Читать книгу The Long Rifle - Stewart Edward White - Страница 9
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ОглавлениеBut they had not proceeded far in the direction the young lady rather vaguely indicated before they were met by her grandfather, out in anxious search for her. When he had learned, partly from the child, partly from the young stranger, an inkling of what had happened, he expressed his relief. The expedition had been her own fancy.
“She would be better housed just now,” submitted the young man. “Nobody rightly would mean to harm her; but men git rough in drink.”
“She got away,” agreed the gunsmith, “and I am obliged to you for your trouble. You’re in town for the Shooting, I suppose,” glancing with professional interest at the stranger’s weapon.
“No, suh,” the young man denied, “just travelin’ through. I am from South Branch since sun-up and knew nought of the Shooting.”
“Where are you stopping for the night?”
“Nowhere as yit; I aim to stop at the tavern.”
“But man alive, you’ll find no place there!” cried the old man. “Every nook and cranny is filled long since.” He stopped abruptly, considered for a moment. “You must stay at my house,” he decided, “Nay, I insist.”
But his urgency was unnecessary. The young man accepted the proffer as simply as, it might be conceived, he would have accepted the good cheer of a dry cave in the wilderness. He deposited the woolly dog on the ground.
“Which way, suh?” he enquired.
The four proceeded down the earth road toward the canal. The little girl prattled eagerly at her grandfather about the horrid Tiger and his attempt at canicide. The stranger moved in his serene silence. Shortly they arrived at a rambling sort of structure, or series of structures attached one to the other. A small mill wheel indicated that the greater group of these were used as a manufacturing plant. The old man unlocked the door of a smaller wing and led the way to a cool interior of plain old polished wood, diamond-shaped panes, a dark table, a great fireplace, two benches, and a number of easy chairs. Ornament there was none, unless a score or more of guns slung on pegs about the walls might be so considered.
“Sit, lad, sit!” urged the old man, thrusting forward one of the chairs. “South Branch is distant and even young limbs must weary.”
“I am obleeged to you, suh,” acknowledged the youth. He deposited his rifle and portmanteau in a corner, removed his hat; perched himself upright and a little gingerly on the edge of one of the great chairs, his eye roving in deliberate scrutiny of his surroundings.
The old man hung his own three-cornered headpiece in the corner, disclosing the fact that he wore no wig. He was a small, compact old gentleman, with a stiff, upright brush of brown hair on a bullet head; and he moved with the swift darting certainty of a bird. His speech, too, was swift and darting and as voluble as that of his visitor was spare.
“My people are all abroad,” he observed. “There is no keeping them at their tasks, so perforce and with good grace I declared holiday. You must take cold cheer.”
He darted here and there, in and out a door on the right side of the fireplace, opening and shutting a cupboard on the left, clattering tankards and trenchers, with a continued buzz of movement like the sustained high hum of a bee. Behind it, as a bridge across to the hushed and aloof serenity of the room, a serenity into which the stranger had slipped as naturally as into a grateful and familiar element, beat the measured slow tick-tock, tick-tock of a tall clock in the corner.
“There!” cried the old man at last. “Draw up, young man! ’Tis but cold fare, but will suffice. I’ll warrant ye’ve done worse in your time! A venison pasty; good bread of rye; honest ale home-brewed, none of your raw spirits that is the drink of fools.”
“I am obleeged to you, suh,” said the young man, and unfolded his long frame from the great chair and took his place at the table.
“I have nought by which to name you,” Farrell reminded his guest as they sat.... “Don, eh? A good Scotch name, I warrant. Nay, fall to, lad, and use your mouth for more grateful work than talking.”
They ate; the stranger for most part in the calm silence that held no hint of awkwardness; the old man chattering as suggestively near to questioning as his notion of politeness permitted. The little girl, who had at first curled herself into another of the great chairs, at length slipped to the floor and sidled over to take her stand against the young man’s shoulder.
“I hope you hurt that old Tiger—when you kicked him,” said she.
“Leave her stay,” the stranger interfered to her grandfather’s admonition. “I like young-uns. There’s been a plenty of ’em in my raisin’.” A slow grave smile sketched his lips, and he reached a strong finger to touch her ringleted head. “But we ain’t got no little ladies like this ’un,” he added. Beyond that he volunteered nothing about himself.
They finished the meal. The old man produced clay pipes and tobacco. But before joining his host in the great chairs before the fireplace the guest stretched his long legs, wandering about the room, examining attentively the weapons on the walls.
The old man watched him a moment, then arose to join him.
“You are interested in guns?” he asked.
“Yes, suh,” acknowledged the other. “You see,”—his manner almost implied an apology for intruding even so much of his personal intimacies—“we livin’ on the border use ’em a lot, what with shootin’ game and takin’ keer of ourselves like, when it comes to Injins and such.”
“You have fought Indians?” pounced the old man.
But the younger withdrew into vagueness.
“Injins is not bad folks in some ways,” he submitted. “I got good friends among the Injins. But a man must take keer of himself.”
“These guns are a sort of historical collection,” explained the gunmaker after a moment’s bright-eyed contemplation of his visitor. “I have tried to show how they have developed. See, here is an old match lock: and here a wheel lock. And this is a sample of the very first rifle with a straight-cut groove without a twist. And here is a bell-muzzle that shot slugs, or even stones.”
“They surely are a clumsy-lookin’ contraption,” marveled the young man. “A man wonders how they ever hit anything.”
“They didn’t—much.”
“Man has a hard enough time gettin’ along nowadays, what with shots that go wild even with good holdin’.” The visitor turned finally to the chairs and the pipes. “But it’s surely interestin’ to me, suh; and I am obleeged to you.”
He lighted his pipe thoughtfully; and somehow it became evident that he was slowly coming to a decision.
“I’m figurin’ on somethin’, suh,” he said at last. “You’re the first man I ever saw that made guns. I wouldn’t wish to ask too much of you, suh; but——”
“What is it, lad?” urged the old man.
“If it ain’t no secret, suh, how kin you make a true bar’l? Many a time I’ve figgered on it—if it ain’t no secret.”
“Come with me, lad,” he cried, eager with the master’s enthusiasm over his craft. He remembered the little girl.
“Time for your posset, child; and then to bed. She is already a good housewife,”—he turned proudly to his visitor—“and shall manage her own supper—and mine and yours for the matter of that—as well as any woman grown. Make your curtsy to Don here, and kiss your old gran’ther, and run along.”
He unlocked a door, and the two entered the long low workshop, now deserted for the holiday. Through the clutter of tools and half-finished pieces, he led the way to a rack on which were stacked broad flat bars of iron.
“Here are your barrels,” said he.
The young man knit his brows.
“You can’t bore no hole in such,” he objected.
The old man smiled.
“Certainly not,” he agreed. “Here,”—he exhibited a long slender rod. “That’s what we call the core rod. First we heat the flat bar to welding heat; then we fold it around the core rod, and weld it together; then we draw out the core rod. There’s your barrel with the hole in it. It is rough, of course,” he added.
“How come the core rod don’t stick?”
“We weld only a few inches at a heat, withdrawing the rod each time, but even then on occasion it will not come away.” The old man sighed. “Then we must cut it out with a cold chisel or throw it away. Next, of course, we smooth the new barrel as much as possible. Have to do that with a hammer for the outside and a hand reamer for the inside, like a carpenter bores in wood.”
“Cain’t you use a lathe?” asked the young man keenly.
“Doesn’t run steady enough.”
“Can you get her straight that way by eye?”
“Pretty good. But look here.” The gunsmith picked up a half-finished barrel from the bench and took down a long hickory bow from a nail on the wall. It was precisely like a bow used as a weapon, except that it was lighter, and its cord was but a fine silk thread. Farrell loosed one end of the thread, dropped it carefully through the barrel, and again attached it to the bow. He held the barrel to the light. “Look through it,” he commanded. “Look at the shadow of the thread and you can see where it does not touch. That means a crooked place. We’ve got to straighten that out by tapping with a light hammer.”
The young man turned his face slowly in admiration of this ingenuity.
“Always begin straightening in the middle of the barrel,” chortled the old man, delighted. “Chase the rascals out at the ends!” he cried.
The stranger shook his head.
“I’d sure hate to try to do it, suh,” he submitted.
“It’s as easy for me to take a kink out of a barrel as it is for you to make shavings off a pine stick with a sharp knife!” the gunsmith boasted.
His visitor turned the barrel slowly over and over, examining mentally the problem rather than physically the thing he held in his hand.
“Yes, suh,” he said at last.
“Here,” said Farrell, leading the way to a long low bench, “is the most important part of all. Here’s where we cut the grooves for the rifling.”
“I do admire to see that!” cried the young man with an approach to eagerness.
He saw a long cherry wood cylinder of four or five inches in diameter in the surface of which had been cut four deep grooves that ran in a long spiral about the cylinder. They resembled the grooves in a rifle barrel, except that in this case, of course, they were on the outside. The cylinder was suspended in a framework. Midway in the framework had been fixed rigidly and immovably four projecting nubs that fitted into and engaged the four grooves. So if one were to push the cylinder forward on its carriage past the nubs, it must revolve at the rate and the pitch determined by the grooves in it.
“And that,” explained Farrell, “is exactly the rate and pitch of the rifling we want in our barrel. All we’ve got to do is clamp our barrel in exact line, hitch our groove-cutting tool rigidly on the end of the wooden cylinder, and it is bound to cut grooves exactly the same as those in the cylinder. See?”
His visitor shoved the simple contrivance back and forth a number of times, noting the slow turn along the rifled guiding groove.
“Well,” he sighed at last, “that is ce’tainly a smart trick. I’ll remember that. How long mout it take you, now, to rifle a bar’l?”
“Takes about a hundred cuts to cut a groove—about two hours,” replied Farrell. “Then she needs polishing and smoothing. We use lead plugs for that mostly.”
They proceeded slowly. Excited by his guest’s intelligent appreciation the old gunmaker expanded. He showed how the new barrels were plugged at one end of the tube, and how they were then browned by a mixture of aqua fortis, blue vitriol, tincture of iron, and water. In sketchy pantomime the old man demonstrated how the locks were constructed and applied. At the woodworking bench he paused for but a moment.
“Curly maple, that’s the wood,” he stated dogmatically, “and you want to work her by hand. And stain her by hand with good honest soot and oil. Then you’ve got a job.”
They returned to the living room. The young man picked up his own rifle, which he examined gravely in the light of new knowledge. Farrell stood at his elbow.
“I see you have one of Martin Meylan’s,” he observed. “Like it?”
“She holds her own,” replied the young man, noncommittally.
“What you done to the trigger guard?”
The stranger smiled his slow smile, in modest deprecation.
“I expect I’m wrong, suh,” said he. “I expect they’s a right good reason why all the gunsmiths do thisaway and not thataway; and I expect they must be right. But just for me, suh—in my own use, this trigger guard suits me better.”
“Made it yourself, eh?”
“Yes, suh. ’Tain’t much of a trigger guard f’r looks; but it suits me better.”
“Humph!” grunted the gunmaker, setting the weapon into the corner again, and leading the way to the pipes and chairs.
“I mean no offense, suh,” said the visitor. “It’s just my own idee for myself.”
“Offense!” snorted the old man. “But you’re right, lad! Do you know why every gunmaker in the Colonies puts that foolish, cumbersome, fragile trigger guard on every gun he turns out? Simply because that is the kind they put on guns in Europe! No other reason! God knows why they wanted that kind there—thought ’em pretty, I suppose. Same way with a lot of other things. Gunmakers are pig-headed fools. They listen to no reason, but sit puffed in the arrogance of their self-conceit like toads; crying down those who——”
He had arisen and was waving about his long pipe; but, catching the expression of honest bewilderment on his guest’s face, he broke off in a calm as startling as his excitement, and sat down again abruptly.
“Tell me, lad,” said he persuasively. “You spoke but now with a lukewarm indifference of the quality of your piece. What is its fault? And why procure ye none more to your fancy, since, as you say, your life may depend on it? Is the barrel not true, then? Perhaps we might remedy that.”
“You mistake me, suh,” the young man assured him earnestly. “The bar’l is true and finely made.”
“It should be. Meylan is a gunsmith of reputation.”
“I would not have you think otherwise. I but spoke aloud an idle thought. I know nought of these things, and would not set my poor notions against the experience of my worshipful masters.”
“Worshipful fiddlesticks!” exploded the old man. “Did I not tell ye, lad, that gunmakers are pig-headed fools, copying slavishly what is patterned for them in Europe and listening to no reason, but sunning themselves in arrogance? Come lad! your ideas?”
“They are without doubt impossible, suh; for I have no understanding of the craft.”
“Perhaps, perhaps!” Farrell waved this aside. “But let us pretend there is no impossible. I would know your ideas, lad! Speak them freely.”
“Well, suh, I would have a piece that used not so much good powder and lead, for powder and lead are hard to come at in the wilderness, and it has seemed to me that a well-placed ball will do its work——”
“Even a smaller ball,” supplied the gunsmith. “There is nought of impossibility there; only common sense. Do you know the reason—the only reason—why all men contrive to use these great slugs? Because in Europe they know little of well-placed balls, and care less; because their only idea is to hit a regiment of men. And then?”
“Well, suh, a longer bar’l would suit me better, and I think most men who range the forests.”
“Why?” snapped the old man.
“For better sighting. The woods are dark, and if a man would hold true in twilight, he must have his front sight far from his eye.”
“That is true, too. And there is nought impossible there—save that gunmakers are a pig-headed lot. And then?”
For the first time the young man chuckled aloud.
“Yere is where we touch the impossible, suh; for as long as I’m a-dreaming I will tell the whole. I would have a piece that would place the ball truer to where I hold, so that when I drawed my bead and pressed my trigger true I would find my ball where my eye had rested.”
“And you do not? You think you can hold truer than your ball can speed?”
“So can any good man,” submitted the youth modestly, but with entire confidence, “for be yore bar’l never so truly made, and load yore piece never so carefully with the best of French powder and priming of the finest grain, cast you yore balls never so cunningly, nevertheless it may so hap that it strays, and no man can tell when this will befall.”
“Why is this, in your opinion?”
“Nay, that I cannot guess,” replied the young man good-humoredly. “It is, I must suppose, in the natur’ of things and we must bear with it.”
The old man hesitated, weighing a decision.
“Nevertheless even that might be compassed, in my belief,” he said at last.
“Anon?” queried the other.
The old man leaned forward excitedly.
“Can you guard a secret?” he demanded.
“Yes, suh,” said the young man gravely.
The gunsmith arose and left the room, to return after a moment bearing a rifle. This he withheld for a moment; then, as though finally making up his mind, he passed it into his visitor’s hands and stood back in silence. It was a graceful weapon, strong without clumsiness, its octagon barrel nearly three feet and a half long, but so light that it would probably not have tipped the beam at over eight or nine pounds. Its stock of polished curly maple extended its full length and was gracefully carved; its trigger guard was small and compact. Beneath the barrel rings of brass held a long hickory ramrod. In the side of the butt-stock opened a brass-covered trap. The lock was small, compact, about half the size of that on the usual arm of the day, and the clean small flint was held in leathered jaws.
“There’s your long barrel, and your spread of sights”—the old man could not keep silence long—“and your small strong trigger guard. There’s your smaller bore. The balls run fifty-two to the pound instead of a score or less—you can carry three times the ammunition. The lock is as swift in action as a flash of light. See how smoothly the flint meets the frizzen! Throw it to your face, man! Held you ever so sweet a balance, or one that steadied itself so in the hand?”
The young man obeyed, and the extended muzzle of the long weapon came to the immobility of a rock.
“What say you?” urged the gunmaker, surveying his visitor’s stance and handling with approval, but shifting from one foot to the other with an impatience ludicrously like that of a small boy.
“It is a sweet piece,” sighed the visitor, lowering it at last. “A sweet piece, such as I never thought to hold atween my hands.” He examined its details keenly. “I think, suh, if you don’t mind my sayin’ it, that you will have to make you another loadin’ rod of iron.”
“Hickory makes quieter loading.”
“I know. But forcin’ the ball down the bar’l is rough work, and a broken rod——”
The old man for the moment did not meet this issue.
“Is it not such a piece as you have dreamed?” he insisted. “Such as you described to me but now?”
The youth smiled a slow gleam of humor.
“All but one thing,” he reminded.
It was Farrell’s turn to look his inquiry.
“These things you have yere,” explained the woodsman, “—and I do not deny they are a great leap ahead—all these things are but aids to a man’s holdin’! But they do not place the ball.”
“Aha, lad!” the old gunmaker burst forth in a triumph for which it was now evident he had waited not too patiently. “That too I have compassed.” He placed his finger alongside his nose with a comical air of cunning. “Tell me, lad, what causes the ball to stray, when, as you say, the holding is good?”
“Nay, suh,” replied the other, “how could I tell you that? It is, as I have said, in the natur’ of things.”
“Then I will e’en tell you! The first of these causes is a fouled and thereby roughened barrel.”
The young man nodded acquiescence.
“That is true, in my own knowledge,” he admitted, “so that, when time serves, I wipe out my piece very carefully after each shot.”
“You can clean away thus the hard ash of burned powder,” Farrell told him, “but you cannot thus remove the lead that is stripped from the ball flake by flake until the smoothness of the barrel is gone. The second reason is married with the third, and both have as parent the fit of the ball in the barrel. For if it sets not snugly in the grooves the force of the powder in great part leaps past it and is lost; and if it does fit snugly then it must be hammered home by force, and is thereby upset and malformed, no matter how shrewdly and gingerly one handles his rod. And a malformed bullet cannot fly straight.”
“That is very interesting to me, suh,” said the young man, “and part of it I had suspected, but not all. But I can see no cure.”
“Here,” proffered Farrell, “are the balls for this rifle.”
The visitor took one of them in his fingers and examined it without comment.
“You see no difference from any ordinary bullet, save for the size. You are right: there is no difference. But look!” He dropped the butt of the rifle to the floor and inserted one of the bullets into its muzzle. In ordinary loading it was customary to drive the ball several inches into the barrel by means of a short metal rod and a small hammer called a “starter,” after which it was forced home with the ramrod. In this instance, when the old man relinquished it, the ball dropped down the barrel freely, and as he reversed the muzzle it rolled slowly out again into his palm. He made no explanation, but looked expectantly toward his visitor. The latter knit his brows, knowing some comment was awaited.
“If you aim to hold it in with wadding atop,” he submitted at last, “I have tried that, and it flies wild as a hawk.”
“Every child knows that—has tried that!”
“Yes, suh,” agreed the stranger, “but it was all I could think of.”
“Now I am going to show you something. And this is what you must keep secret. You must not tell a soul of what you are to see. Remember!”
“I have passed you my word, suh,” stated the young man with a quiet dignity.
The old gunmaker paused in his tremendous inner excitement long enough to pat the other hastily on the shoulder.
“No offense, my lad; I trust ye,” said he. “Now see.” He opened the brass trap in the side of the stock and from it took a piece of greased linen cloth cut in a round a little less in size than a half-dollar. This he stretched across the muzzle of the gun, covering with it the hole of the bore. Next he laid the bullet atop and pressed it into the aperture with his thumb.
“We are supposing we have charged the piece with powder,” he explained. “Here,” he forced the ramrod into the visitor’s hands. “Push her home, lad!”
The young man, with the grace of long accustomedness, swung the butt of the weapon to the left and in front and at the same time inserted the tip of the ramrod into the bore and applied strongly the thrust of his right arm. An expression of surprise crossed his face.
“She slides slick and smooth as a greased shoat through a cornfield!” he marveled.
“And she stays there,” supplemented the old man, snatching the rifle, turning it upside down, and striking the butt sharply by way of demonstration. “Is not that quicker than the old way? And quieter? And need ye fear now that the hickory rod will break? And mark you: each new loading wipes away the burnt powder of the last shot, so that the barrel is ever clean. And the ball is left true and round as it came from the mould. And no lead strips from it to the barrel. And the linen patch, filling well all space within, lets not the force of the powder by. So there are your reasons for wild flight all answered!”
But the visitor was not wholly satisfied.
“And the ball still takes the twist of the grooves when the naked lead touches them not?” he commented doubtfully. “How can that be?”
The old man paused in his task, which was of abstracting the bullet by means of a screw worm which he had attached to the end of the rod.
“Nay, lad: that I cannot tell you. I have thought much on it. It must be, as you say, in the nature of things. But it does.”
The youth pondered in his slow and deliberate fashion.
“And the ball flies true?” he asked at length. “I do not doubt you, suh,” he hastened to add, “but I mind me my father’s sayin’; for when one showed him a piece and boasted of the hang of its stock and the prettiness of its carvings and the smooth dark brown of its bar’l, and the cunning of its make, he always said, ‘Yes, she’s purty, but she ain’t worth a damn unless she shoots straight. Let’s try her.’ No offense, suh; but have you tried her?”
“I’ve shot her,” replied the gunsmith briefly. He broke off; but was compelled to answer the other’s waiting. “I can make a gun,” he continued in gruff tone, “but I cannot hold one true. A slight palsy—a shaking of the hand. But,” his voice rose to a vehemence almost of hysteria, “I’ll stake my life that I am right, sneer and laugh these other pig-headed fools as they may! They know nought but what their fathers have told them; and their conceit is such. But they will sing a different tune. Fools! pig-headed fools!” He fumed, walking up and down with quick uneven steps. Abruptly he came to a halt before his visitor. “Would you credit it,” he resumed in a quieter and more reasonable voice, “when, as a brother craftsman, I sought to share the workings of my mind; when I strove to discuss reasonably the things we have discussed so reasonably here—and you are an intelligent lad, Don, with more sense in your noodle than all of them together—when I would have spoken of the need for a rifle fitted to American rather than European hands, I was set aside as one sets aside a presumptuous urchin and rebuked for conceiting myself wiser than the masters!” He snorted, and again changed his mood.
“But to-morrow!” He chuckled, and again laid his finger alongside his nose. “You must linger to-morrow, lad; you are welcome here. To-morrow you shall see.”
“You will shoot the piece in to-morrow’s match?”
“Not I. But I forget: you are a stranger here, and perchance know not the significance of to-morrow. Know then that this is no ordinary shooting; but is an event to which once each year all gunmakers bring their best and truest pieces to the trial; so that he whose rifle carries away the palm is winner of the golden medal of the craft, so that all men come to him, and his business gains great increase and himself reputation.”
“But, suh,” suggested the young man diffidently, “you yourself but now said——”
“That I cannot hold true,” agreed the other. “But it is an article of the contest that the maker of the piece may engage another to stand for him: and for that reason it is customary in the craft to bespeak skilled men to shoot for them at the butts. Few gunmakers test their own rifles. And I—” he chuckled again, and rubbed his hands together—“I have been beforehand, and have compacted with John Gladden of whom even in the borders you may have heard.”
“His name has reached my ears,” acknowledged the young man. “I should greatly admire, suh, to see so notable a marksman perform.”
“You shall!” cried the gunmaker. “You shall! To-morrow! And with the best shooter and the best rifle in the colonies it shall go hard if I do not thrust their sneers adown their very throats! And I’ll tell you this ...”
The tall clock in the corner clucked in its throat, hesitated, then struck solemnly. The young man glanced up startled at the level shafts of light.
“Yore pardon, suh, for interruptin’ you,” he cried. “But I must be excused. I have made a promise which I am tardy in fulfilling. It will not take me long, and I beg you to be patient, for I would hear more of these things on my return.”
So saying, he snatched up his hat and hastened from the room.
