No one had hit the centre of the white circle yet. Mike pulled the trigger. Bang-All banged, and the bullet zipped straight through the bull‘s-eye.

People whistled in surprise, but one man said, "I’ll bet you can‘t do that again, Sonny."

Mike blew the smoke from the muzzle of Bang-All. "I paid for five shots," he said, "and I’ll drive every bullet right on top of the other, even with a blindfold on. For I can outshoot, out-thunder, and out-lick any man, mountain lion, or war-whooping redskin this side of the Alleghenies, and the other side too."

"Move the target back!" somebody yelled.

The target was moved so far off that some of the older people in the crowd started hunting for spyglasses in order to see it. Mike whipped his second bullet through the heart of the target. He sent his third bullet whamming in on top of the one before. When he had hit the bull‘s-eye five times, the rest of the marksmen decided they might as well go home and take up knitting.

Mike went home, too, lugging five quarters of beef with him. The Fink family had enough chops and roasts for a whole winter, even though Mike could eat a dozen steaks all by himself for breakfast.

At other shooting contests after that, the rival sharpshooters would give Mike a quarter of beef beforehand if he would promise not to take part. So Mike had to be satisfied with roaming in the woods, scouting for Indians. He wanted to join George Washington‘s army and fight the English in the American Revolution, but he was still too young to be a soldier.

With plenty of free meat, plus hominy and fried cornmeal, and buckets of molasses, Mike grew stronger than ever, though he never grew overly tall. When he was seventeen, he started hanging around the river docks in Pittsburgh, watching the boats. There were barges and keelboats, flatboats and Indian canoes, and a few ships left over from the Revolutionary Navy. Some craft carried cargoes of flour, cloth, lumber, and nails. Some carried people and livestock from one town to another, for there were not many roads through the wilderness then.