"So it can be approached," Grant said. "It has been approached. It has not been taken. Judges will walk the lane after each shooter. The plate will be inspected. What is written down will be what was seen at the plate, not what was hoped for at the line. If there is any dispute, Chief Hargrove's word on inspection is final."
At the mention of the name, a few heads turned toward the far end of the officials' table, where an empty chair sat in the shade with a water bottle sweating beside it. Chief Walter Hargrove had not yet taken his place. He was said to be coming down from the county office, where he had been signing something; he was said, by other people, to be already somewhere on the ground, unnoticed, watching how the morning set itself before he allowed it to know he was watching. Willa had known him, in the distant way everyone at a range knows its old men, since she was tall enough to carry an empty case with both hands, and she still did not know which of those stories to believe on any given day.
"What I will ask of you," Grant said, to the crowd, "is quiet when a shooter is at the line. Not quiet for me. My feelings will survive. Quiet because standing is honest work and honest work deserves a fair hearing."
He looked, then, along the shooters, and his eyes found each of them in turn without lingering and without mercy, and found Willa last, and did not linger on her either, for which she was grateful in a way she would not have been able to explain to Danny, who believed that being looked at for a long time was the natural reward of being good at something.
"Ronnie Ayres," Grant called. "To the line when you are ready."
Ronnie Ayres was fifty-two, a feed-store manager with a sunburned neck and a way of settling himself that reminded Willa of a man easing into cold water. He shot standing the way he did most things, without display and without hurry, and his five shots made the small, far sound that the crowd had come to know, a flat report and then, sometimes, the answering note of the plate, so distant and so thin that you wondered if you had heard it or only wanted to. When he lowered the rifle his shoulders rose and fell once, hard. The judges went down the lane in the little electric cart that nobody was allowed to find funny after ten in the morning, and they came back with his card, and Grant read it without expression. Three on the plate. One low. One away. Ronnie nodded as if the card had confirmed something private, and went back behind the line, and his wife handed him a bottle of water and did not say it would be next year, because they had said next year to each other for nine years and had learned to say other things instead.
Pete was younger, all elbows and confidence, and he shot too quickly, and the range knew it before he did. His first shot struck, and the small success loosened him in exactly the wrong way; by the fourth his rifle was moving in the visible, swimming circles that every standing shooter dreads and every watching shooter recognises with a sympathy they would never offer out loud. Two on. Three away. He came off the line grinning in a fixed way and saying, to nobody in particular, that the heat had got into the scope, and Danny Mercer, who was sitting on an equipment case with his own rifle across his knees, said, "It does that, man. It does that," in a tone so kind that only someone who had never needed kindness at a firing line could have missed the edge on it.
The older man from the county over shot third, and he was the one the old hands had been watching. He had a stillness about him that could not be taught after a certain age, only earned or not earned, and for his first three shots the plate answered each time, clean and far. The crowd, which loved a story even more than it loved a favourite, began to transfer its hopes to him in a warm, disloyal rush. His fourth shot went away into the sand, raising nothing, not even dust that anyone could swear to, and a sound went through the line that was half sympathy and half relief. His fifth was on the plate, low and left. Four on, none near the centre in any way that would make the judges walk more slowly. He shook Grant's hand. He shook Ronnie's hand. He did not look at Danny, and he did not look at Willa, and Willa understood that, too; there came a point in a final when looking at the people still waiting was a kind of expenditure, and a man who had just spent himself had nothing left to be generous with.
"That leaves two cards," Grant said, when the lane was clear and the plate, inspected and confirmed, stood alone again in the sand, leaning very slightly, indifferent as an animal that has been looked at all its life. "Danny Mercer. Defending finalist. And Willa Callen."
He read the names in the order the draw had made, which put Danny to shoot fourth, but for a moment the order did not matter, because the crowd heard the two names together and made of them the story it had come for. Willa could feel it happen. She could feel herself become, in a hundred minds at once, not a score waiting to be shot but an ending waiting to be chosen. Either the champion would hold, which was the story the banners and the broadcast phones wanted, or he would be beaten by the instructor's daughter, which was the story the other half of the crowd wanted, the half that had already begun to take her side loudly and possessively, as if taking her side were the same thing as knowing her.