Free The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner

your gun, then,” she said, but his look made her feel dizzy and absurd and hot and as if she were going to fly all to pieces. She had come to the point of meeting his eyes and trying to stare him down, both of them laughing, when the man with the megaphone began to announce the opening of the singles traps, for the championship of North Dakota.
    â€œPromise!” Bo said. “Don’t be a piker. I can’t shoot for any such stakes as the championship of Dakota.”
    Elsa got hold of the disintegrating feeling and fingered the enamelled brooch at her throat. She was delighted and a little terrified. “We’ll see,” she said.
    They found Jud and Eva sitting among the spectators behind the second trap. Eva had a kewpie doll in her lap. “Won it on a toy horse race,” she said. “That’s what comes of having a beau that knows the ponies. My horse never was behind.” She reached out and pinched Jud’s ankle, and he moved it calmly out of reach.
    One of the men at the table read off the names of the first shooters, who lined up behind the traps. Bo leaned over and began explaining to Elsa. They shot in groups of twenty-five rounds. The first was the easiest, “known traps and known angles,” the shooter knowing the source and direction of each bird. There would be a clump of possibles on this one. Then came twenty-five shots at known traps but unknown angles. The bird might come straight out or to either side. That was tougher. The third and fourth rounds the shooters went out singly. In the third round they shot “reversing,” standing at number one trap and getting a crossing bird from number five, then standing at number two and getting a bird out of number four, and so on. The last twenty-five rounds was “expert.” You didn’t know which trap the bird would come from, or in what direction.
    Her eyes were on him almost in horror, but she was laughing still. “You shoot a hundred times,” she said, “and you’re an extra good shot, and you have the nerve ... !”
    â€œA hundred isn’t so many.” She noticed for the first time what it was that made his face so changeful and interesting. His eyebrows turned up rather than down at their outside ends. Like a devil. He was a devil. A hundred times! “I might miss as many as six,” he said slyly. “That’d only be ninety-four.”
    â€œKeep the gun in the case!” she said, and waved him away.
    He laughed and leaned back. A white saucer whizzed out of the first trap, the first shooter caught it with his barrels, fired. The saucer shivered to fragments, its thin splashings as the pieces hit the water clearly audible even over the echo of the shot rolling back from the shore. “Good bird,” said an official clearly. The scorer at the table echoed him, “Good bird.” The second shooter stood ready. “Pull!” he said.
    Bo kept score with a stick on the bare ground. If anyone missed more than two he erased the whole score. “Don’t need to worry about them. Guy that wins this has to shoot a possible on the first two rounds.”
    A man with a sheet of paper in his hand went around reading off the next names. “Simmons, number one; Carter, two; Shale, three; Gulbransen, four; Galbraith, five. Ready for the next squad. Simmons, Carter, Shale, Gulbransen, Galbraith.”
    â€œThey run these off pretty smooth,” Bo said. He opened the case and took out the stock and then the barrels, fitted the gun together, broke it and snapped it together again, his automatic hand going down to scratch in the tallies. He wiped off the stock, ran the ramrod through the shining barrels. His hands moved on the blue steel almost tenderly. Then he laid the gun across his feet and watched again.
    â€œYou’ll be up pretty soon,” Elsa said. He nodded, and she saw the tightening that had come over the muscles in his jaw and neck,