chase at Creedmoor seven years ago. My father took me to see the contest.”

Chase reconsidered the snot-nosed lieutenant. As if he could remember that kid from that far back.

It also made Captain Wilbur Lincoln reconsider the noncom who had just bested him, first at five hundred yards, then at a thousand. With a repeating rifle that looked as if it had been marched over by the entire command at Fort Robinson. “You? You shot at . . . Creedmoor?”

Turning toward the officer, Chase spit tobacco juice onto the ground. “Oh, I did not do that well,” he said sheepishly. “Why five, no six, yes, six fellows outshot me that time. Come on, Useless.” He strode back toward the enlisted men's barracks, where the post adjutant had graciously agreed to house the boys from the 6th Cavalry for the night before they continued their journey north to South Dakota. Trooper Eustis followed close behind him.

A black sergeant handed Chase the paper targets. “That was some groupin', Sergeant.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. I appreciate that.” Chase would study the targets later.

Four others cheered him as he ambled past. Others, of course, those idiots who had so unwisely bet on Captain Wilbur Lincoln and his fancy little target rifle, sent him looks of bitter derision. He greeted them with pleasant smiles, anyway. Just to make them feel worse.

Speaking of feeling worse, Chase felt the urge to rub his shoulder or at the least send Trooper Eustis to the post sutler to buy some liniment. It felt as if it were black and blue. Actually, he sometimes wondered if he had chipped his collarbone. That Winchester kicked like an elephant.

But it had won him fifty-five dollars from a snobbish officer who had been spotted a fancy brass telescope and a long-range rifle. At five hundred yards. And then a thousand. And that took a bit of the bite out of the pain Sergeant Jay Chase was feeling.

“What you thinking, Sergeant?” Trooper Eustis asked.

“I'm thinking what a bunch of suckers there are stationed at Fort Meade these days.”

 

 

 

George Washington's birthday proved sunny, calm, and even warm as Sergeant Jay Chase rode to the designated sharpshooting contest cheered by those green kids he still was trying to whip into shape and cheered by some of the leading gamblers in Sturgis.

It had been decided to hold the contest around a little lake or pond or whatever you wanted to call it—still frozen over, although the ice didn't look that firm—that lay north of Fort Meade, almost on a line that ran from Sturgis to Bear Butte off to the northeast. If he looked behind him, Chase knew he could make out Sly Hill and Oyster Mountain, maybe even Granite Peak and Crook Mountain in the Black Hills. Instead, he focused on his competition.

He rode under a banner proclaiming T
HE
M
EADE
C
OUNTY
S
HARPSHOOTING
S
PECTACLE OF THE
W
ORLD
.

So,
Chase wondered,
will the winner be world champion or county champion, and will this truly be a spectacle?

He saw an Indian with a big, battered flintlock rifle. A buckskinned vagabond with a beard to his belly. Cowboys with Winchesters and Marlins, one with a Spencer, another two with Henrys. Six or seven trappers or buffalo hunters or wolfers with Sharps rifles, one of which even had a telescopic scope. That reminded him of Captain Wilbur Lincoln. He wondered if the uppity captain had ever paid back that snot-nosed lieutenant.

The barber from Sturgis had shown up, too, trading in his razor and strop for a Ballard No. 5 Pacific single-shot rifle and several boxes of .40-63 cartridges. The barber, Chase knew, had been one of those snake-in-the-grass sharpshooters under Hiram Berdan's command during the Rebellion—back when his eyes and muscles had been thirty years younger. Even a couple of enlisted men and two officers from Fort Meade were in the competition.

He saw an 1866 Springfield that had been modified into a .50-70 sporting rifle. Chase didn't remember the shooter's name, but he knew that gun. He had beaten it in the Fourth of July contest three years back.

Turning his head right and left, he saw a Chaffee-Reese bolt action . . . a Howard .44 single-shot carbine . . . a .43-caliber Keene, the first bolt-action rifle Remington had produced . . . two Colt Lightnings, both probably in .32 caliber . . . even a few rifles Chase couldn't identify.

He shook his head, amazed at just how many people came out thinking that they could outshoot him. Well, it wasn't every day that somebody put up a purse of $1,500, winner take all.

No second place this go-round.

He rode past the field they would be shooting across, starting at fifty yards. Colonel Tom C. Curtis had sure done his best, lining the shooting grounds with barbed wire that had been decorated with bunting. Buggies and wagons were parked all along the lakeshore, and corrals had been thrown up, with hay for the horses and mules to eat scattered across the ramshackle affairs.

Chase smelled stew and bread. One tent appeared to be more popular than the rest, and he guessed Colonel Tom C. Curtis had hired a few beer-jerkers from the Sturgis saloons. Folks must have come from Deadwood . . . from Rapid City . . . maybe as far away as Pierre or even Montana or Wyoming.

As he reined in his horse, Sergeant Jay Chase saw the woman.

 

 

It never ceased to amaze her just how many men couldn't shoot worth a hoot. Colonel Tom C. Curtis's harebrained shooting championship started with paper targets at fifty yards, which was nothing more than a pot shot for Shirley Sweet.

The day proved perfect for shooting. No wind. Not even cold, and the paper targets had been painted red to make them easier to spot. But plenty of men swore bitterly, blaming their rifles and not their own incompetence, when their shots missed the bull's eyes, missed the circles, missed the entire bright red paper square.

Shirley, of course, did not miss.

She had brought along her No. 3 Remington Rolling Block Sporting Model.

Colonel Curtis pleaded with her not to shoot so straight in the early rounds. Build up her odds. Make the bets higher. Nobody would bet on a woman to win, not in South Dakota. Not anywhere in the West. Probably not anywhere in the world.

“I'm here to win,” Shirley said. “And nothing's guaranteed.”

“Just make it interesting, sweetie,” Curtis begged.

She rammed a cleaning cloth down the Remington's 30-inch barrel. “Do you have $1,500 to pay the winner?”

“I will. Once all the bets have been collected, sweetie.” That was the colonel's scam. The bets would pay for the bartenders he had hired and the whiskey and kegs of beer he had bought.

Knowing Curtis the way she did, he also would be collecting a percentage of the take from the soiled doves in their cribs and from the church collection plate.

Everyone bowed for the parson's invocation and prayer and the passing of the plate, and then Shirley finished cleaning her rifle and waited for her turn in the firing line for the second round—iron discs, probably removed from plows at the Sturgis stores that catered to farmers, at a hundred yards.

A steel target at one hundred yards was more to her liking. No spyglasses needed for the judges to announce where the bullets had hit. You just fired, and waited to hear the
ping
. Or not.

She beat the gentleman with the bolt-action Keene, and he bowed graciously and kissed her hand. She liked him . . . and his Remington .43.

But that cowboy with the dirty Henry that she beat in the next round, iron discs at two hundred and fifty yards? She didn't care much for that louse. He cursed his luck, cursed Colonel Curtis, cursed his pards who heckled him so mercilessly, and cursed her as a man decked out in women's garb. Then he stormed away to the tent saloons.

Five hundred yards made things more interesting—shooting cracker boxes, also painted red with white bull's eyes. Shirley used her tang sight for the round.

And then there were three.

Shirley Sweet. Libertino Adorante, a silver-headed barber from Sturgis who had a Ballard No. 5 Pacific .40-63. And a wiry sergeant from Fort Meade, who called himself Jay Chase. To her surprise, he was shooting a beat-up Winchester repeating rifle in .50 caliber that reminded her of Deputy U.S. Marshal Jimmy Mann.

Actually, she had hoped he might have been there. She even looked around for any sign of Danny Waco, but if he was at the competition, he was in the saloons or brothels. Probably not at the church tent, unless he was robbing it.

“Children, ladies, and gentlemen!” Colonel Tom C. Curtis spoke through a red, white, and blue megaphone. “Our three finalists will be shooting at a target that has been posted on the far side of Lake George Washington.”

Shirley figured that was not the name of the frozen pond out on the flats.

“Its distance from here is one thousand yards—almost a full mile.”

More like six-tenths,
Shirley thought as the crowd oohed and ahhed.

“The target is a church bell—”

“That, Colonel, is sacrilegious!” the preacher bellowed.

Curtis lowered the megaphone and found the parson. “It's from an abandoned Catholic church, sir.”

The preacher was Protestant, and he nodded his acceptance and withdrew his protest.

“As I was saying . . .” Colonel Tom C. Curtis returned to his megaphone. “The bell has been painted red, white, and blue in honor of our glorious nation's first president, on this, his . . . his . . . his . . . one hundredth birthday!”

Applause. Shirley didn't know exactly when George Washington was born, but she had to guess he would have been a bit older than a century mark, but she decided to stop listening to Colonel Curtis and focus on that target. If she could see it.

“How will we know if we hit it?” the barber asked.

“Why, my good man,” Colonel Curtis answered, “church bells ring, don't they?”

Laughter erupted. Even Sergeant Jay Chase chuckled. Shirley, who was trying her best not to listen to that blowhard and cheat she worked for, had to smile.

“Shooters will fire from the prone position. Shooting sticks are allowed at this stage in this round.” The colonel waited as the Sicilian barber from Sturgis and Shirley went to their tables and grabbed their shooting sticks. The barber carried a fancy tripod. Shirley's was just a couple old fire-hardened limbs tied together with rawhide, which she had been using since her childhood in Ohio.

Sergeant Jay Chase just rubbed the front sight of his Winchester '86.

Of course, the colonel waited five more minutes to allow more bets to be placed before he returned to his megaphone.

“After a random drawing of lots, our finalists will fire in this order. Liber . . . tin . . . o Adorante . . .” Curtis butchered the barber's name. “Sergeant Chase of the finest cavalry in the world. And Shirley Sweet, second only to Annie Oakley among our nation's shooters of the fairer sex.”

Shirley had never met Annie Oakley, but figured she could give Buffalo Bill's sharpshooter a run for her money. She shook her head at the colonel's attempted compliment and whispered, “I've never shot one of the fairer sex. Not even a man, though I'm tempted right now.”

“So am I,” she heard Sergeant Jay Chase say.

She turned, saw the soldier, and smiled. He grinned back.

Three minutes later, the crowd hushed as the barber stretched out on the ground and sighted down the Ballard. They waited. The rifle boomed.

A moment later, the bell beyond the pond chimed.

Locals cheered, but fell silent as Jay Chase stepped to the line.

“Sergeant,” Tom Curtis said as the soldier stretched out on his belly. “Would not you prefer to use shooting sticks?”

“He may use mine,” the barber offered.

“Thank you, no.” Chase levered the Winchester, waited, and fired.

The crowd exploded in delight at the
ping
of the bell.

Shirley Sweet allowed the Sturgis mayor to help her to the ground and braced the Remington's stock against her shoulder. She drew a breath, let it out, found the bell in her sights, and squeezed the trigger. She didn't hear the sound, but the crowd did. Everyone cheered, except those who had bet against her. They cursed.

“What's next?” the mayor asked. “Do we move the bell?”

“Let's put 'er atop Bear Butte!” someone joked.

When the laughter died, Colonel Tom C. Curtis said, “I think it would be easier to have our shooters back up fifty yards than move that bell.” His head shook. “It weighs a ton.”