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.