Chapter 9

Rand found another car, a smoke-gray Plymouth coupé, standing on the left of his Lincoln when he went down to the garage. Running his car outside and down to the highway, he settled down to his regular style of driving--a barely legal fifty m.p.h., punctuated by bursts of absolutely felonious speed whenever he found an unobstructed straightaway. Entering Rosemont, he slowed and went through the underpass at the railroad tracks, speeding again when he was clear of the village. A few minutes later, he was turning into the crushed-limestone drive that led up to the buff-brick Gresham house.

A girl met him at the door, a cute little redhead in a red-striped dress, who gave him a smile that seemed to start on the bridge of her nose and lift her whole face up after it. She held out her hand to him.

“Colonel Rand!” she exclaimed. “I’ll bet you don’t remember me.”

“Sure I do. You’re Dot,” Rand said. “At least, I think you are; the last time I saw you, you were in pigtails. And you were only about so high.” He measured with his hand. “The last time I was here, you were away at school. You must be old enough to vote, by now.”

“I will, this fall,” she replied. “Come on in; you’re the first one here. Daddy hasn’t gotten back from town yet. He called and said he’d be delayed till about nine.” In the hall she took his hat and coat and guided him toward the parlor on the right.

“Oh, Mother!” she called. “Here’s Colonel Rand!”

Rand remembered Irene Gresham, too; an over-age dizzy blonde who was still living in the Flaming Youth era of the twenties. She was an extremely good egg; he liked her very much. After all, insisting upon remaining an F. Scott Fitzgerald character was a harmless and amusing foible, and it was no more than right that somebody should try to keep the bright banner of Jazz Age innocence flying in a grim and sullen world. He accepted a cigarette, shared the flame of his lighter with mother and daughter, and submitted to being gushed over.

“ ... and, honestly, Jeff, you get handsomer every year,” Irene Gresham rattled on. “Dot, doesn’t he look just like Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind? But then, of course, Jeff really is a Southerner, so...”

The doorbell interrupted this slight non sequitur. She broke off, rising.

“Sit still, Jeff; I’m just going to see who it is. You know, we’re down to only one servant now, and it seems as if it’s always her night off, or something. I don’t know, honestly, what I’m going to do...”

She hurried out of the room. Voices sounded in the hall; a man’s and a girl’s.

“That’s Pierre and Karen,” Dot said. “Let’s all go up in the gunroom, and wait for the others there.”

They went out to meet the newcomers. The man was a few inches shorter than Rand, with gray eyes that looked startlingly light against the dark brown of his face. He wasn’t using a cane, but he walked with a slight limp. Beside him was a slender girl, almost as tall as he was, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She wore a rust-brown sweater and a brown skirt, and low-heeled walking-shoes.

Irene Gresham went into the introductions, the newcomers shook hands with Rand and were advised that the style of address was “Jeff,” rather than “Colonel Rand,” and then Dot suggested going up to the gunroom. Irene Gresham said she’d stay downstairs; she’d have to let the others in.

“Have you seen this collection before?” Pierre Jarrett inquired as he and Rand went upstairs together.

“About two years ago,” Rand said. “Stephen had just gotten a cased dueling set by Wilkinson, then. From the Far West Hobby Shop, I think.”

“Oh, he’s gotten a lot of new stuff since then, and sold off about a dozen culls and duplicates,” the former Marine said. “I’ll show you what’s new, till the others come.”

They reached the head of the stairs and started down the hall to the gunroom, in the wing that projected out over the garage. Along the way, the girls detached themselves for nose-powdering.

Unlike the room at the Fleming home, Stephen Gresham’s gunroom had originally been something else--a nursery, or play-room, or party-room. There were windows on both long sides, which considerably reduced the available wall-space, and the situation wasn’t helped any by the fact that the collection was about thirty per cent long-arms. Things were pretty badly crowded; most of the rifles and muskets were in circular barracks-racks, away from the walls.

“Here, this one’s new since you were here,” Pierre said, picking a long musket from one of the racks and handing it to Rand. “How do you like this one?”

Rand took it and whistled appreciatively. “Real European matchlock; no, I never saw that. Looks like North Italian, say 1575 to about 1600.”

“That musket,” Pierre informed him, “came over on the Mayflower.”

“Really, or just a gag?” Rand asked. “It easily could have. The Mayflower Company bought their muskets in Holland, from some seventeenth-century forerunner of Bannerman’s, and Europe was full of muskets like this then, left over from the wars of the Holy Roman Empire and the French religious wars.”

“Yes; I suppose all their muskets were obsolete types for the period,” Pierre agreed. “Well, that’s a real Mayflower arm. Stephen has the documentation for it. It came from the Charles Winthrop Sawyer collection, and there were only three ownership changes between the last owner and the Mayflower Company. Stephen only paid a hundred dollars for it, too.”

“That was practically stealing,” Rand said. He carried the musket to the light and examined it closely. “Nice condition, too; I wouldn’t be afraid to fire this with a full charge, right now.” He handed the weapon back. “He didn’t lose a thing on that deal.”

“I should say not! I’d give him two hundred for it, any time. Even without the history, it’s worth that.”

“Who buys history, anyhow?” Rand wanted to know. “The fact that it came from the Sawyer collection adds more value to it than this Mayflower business. Past ownership by a recognized authority like Sawyer is a real guarantee of quality and authenticity. But history, documented or otherwise--hell, only yesterday I saw a pair of pistols with a wonderful three-hundred-and-fifty-year documented history. Only not a word of it was true; the pistols were made about twenty years ago.”

“Those wheel locks Fleming bought from Arnold Rivers?” Pierre asked. “God, wasn’t that a crime! I’ll bet Rivers bought himself a big drink when Lane Fleming was killed. Fleming was all set to hang Rivers’s scalp in his wigwam ... But with Stephen, the history does count for something. As you probably know, he collects arms-types that figured in American history. Well, he can prove that this individual musket was brought over by the Pilgrims, so he can be sure it’s an example of the type they used. But he’d sooner have a typical Pilgrim musket that never was within five thousand miles of Plymouth Rock than a non-typical arm brought over as a personal weapon by one of the Mayflower Company.”

“Oh, none of us are really interested in the individual history of collection weapons,” Rand said. “You show me a collection that’s full of known-history arms, and I’ll show you a collection that’s either full of junk or else cost three times what it’s worth. And you show me a collector who blows money on history, and nine times out of ten I’ll show you a collector who doesn’t know guns. I saw one such collection, once; every item had its history neatly written out on a tag and hung onto the trigger-guard. The owner thought that the patent-dates on Colts were model-dates, and the model-dates on French military arms were dates of fabrication.”

Pierre wrinkled his nose disgustedly. “God, I hate to see a collection all fouled up with tags hung on things!” he said. “Or stuck over with gummed labels; that’s even worse. Once in a while I get something with a label pasted on it, usually on the stock, and after I get it off, there’s a job getting the wood under it rubbed up to the same color as the rest of the stock.”

“Yes. I picked up a lovely little rifled flintlock pistol, once,” Rand said. “American; full-length curly-maple stock; really a Kentucky rifle in pistol form. Whoever had owned it before me had pasted a slip of paper on the underside of the stock, between the trigger-guard and the lower ramrod thimble, with a lot of crap, mostly erroneous, typed on it. It took me six months to remove the last traces of where that thing had been stuck on.”

“What do you collect, or don’t you specialize?”

“Pistols; I try to get the best possible specimens of the most important types, special emphasis on British arms after 1700 and American arms after 1800. What I’m interested in is the evolution of the pistol. I have a couple of wheel locks, to start with, and three miguelet-locks and an Italian snaphaunce. Then I have a few early flintlocks, and a number of mid-eighteenth-century types, and some late flintlocks and percussion types. And about twenty Colts, and so on through percussion revolvers and early cartridge types to some modern arms, including a few World War II arms.”

“I see; about the same idea Lane Fleming had,” Pierre said. “I collect personal combat-arms, firearms and edge-weapons. Arms that either influenced fighting techniques, or were developed to meet special combat conditions. From what you say, you’re mainly interested in the way firearms were designed and made; I’m interested in the conditions under which they were used. And Adam Trehearne, who’ll be here shortly, collects pistols and a few long-arms in wheel lock, proto-flintlock and early flintlock, to 1700. And Philip Cabot collects U.S. Martials, flintlock to automatic, and also enemy and Allied Army weapons from all our wars. And Colin MacBride collects nothing but Colts. Odd how a Scot, who’s only been in this country twenty years, should become interested in so distinctively American a type.”

“And I collect anything I can sell at a profit, from Chinese matchlocks to tommy-guns,” Karen Lawrence interjected, coming into the room with Dot Gresham.

Pierre grinned. “Karen is practically a unique specimen herself; the only general-antique dealer I’ve ever seen who doesn’t hate the sight of a gun-collector.”

“That’s only because I’m crazy enough to want to marry one,” the girl dealer replied. “Of all the miserly, unscrupulous, grasping characters...” She expressed a doubt that the average gun-collector would pay more than ten cents to see his Lord and Savior riding to hounds on a Bren-carrier. “They don’t give a hoot whose grandfather owned what, and if anything’s battered up a little, they don’t think it looks quaint, they think it looks lousy. And they’ve never heard of inflation; they think arms ought still to sell for the sort of prices they brought at the old Mark Field sale, back in 1911.”

“What were you looking at?” Dot asked Rand, then glanced at the musket in Pierre’s hands. “Oh, Priscilla.”

Karen laughed. “Dot not only knows everything in the collection; she knows it by name. Dot, show Colonel Rand Hester Prynne.”

“Hester coming up,” Gresham’s daughter said, catching another musket out of the same rack from which Pierre had gotten the matchlock and passing it over to Rand. He grasped the heavy piece, approving of the easy, instinctive way in which the girl had handled it. “Look on the barrel,” she told him. “On top, right at the breech.”

The gun was a flintlock, or rather, a dog-lock; sure enough, stamped on the breech was the big “A” of the Company of Workmen Armorers of London, the seventeenth-century gunmakers’ guild.

“That’s right,” he nodded. “That’s Hester Prynne, all right; the first American girl to make her letter.”

There were footsteps in the hall outside, and male voices.

“Adam and Colin,” Pierre recognized them before they entered.

Both men were past fifty. Colin MacBride was a six-foot black Highlander; black eyes, black hair, and a black weeping-willow mustache, from under which a stubby pipe jutted. Except when he emptied it of ashes and refilled it, it was a permanent fixture of his weather-beaten face. Trehearne was somewhat shorter, and fair; his sandy mustache, beginning to turn gray at the edges, was clipped to micrometric exactness.

They shook hands with Rand, who set Hester back in her place. Trehearne took the matchlock out of Pierre’s hands and looked at it wistfully.

“Some chaps have all the luck,” he commented. “What do you think of it, Mr. Rand?” Pierre, who had made the introductions, had respected the detective’s present civilian status. “Or don’t you collect long-arms?”

“I don’t collect them, but I’m interested in anything that’ll shoot. That’s a good one. Those things are scarce, too.”

“Yes. You’ll find a hundred wheel locks for every matchlock, and yet there must have been a hundred matchlocks made for every wheel lock.”

“Matchlocks were cheap, and wheel locks were expensive,” MacBride suggested. He spoke with the faintest trace of Highland accent. “Naturally, they got better care.”

“It would take a Scot to think of that,” Karen said. “Now, you take a Scot who collects guns, and you have something!”

“That’s only part of it,” Rand said. “I believe that by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, most of the matchlocks that were lying around had been scrapped, and the barrels used in making flintlocks. Hester Prynne, over there, could easily have started her career as a matchlock. And then, a great many matchlocks went into the West African slave and ivory trade, and were promptly ruined by the natives.”

“Yes, and I seem to recall having seen Spanish and French miguelet muskets that looked as though they had been altered directly from matchlock, retaining the original stock and even the original lock-plate,” Trehearne added.

“So have I, come to think of it.” Rand stole a glance at his wrist-watch. It was nine five; he was wishing Stephen Gresham would put in an appearance.

MacBride and Trehearne joined Pierre and the girls in showing him Gresham’s collection; evidently they all knew it almost as well as their own. After a while, Irene Gresham ushered in Philip Cabot. He, too, was past middle age, with prematurely white hair and a thin, scholarly face. According to Hollywood type-casting, he might have been a professor, or a judge, or a Boston Brahmin, but never a stockbroker.

Irene Gresham wanted to know what everybody wanted to drink. Rand wanted Bourbon and plain water; MacBride voted for Jamaica rum; Trehearne and Cabot favored brandy and soda, and Pierre and the girls wanted Bacardi and Coca-Cola.

“And Stephen’ll want rye and soda, when he gets here,” Irene said. “Come on, girls; let’s rustle up the drinks.”