ll pocket or sash pistols; a pair of French petronels,
and an extremely long seventeenth-century Dutch pistol with an
ivory-covered stock and a carved ivory Venus-head for a pommel; eight
seventeenth-century French, Italian and Flemish pistols. Rand noted them
down, and was about to pass on; then he looked sharply at one of them.

It was nothing out of the ordinary, as wheel locks go; a long Flemish
weapon of about 1640, the type used by the Royalist cavalry in the
English Civil War. There were two others almost like it, but this one was
in simply appalling condition. The metal was rough with rust, and
apparently no attempt had been made to clean it in a couple of centuries.
There was a piece cracked out of the fore-end, the ramrod was missing, as
was the front ramrod-thimble, both the trigger-guard and the butt-cap
were loose, and when Rand touched the wheel, it revolved freely if
sluggishly, betraying a broken spring or chain.

The vertical row next to it seemed to be all snaphaunces, but among them
Rand saw a pair of Turkish flintlocks. Not even good Turkish flintlocks;
a pair of the sort of weapons hastily thrown together by native craftsmen
or imported ready-made from Belgium for bazaar sale to gullible tourists.
Among the fine examples of seventeenth-century Brescian gunmaking above
and below it, these things looked like a pair of Dogpatchers in the
Waldorf's Starlight Room. Rand contemplated them with distaste, then
shrugged. After all, they might have had some sentimental significance;
say souvenirs of a pleasantly remembered trip to the Levant.

A few rows farther on, among some exceptionally fine flintlocks, all
of which pre-dated 1700, he saw one of those big Belgian navy pistols,
_circa_ 1800, of the sort once advertised far and wide by a certain
old-army-goods dealer for $6.95. This was a particularly repulsive
specimen of its breed; grimy with hardened dust and gummed oil, maculated
with yellow-surface-rust, the brasswork green with corrosion. It was
impossible to shrug off a thing like that. From then on, Rand kept his
eyes open for similar incongruities.

They weren't hard to find. There was a big army pistol, of Central
European origin and in abominable condition, among a row of fine
multi-shot flintlocks. Multi-shot ... Stephen Gresham had mentioned an
Elisha Collier flintlock revolver. It wasn't there. It should be hanging
about where this post-Napoleonic German thing was.

There was no Hall breec