Читать книгу The Lost Diary of Annie Oakley’s Wild West Stagehand - Clive Dickinson - Страница 7

Goodbye Louisville, it’s been nice seeing you – but it’s even nicer having time for a real good talk with Annie and Frank, seeing as how I’m going to be looking after Annie and her guns from now on.

She’s so excited, you’d think she was a little girl on her first trip away from home. Come to think of it, that’s just what she looks like.

Frank’s kind of quiet. He stays in the background and lets Annie do the talking, but they’re a good team. Folks say he’s a crack shot too. In fact he and Annie met at a shooting match. Frank was an unbeaten champion then, and Annie was just Annie Moses from a small town called Greenville, in Darke County, Ohio. But folks there reckoned Annie “could shoot a little”, and she won that match fair and square.

Frank Butler was a beaten man in more ways than one that day. It wasn’t long before they were married and started appearing in a shooting act called Butler and Oakley.

Why Oakley? Annie says she liked the name and it sounded good. You can’t argue with that, and I’ve a hunch that some day the name Annie Oakley’s going to be famous everywhere.

Annie ain’t had an easy life, that’s for sure. She started shooting when she was just a little girl, so the family could have enough to eat. Soon she was selling the game she shot and earning good money.

Owners of fancy hotels liked her game, because there was never any gunshot in the meat. Annie was so accurate, she always killed the birds stone dead with a shot clean through the head.

Before long, she’d earned enough money to repay the loan on the family farm. Since she was a little girl, Annie ain’t never had a dollar she ain’t earned herself.

She’s had to work for those dollars, mind. Travelling from town to town with Frank, performing in music halls or circuses, staying in cheap hotels. That’s a hard way to make a living.

It’s hard too, when there are so many shooting acts around these days. Annie’s always been different. I guess that’s what makes her stand out. Other lady sharp-shooters dress up all fancy, but Annie dresses real neat and simple. She does all her own sewing, making her clothes, and decorating her dresses and blouses with coloured ribbon and pretty stitching. She ain’t nothing like folks imagine when they think of the Wild West – not till she picks up her guns, that is.

Other shooters, men and women, don’t always shoot fair either. They cheat and, because folks know they cheat, some think Annie cheats too, which ain’t right at all.

Frank told me the story of a faker he knew. This son-of-a-gun played a tune on a piano by shooting disks hanging from each piano key. That looked and sounded pretty smart until, halfway through the act, his gun jammed and he couldn’t shoot any more. The trouble was, the piano tune kept on playing! Down in the orchestra pit, his accomplice hadn’t seen what had happened and kept on thumping out the notes.