“Yup, and a sweet little shooter she is, too. I knew it was yours when you started telling me about getting it for your birthday. Seeing as how it looks like we’ll be riding together for a while—at least until I teach you enough so’s you can make Oregon on your own—we’ll take a couple of days off and I’ll teach you to shoot it.”

“I can shoot,” Francis said.

“Well, maybe you can, and maybe you can’t. But just reading signs makes your story look thin.”

“What do you mean?” Francis asked.

“I mean if you really knew how to shoot that rifle, it wouldn’t have been seven Pawnees jumping you that day by the wagon train. It would only have been five, and maybe just four—and those four would have been thinking seriously about going home without you. That’s what I mean.”

———— Chapter Seven ————

“NO-AH, MR. TUCKET, that isn’t quite the way it’s done.”

It was the first time Mr. Grimes used the long, drawn-out negative answer to something Francis had messed up. But it wasn’t to be the last. In fact, he would use that long no, as Francis thought of it, about ten times to every short nod, which was the way the mountain man approved of anything.

It was the afternoon of the day Francis and Mr. Grimes had met at the stream. Francis had just loaded and fired his gun as instructed by Mr. Grimes. He felt that he’d done all right. A piece of wood more than thirty yards distant had turned to splinters with his shot. And it had been the piece of wood he was shooting at.

“What did I do wrong?” he asked. “I hit the piece of wood, didn’t I?” There was just a thin bit of annoyance in his voice.

Mr. Grimes smiled and hooked his right hand in back of his neck, stretching. “Well, now, that’s just about what everybody says—when they don’t know about rifles.” He mimicked Francis, “ ‘I hit the piece of wood, didn’t I?’ And yes, you did, Mr. Tucket. You hit the piece of wood. But how many times more can you hit it? Go ahead, load up and have at it. Pick another piece of wood out there and hit it for me, will you?”

Francis loaded, aimed, and fired at a buffalo chip about forty yards away. He missed. He tried twice more and missed both times.