gold-inlaid. To the trigger-guards were attached tags marked _Fleming vs.
Rivers_.

Rand examined each pistol separately, then compared them. Finally, he
took a six-inch rule from his pocket and made measurements, first with
one edge and then with the other.

"Well, I'm damned," he said, laying them on the desk. "These things are
the most complete fakes I ever saw--locks, stocks, barrels and mountings.
They're supposed to be late sixteenth-century; I doubt if they were made
before 1920. As far as I can see or measure, there isn't the slightest
difference between them, except on some of the decorative inlay. The
whole job must have been miked in ten-thousandths, and what's more,
whoever made them used metric measurements. You'll find pairs of English
dueling pistols as early as 1775 that are almost indistinguishable, but
in 1575, when these things were supposed to have been made, a gunsmith
was working fine when he was working in sixteenth-inches. They just
didn't have the measuring instruments, at that time, to do closer work.
I won't bother taking these things apart, but if I did, I'd bet all
Wall Street to Junior's piggy-bank that I'd find that the screws were
machine-threaded and the working-parts interchanged. I've heard about
fakes like these,"--he named a famous, recently liquidated West Coast
collection--"but I'd never hoped to see an example like this."

Goode gave a hacking chuckle. "You'll do as an arms-expert, Mr. Rand," he
said. "And you'd win the piggy-bank. It seems that after Mr. Fleming
bought them, he took them apart, and found, just as you say, that the
screw-threads had been machine-cut, and that the working-parts were
interchangeable from one pistol to the other. There were a lot of papers
accompanying them--I have them here--purporting to show that they had