Read Nothing In Her Way for Free Online Page B

hundred. It costs more.”
    I winced and shook my head. “I’ll take the little one.”
    “Sure thing,” he said, a little disappointed. “I guess you’re right. This other one’s too much gun unless you really got the fever.”
    I bought a box of .22 rifle ammunition, and as I started to leave, he said, “You can tell a jack from a cottontail, can’t you? I mean, you got to have a license to hunt cottontails.”
    “Oh, certainly,” I said. “I can distinguish them. Jack rabbits have longer ears.”
    When I was out on the sidewalk I shot a quick glance through the window. He was talking to another clerk and laughing.
    I went out that afternoon with the rifle. Not too far from the highway I set up a rusty can for a target and shot at it for a while. Then I went for a walk, circling toward the dunes. When I came in I had two more boxes of sand in my coat pocket. I wrapped and addressed them in the cabin, exactly as I had before, and took them down to the post office the next morning.
    I kept it up all the rest of the week. I spent most of every day wandering around in the dunes, carrying the gun and a little canteen of water, and when I came in I’d have the boxes of sand in the pocket of my coat. The next morning I’d mail them. On Thursday I deliberately skipped going to the post office, and on Friday I mailed five.
    The rifle and jack-rabbit idea was a good one. They couldn’t help wondering what kind of screwball it was who didn’t have anything better to do than hunt jack rabbits. And from there it was only one jump to wondering what kind of stupid screwball it was who’d hunt for them in the only place in the county where there weren’t any. There was no life of any kind in the sand dunes.
    And there was one other angle to it. Goodwin belonged to a rifle club.
    * * *
    I had already located the rifle range. It was about a mile south of town, on a dirt road going toward the border. I went by it a couple of afternoons during my walks, but there was nobody shooting. I had an idea, though, there would be on Saturday or Sunday.
    By the time Saturday came I was so full of the fact that I was going to see her that night that I had a hard time concentrating on anything. I went to the post office and mailed the two boxes. This time the clerk stared at me curiously, and when I went out two of the loafers who had been talking near the door broke off abruptly and fell into an awkward silence as I walked past. Somebody had begun to wonder if I was sending my laundry home a sock at a time.
    After lunch I took the gun and started east of town on the highway, swung off it before I got to the dunes, and circled toward the rifle range. Before I got there I could hear the big rifles. It was an open flat with a low ridge about four hundred yards behind it to stop the lead. As I came across the road I could see there were four of them taking turns on the firing line, shooting at a two-hundred-yard target. They had a spotting scope set up to check the shots.
    When I got near enough to see them, I knew I was in luck. One of them was Goodwin. Another was the clerk from the hardware store. I didn’t know the other two. I sat down on the ground well back out of the way and just watched, smoking a cigarette.
    The clerk looked back after a while, and when he recognized me he grinned. “Got any jacks yet?” he asked.
    “Not a one,” I said. “Can’t seem to hit them.”
    “They’re tricky.”
    He came over in a few minutes and asked for a light. “Your name’s Reichert, isn’t it?”
    “That’s right,” I said.
    “Mine’s Carson.”
    I got up and we shook hands. He called to Goodwin, who wasn’t shooting at the moment. “Hey, Howard, why don’t you let Reichert here shoot that bull gun once? I’m trying to sell him a rifle.”
    Goodwin came over and I shook hands with him, keeping my face still. It wasn’t easy. There’s a lot of Spanish blood in the family.
    He was very pleasant, and there was a quiet sort of