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,