“It’s easy enough to throw a rock. Shooting a gun is entirely different.”

Joe Sharp ~ Shelling Corn One day Maria was working with some horses when shots drew her to the back of the fancy store. The old man was teaching Crisanto to fire a six shooter. This amused Maria very much, as Crisanto was inept at just about anything that required dexterity.

They’d set up bottles on a fence and Crisanto stood, one hand on his hip and the other pointing a big six shooter. He fired and missed, fired and missed, fired and missed. He was disgusted as he reloaded and Maria sauntered up beside him. She waited and let him fire and miss again before she picked up a rock and hurled it at one of his targets. She smashed it easily. He looked at her, humiliated, then turned his attention to the next bottle. He fired and missed. Maria threw again, shattering the next bottle.

“Maria, we’re going to run out of bottles.”

“Someone needs to break them.” She grinned.

“It’s easy enough to throw a rock. Shooting a gun is entirely different.”

She shrugged. “No it’s not.”

“It is.”

“No, it’s not.” She turned and ran to the church, retrieving her own gun. She nodded to Crisanto. “Go on, try again.”

He fired and missed. Maria fired and shattered the target. The boy turned and looked at the old man in disgust. It wasn’t the teacher, since the old man had taught Maria, too, at least rudimentarily. Maria could shoot a gun as naturally as she could throw a rock.

“How do you do that?”

Maria shrugged. “I just do it.”

He was completely frustrated now and fired wildly and too fast at the bottles, missing every one. He opened the gun and tore at the empty cartridge cases.

Maria smiled, “That’s even worse.”

“You do it, you’re so smart.”

She fired quickly and killed four more bottles. She deftly reloaded and fired again and killed five more. She looked behind them and spotted a rifle propped against the trough. “Oh, with a Winchester it’s even easier.”

She grabbed the rifle and began shooting again, this time shattering the pieces of the broken bottles until there was nothing more to kill down range.

“That’s a nice rifle.” She handed it to Crisanto and picked up her gun. She walked, a little too provocatively, back to the church and the shooting lesson was ended for the day. Maria's Trail