Dave Saunders, a black seventeen-year-old living with his family in the American South around the 1930s, is frustrated because the other, older workers always talk down to him. He believes that if he could just get a gun for himself, he’d prove his manhood and earn their respect. He goes down to the local store owned by Joe and asks to see a catalog that, among other things, sells guns. Joe lends him the catalog, but adds that he has a gun that Dave can purchase for two dollars.
Dave goes back to his family’s house, thinking about how to get the money he needs to buy the gun. He knows better than to ask his father, Bob Saunders, who’s liable to at minimum threaten a beating at such a question. Instead, after his mother, Dave goes to his mother, Mrs. Saunders. While she is reluctant to give Dave money to buy the gun—and she actually collects his earnings from his work on Jim Hawkins’s farm because she doesn’t trust him with money—eventually she gives in after Dave makes the argument that his father deserves to have a gun and that he’ll give the gun to his father right after purchasing it.
Once he has the money, Dave buys the gun. Rather than give it to his father, though, he lies to his mother about having hidden it, and then sleeps with the loaded gun under his pillow. The next day, when Dave goes out into the field to perform his usual work, he hides the gun by strapping it to his thigh and takes it with him. As he goes out into the field to work, he takes Mr. Hawkins mule, Jenny, with him. He goes out to the farthest field, where he thinks he’ll be able to practice shooting the gun without anyone bothering him. But when he does eventually fire the gun, he closes his eyes and ends up accidentally shooting the mule.
Dave is distraught and frantically tries to stop the bleeding. But Jenny soon collapses and dies. Dave buries the gun by a tree and leaves the scene, trying to make up with a story to explain how the mule died that leaves the gun out of it. Later that day, someone finds the mule’s body and a group gathers around it. When Jim Hawkins asks Dave to explain what happened, Dave lies and says that Jenny tripped and impaled herself on a plough. Nobody believes the story, and soon one of the gathered men comments that the wound looks like a bullet hole. Mrs. Saunders quietly asks Dave about the gun, and urges him to tell the truth. Now crying, Dave confesses.
Dave’s father is furious, and promises to beat Dave for what he’s done. He also promises Mr. Hawkins that Dave will make things better. Mr. Hawkins decides that it would be best if Dave pays him back for the dead mule at a monthly rate to come out of his salary—$2 a month until he has covered a full $50. He asks Dave to sell the gun to make the first payment, but Dave lies and says he already threw it in a creek. His father, even angrier, tells him to find the gun, get the $2 he paid for it, and give it to Mr. Hawkins.
That night, Dave can’t sleep. He is upset at what happened, and afraid of the beating his father will give him. He sneaks out of the house, retrieves the gun from where he had buried it, and fires it again, this time making sure to keep his eyes open. He fires it four times, until the chamber is empty. He heads back across the field, until he is nearby Mr. Hawkins house, and thinks about how, if he had one more bullet, he’d fire at the house to prove he was a man.
He hears a train in the distance, and thinks about having to pay two dollars a month for so long. Keeping the empty gun with him, he hops onto a moving train, riding it off to somewhere where he could be a man.
