Chances are it's provenance is common. A Depression farmer sold a couple of fat hogs, , went to town, paid the village hardware merchant about $15, and took her home. After an appropriate period of admiration around the deal table in the kitchen, it went on two nails over the back door with a box of 12-bores handy, probably No. 6, but maybe No. 4. That was about the only ballistics discussion that interested Zeke -- which was best for pheasants, jump-shooing mallards, and discouraging city-slicker strangers messing around the home place.
Sometime later he benefited from the Ever Normal Granary and took his subsidy check back to town for a fancier gun, probably a double, maybe even a pumpgun. The old single moved to the barn for rapid response to rats, foxes, chicken hawks, and skulking strangers.
Every once in a while he noticed the pigeon decorations and brushed them off with a gunny sack. He got along in years, slowed down, didn't get out to the barn much. His kids couldn't be bothered, and the ol' one-shot moldered away until, about Y2K, it turned up at the memorial service most cherished by too many of his survivors -- his estate sale.
It brought $30 from a fool who just likes walnut, however cracked and dinged, and blue steel, however rusted and pitted and scarred. He'll fix her up and shoot her, but mostly he just likes folk-guns and their propensity to stir his muse to perfectly plausible stories of the past.
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This one was bad enough to demand rule breaking. The metal suffered a wire wheel. The walnut was heavily sanded and linseeded, cracks epoxied, deep dings filled with walnut sanding dust and glue. The innards were scrubbed with gasoline before cursory polishing. For no better reason than whim, the barrel was bobbed to 18 1/4 inches, turning her from full choke to straight pipe.
(Twelve or 14 would have been handier or at least cooler, but our man had a personal connection to Vicki Weaver of Coalville, Iowa, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Fear moves him to obey even pointless laws. Wimp.)
Before the final finish --yes, flat black from a rattle can -- the question of sights arose. The solution was "no."
The plausible story of the future is a 3 a.m hipshot requiring minute-of-thug accuracy down his short, dark hallway. Sights would be superfluous, maybe even dangerous, maybe snagging the flap of his union suit.
He knows the odds of any such thing happening are all but prohibitive, but just in case, nothing better at hand...
There is no such thing as a boring gun.
2 comments:
You did right by her. Those like her were called 'house guns' when I was young. My very first single-shot was an old Sears brand 20 guage with a roofing nail for a firing pin. You don't need a $2000+ gun for around the house. But, it's nice to be able to fire a second round without using a pair of needle-nose pliers.
Now that's a memory -- a carefully seected nail to replace a broken firing pin. I made an old single-shot .22 work that way, too many years ago to recall the details.
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