I picked up a guitar student in the mid-Sixties who was an ex-Marine, and when in the service he developed a taste for competitive pistol shooting. Sunday afternoons he and I used to go to the Seattle Police Athletic Association's range, burn a lot of powder, and try to blow holes in the exact center of rectangular pieces of paper at 25 yards. When the weather was good, we'd often go out to a gravel pit or some other isolated place with a good backstop and do murder to empty soft drink and beer cans (but we never mixed beer with shooting. Stupid! The beer came afterwards, when the guns were cleaned and put away.). A beer can full of water makes a most satisfying geyser when hit square on with a .45 ACP slug!

Loren, my friend, got married to a lovely young woman named Marcia. He got her interested in shooting also, and she got pretty good.

On one of our Sunday afternoon outings, we went to clearing in a wooded area just south of Issaquah, east of Lake Washington. It was just off the road, at the foot of a bluff that made a good backstop. Loren and Buzz Ross, another friend, were off to one side of the clearing, blazing away at targets they had set up. After putting most of a box of Canadian military surplus 9 mm. ammo through my Smith & Wesson Model 39 (Loren got a real deal on the ammo: Several thousand rounds at 3¢ a round. I bought a bunch off of him), I was leaning against Loren's car taking a breather and watching Marcia as she popped away at miscellaneous targets with Loren's .22 cal. Ruger Mark II. She had set up a row of water-filled cans on the remnants of what had once been a fence rail, but she wasn't shooting at them. She was saving them for later.

We were not the only ones who used this place as a shooting gallery. Two other guys were there, and they were also taking a breather and watching Marcia (who, in addition to being a very bright young woman and a crack-shot, was quite easy on the eyes). They were discussing various handguns in terms of difficulty to shoot—heavy recoil. They noted the .22 that Marcia was shooting and remarked that it was a good gun for a woman. Light recoil. "Probably about the heaviest gun a woman could handle would be a .38 Special," one of them pontificated, "but only if she had the proper training. Say, a police woman." "Right," said the other guy. "A woman could never handle a gun like a .45 auto," said the first guy. "Might sprain her wrist. Maybe even break it." "Right," said the other guy. They'd been going on like this for awhile. Two male chauvinist piglets.

Although she was concentrating on her shooting, Marcia overheard this conversation. Tendrils of steam began to emerge from her collar, but she retained her sweet smile. She fired the last round from the magazine of the Ruger, then came to where I stood. Behind me, on the hood of Loren's car, was the black attaché case where Loren kept his arsenal (James Bond movies, staring Sean Connery, were big about this time, and we all carried our arsenals in black attaché cases). She put the Ruger away and picked up Loren's Gold Cup target grade .45 automatic—a finely tuned version of the good old fashioned slab-sided 1911 A1 .45 caliber Army Colt Pistol. She filled a magazine with cartridges holding lead slugs about the size of loaves of bread, shoved the magazine into the grip, and returned to where she had been shooting. She pulled the slide back and released it to snap forward and chamber a round (a sound guaranteed to scare the crap out of a burglar!). She took the target-shooter's stance—erect, turned somewhat sideways, holding the pistol with one hand. She extended her arm, peered along the sights, and unleashed Hellfire at a row of water-filled soft drink cans. Cans leapt into the air, water exploded everywhere, and thunder echoed from the mountainsides.

Marcia returned to the car and put the Gold Cup away. As she leaned against the fender beside me, she smiled sweetly at the two guys. They just stood there with their mouths open and blinked.

Don Firth