OCR Text |
Show "I can't afford to have you shoot up my silver dollars," Sylvester announced one morning. "So these will have to do." Earlier that morning, morn-ing, Sylvester had taken a green pine limb, about as thick as a woman's wrist and sawed off a pile of half-inch thick wafers, about the size of silver dollars. Sylvester handed some of the wafers to Mary, offering her the opportunity to give Port the silver dollar test. She hurried outside. The two men followed, Port carefully care-fully checking his pistol. When Port nodded that he was ready, Mary flung the first wooden wafer high above her head. It was flipping end of end and had just reached the top of the arc when Port fired. The wafer ch attered into five or six pieces. She threw a second, sec-ond, third and fourth wafer. Each time the result was the same. Port didn't miss. "How much do I owe you?" Port asked as they walked back into the cabin. "We'll discuss that when the lessons are over." "We're not finished?" "You've learned how to shoot a pistol. That's the first lesson. There are two more lessons yet to be learned." "What are they?" Port asked. "Both are more important than leaning how to shoot. We'll do the first in the morning. You'd better get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow will not be easy." "You're not going to throw them up in the air?" Port asked the next morning when Sylvester set up a plank with five bottles on it. "Nope, they'll be hard enough to hit on the plank," Sylvester responded. re-sponded. "At a hundred yards." "At twenty yards." Sylvester paced off twenty yards, then drew a six-foot circle in the dirt using the toe of his boot. "Want you to break all five bottles without stepping outside the circle." "Too easy," Port said. "What am I missing?" "I'll be shooting at you, from beside that tree over there." "Wait a minute..." "It's one thing to hit a target on the practice range," Sylvester explained, ex-plained, "but quite another to hit your target when someone is shooting shoot-ing at you. If you can't do that you'd better hang your gun up and forget the whole thing." "I don't think I want to do this," Port said. (To be continued) |