Peppered

If anybody had even a passing thought that Austin's Harry Whittington would suffer the kind of mishap involved and that nobody would know about it, that person just plain doesn't know Austin, the most gossipy place on earth. There's plenty of news that doesn't appear in the local daily, but there's no news that isn't known to a circle of acquaintances, usually fairly large, because in Austin you may not know everybody or everything but the chances are excellent that you know people who know plenty about the people and things that you don't know about and rare is the person unwilling to send a juicy item on its way. The number of people in the shooting party is reported differently from source to source, but there seem to have been at least five: P. Willeford, H. Whittington, R. Cheney, K. Armstrong, and at least one person not named (is there another Armstrong sister?). That's not counting all the taxpayer-supplied Secret Service people, medical people, and the ambulance standing by and whatever hunt servants there may have been. Mr. Cheney is fortunate that it was a man, not a woman, and a peer or better and not a poor local person, and that he was using birdshot and not something more lethal There was a hospital transfer involved and also time in an intensive-care unit. There are jurisdictions where the hospital would have been required to report the incident to law-enforcement agencies and where sworn statements would have been required.