It was no trick finding Sloane. He left the Sinclair the next evening just about dinnertime and walked the slow two miles east to the Maplewood, the main street rimmed with red light from the westering sun and people in slow promenade with the day’s heat broken and Washington sitting neat as a cutout at the end of the street, the small jets of black smoke from the cog railroad rising from the slope as if the mountain breathed. He walked down behind the hotel, past the farm buildings and stables and beyond the kitchen gardens to a stretch of rough field studded with outcroppings, following for some time the reports of a gun. He perched up on the top rail of the old-fashion stile set into the fence and sat watching, smoking, making no effort to hide himself.

A hotel or stable boy was heaving the clay pigeons, snapping his arm in a flat motion of elbow and wrist to throw the small discus. Cradled in his other arm against his body was a stack of the pigeons. A crate of them sat on the ground. The boy tried to get another into the air right after the first so there were two sailing through the air at the same time. Only then would the gunner, Sloane, raise his shotgun, the motion a swift smooth upswing as his body remained still but seemed to crouch and spring forward at the same time. The pigeons were thin black slices in the sky until hit and then they blew apart in a scatter of fragments. Jamie sat watching. There was a clear satisfaction in it, he could see. He’d thought it would be the sound of the gun but as he watched he guessed that Sloane didn’t even hear that. It was the spattered clay he was tuned to.

Sloane shot with a thoroughness, a tenacity of spirit and concentration evident even from this small distance that Jamie recognized immediately. It was the calm certitude of a man centered exactly in the world, one whose shoes owned each piece of ground they fell upon. The clay pigeons that broke apart were not so much appreciated as expected. The others, those few that fell in a long glide into the grass, were dismissed, not worried over. Not as if they hadn’t existed but simply they were gone. He was moving along to the next set, ready for them, the double-gun broken open and the brass and paper cartridges ejected still trailing smoke to land in a litter of other shells behind him as he slipped two new shells into the gun and then held it, ready before him, up against his chest, alert and relaxed. Jamie sat smoking, the tobacco mixed with the sweet-bitter waft of burnt powder from the shot-shells.