worked with him to make him a perfect shot and each year when he would take him and start on his speed he would start killing a six or eight out of ten. Then move to nine out of ten; hang there, and then move up to a twenty out of twenty only to be beaten by the luck that separated perfect shooters in the end.

He never showed his father the second story. It was not finished to his satisfaction at the end of vacation. He said he wanted to get it absolutely right before he showed it. As soon as he got it right he was going to send it to his father. He had had a very good vacation, he said, one of the best and he was glad he had such good reading too and he thanked his father for not pushing him too hard on the writing because after all a vacation is a vacation and this had been a fine one, maybe one of the very best, and they certainly had had some wonderful times they certainly had.

It was seven years later that his father read the prize-winning story again. It was in a book that he found in checking through some books in the boy’s old room. As soon as he saw it he knew where the story had come from. He remembered the long-ago feeling of familiarity. He turned through the pages and there it was, unchanged and with the same title, in a book of very good short stories by an Irish writer. The boy had copied it exactly from the book and used the original title.

In the last five of the seven years between the summer of the prize-winning story and the day his father ran onto the book the boy had done everything hateful and stupid that he could, his father thought. But it was because he was sick his father had told himself. His vileness came on from a sickness. He was all right until then. But that had all started a year or more after that last summer.

Now he knew that boy had never been any good. He had thought so often looking back on things. And it was sad to know that shooting did not mean a thing.

The End