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