The Rifle Read online

  He took it from the pegs and ran a clean patch down the bore to remove any residue of grease. He selected a piece of black flint from England—the best flint still came from there—and shaped it carefully to fit the jaws of the hammer and tightened it in place, held in the jaws with a soft piece of buckskin.

  He had never struck the frizzen and he did so now, cocking and letting the hammer fall on the unloaded rifle, and was gratified to see that his ideas had been right and the empty pan was virtually showered in sparks.

  He had burred out a .40 mold for balls—actually making it slightly smaller so there would be room for a mattress-ticking patch—and two evenings earlier had run a hundred balls of pure soft lead. He had kept them in a small box full of rag waste so they would not roll against each other and get flat-sided, and he took the balls, the rifle, his main charge powder horn and smaller horn for priming or pan powder, and moved into the back of his shop.

  His smithy was set on the edge of Philadelphia and there were no cabins farther out than his yet. There was a clearing about sixty yards across, where he kept a small garden, and he moved to the far side of it, where he had set a post for targets. On a hatchet-flattened piece of log he drew a V—each leg five inches high—with a stub of charcoal and tied the log vertically to his target post, and then he paced off thirty long steps.

  It was close to shoot, but he knew if any errors were to show they would be easier to see at close range.

  He was oddly—considering how much he loved firearms—a bad shot. He had worked at it for years, but he still wavered and couldn’t get the timing right to squeeze the trigger when the sights were just right, so he didn’t trust himself and always shot off a rest to make sure his own movement didn’t affect the way a rifle performed.

  He set up a stool with a crude table and a leather bag full of dirt to rest the barrel of the rifle on and charged the bore with a brass measure and dry powder from his horn.

  He was not certain how much powder to use because it was such a small bore, but he had it in his mind that the ball should spin faster than normally, which would retard it slightly and require more powder, so he put in what would be a usual charge for a .50–inch ball.

  Then he used a patch greased in bear grease, put it across the bore, and pushed the ball down—being careful to keep the “sprue,” or where the mold had left a mark from pouring, straight up—to start it with his thumb, just to where it dented the patch into the barrel slightly.

  He used the ramrod to push the ball smoothly down the bore to rest on the powder, setting it with a firm push—not jamming it or slamming the rod into it, which would upset the ball or give it a flat side and change the way it flew.

  In all of this he took his time, though he was anxious, and it was a full five minutes before he had the rifle charged with powder in the pan and the hammer drawn back.

  He had used curved-up sides, called horns, for the rear sight and a small German silver blade for the front, and he rested the barrel of the rifle on the dirt bag and settled the sights on the V that stood thirty yards away. He took a breath, let half of it slowly out, held it, and squeezed the trigger.

  The rifle cracked—rather than the more thumping boom of the larger bores—and he was glad to note that ignition was instantaneous and the recoil straight back into his shoulder.

  He could not see where the ball hit. It was too small to show the hole in the green wood this far away, but he knew that one shot didn’t mean anything. It took three shots to strike a pattern, to show how a weapon would work, and he loaded the rifle exactly the same way two more times, held the sight exactly the same, and shot exactly the way he had fired before.

  With the third shot he set the weapon carefully down and walked to the target and was crushed to see that there was only one hole at the point of the V where he had aimed. It did not seem conceivable that the other two balls had completely missed the log and he had a moment of almost crippling disappointment, a brief thought of all the months and months of work for something that was no more than a pretty toy. A rifle that would not shoot.

  Then he saw that the side of the bullet hole seemed odd, smudged and pulled slightly to the side, not the neat round hole that a ball should make.

  Could it be possible, he thought—could more than one ball have gone in the same hole? With trembling fingers—he had never heard of such a thing, a rifle so consistent and accurate that it shot in the same hole—he used a small chisel to clear away wood and bits of splintered lead, and when he was done he found not two but three balls smashed, swaged into the log one almost exactly on top of the next.

  He couldn’t believe it, thought it must be some kind of fluke. Perhaps he had used a bit of log with balls already fired into it—though he knew he hadn’t, he still could not believe what had happened. He decided to try it again with a fresh piece of wood and he did so, taking care to aim deliberately and squeeze the trigger slowly, and this time there was no doubt.

  The hole was not quite true, almost two balls wide, but all three of the balls had gone in virtually the same place and he knew that he had done something very grand in making this rifle, and that evening while he cleaned it with warm water and regreased the bore with strained bear grease to keep rust from happening, that night he knew he would never be able to sell it.

  But the rifle was not the only thing to enter Cornish’s life then. The day after he found how sweet the rifle was—shooting three balls in the same spot—the next day he met Clara.

  It was not love at first sight. Clara was too practical for that. She came with her father to pick up his fowling piece that Cornish had repaired. Cornish could not take his eyes off Clara and when he smiled at her and nodded, she smiled back in a way that meant so much.

  Cornish came to call, and then came to court and sit on a bench and watch the evening sun set with Clara, and when he asked for her hand she said yes and her father said yes and Cornish knew he would need money to start a family.

  He had nothing to sell except the rifle.

  At the back of his workbench on the wall he had pegged the two target logs with the holes showing and had the rifle lying across them and he had stopped counting the men who came and wanted to buy it. Always he felt a pang—as if they wanted to buy his son or daughter—and always he said no, no, he would keep it a while.

  But now it was different. Now there was Clara and their new life, and he decided to sell the rifle. Still he felt it should not just be a work gun, not a gun to have nearby when you plow. This rifle, he thought, was destined for something more, some great thing, and he was thinking this one morning, only three days before they posted the wedding banns, when John Byam came into his shop. Outside, Cornish could see two horses, one with a saddle and one with packs bundled and covered with heavy, greased canvas.

  Byam had a rifle but it was an old Pennsylvania—large bore—and the rifling was nearly gone from constant rubbing with the ramrod. More than many men, John lived because of his rifle. He was a young man, unsettled and given to running the ridges and country of the west—into western Pennsylvania and even beyond. He did not speak much, wore buckskins that smelled of wood smoke and deer blood, and walked in moccasins so worn his feet could nearly be seen through them. He didn’t speak much but when he handed his rifle over to Cornish to get the rifling rebored to a larger size, he looked up and saw the sweet rifle on the two target logs.

  “Made with your hands?” he asked.

  Cornish nodded.

  “Is it a good piece?”

  “It’s a sweet shooter, very sweet.”

  “Is it offered?”

  Cornish nodded slowly, against his will. “It depends. What can you offer?”

  He whispered, almost a hiss. “Anything I have.”

  Cornish had been looking down at Byam’s rifle and the intensity in his voice made Cornish look up suddenly. “You know rifles?”

  Byam ignored him. “Might I see . . . hold it?”

  For a moment Cornish hesitated, then
took the rifle down and handed it to Byam. Byam looked at the barrel. “It’s small . . .”

  “Because it’s meant to be small. The size of the ball is balanced . . .”

  “. . . by the speed and accuracy.” Byam nodded. “I have thought a smaller bore is better, but nobody makes them. Or did. Does it shoot as pure as it looks?”

  Cornish pointed to the two target logs. “Three balls in each hole.”

  “How far?”

  “Thirty paces.”

  “Can I shoot it?”

  Again Cornish hesitated, but he thought of Clara and the need to sell the rifle—and then too there was something about this young man, this Byam. He didn’t just hold the rifle so much as fit with it in some way, as if the weapon were simply an extension of his arms, his body.

  Cornish nodded. Byam expertly ran a dry patch down the bore of the rifle, poured powder from his own horn into the cupped palm of his hand for a measure, poured it down the barrel, took a patch from his bullet pouch and a ball from Cornish, seated the ball, turned the rifle away, stepped outside, and aimed into the woods and opened the frizzen, tapped a few grains of fine powder into the pan, and raised the rifle, aimed across the clearing. “The white limb, that dead one. I’ll cut it.”

  Cornish squinted, then saw it—it had to be eighty paces. Even from a rest he couldn’t hit it and he doubted this Byam could. “Shoot closer—”

  Before he could finish, the rifle cracked and Cornish saw the limb jerk and fall to the ground.

  “Sweet,” Byam said, nodding. “Like honey from a tree after a long, dead winter. “I’ll buy it.”

  “We haven’t discussed worth,” Cornish said. “Now the way I view it . . .”

  “On my packhorse I have all my cured hides from last season. A year’s work. The pack is yours for the rifle. And I’ll give you my old one.”

  Cornish thought a moment. That was easily twice what the rifle would bring from anybody else, and Byam took the hesitation wrong, took it as a negative answer and added, “I’ll throw in the packhorse as well. The rifle must be mine.”

  Cornish sighed. “It isn’t the price, it’s the rifle. I’m fond of it.”

  “You can make another.”

  “Not like this one. No, I cannot.”

  And Byam grew quiet because they both knew it was true. If he lived to be a hundred, Cornish would never again come close to the sweetness of this rifle. Still, he was to marry Clara and he needed a start. “Done. You keep the horse.”

  “No, I said it and I meant it.”

  “That would not be fair. You keep the horse and I’ll take the pack, as you said first. That will be enough and more than enough.”

  And the business was done. Byam unloaded the packhorse and took the rifle and ball mold, a small keg of powder, and twenty pieces of black flint, and left; and not once during the transaction did Cornish take his eyes off the rifle and even when Byam left, rode off into the woods leading the packhorse with the rifle across his lap, even then Cornish watched it, watched the rifle until the trees closed in and he could not see it any longer. Nor was it done yet. He missed the rifle and over the next days found himself looking up where it had hung, expecting to see it and disappointed, almost grieving when he didn’t. At last he said to himself, half aloud, “Enough. He’s gone in the woods and probably dropped the rifle off a cliff by now.”

  He was wrong. Nothing happens in a vacuum. While he worked on the rifle Cornish was in fact destined to meet Clara and fall in love, and while he worked on the rifle, England—riddled in fear that the colonies in America would grow to dominate and outproduce and take over the world, which in fact is exactly what happened—began to add taxes to Colonial produce and products to try to hold them down. With this they forbade the Americans to sell anywhere but to certain markets in England where the prices were kept viciously low, and compounding the problem they threw an added tax on tea that was little more than coupling insult to injury.

  While Cornish worked on the rifle some men in the American colonies rioted, some died, shot down by British soldiers; some men met in a hot, muggy meeting hall in Philadelphia and discussed a declaration one of them, a man named Jefferson, had penned proclaiming independence from England or any form of tyranny.

  All of this led to a war. The Americans called it a War of Independence, a Revolutionary War, but to England it was simply a revolt.

  Had John Byam continued moving back into the woods, none of this would have affected him, nor the rifle. But as he left Cornish, knowing almost nothing of what had been transpiring for the past two years, having lived in the wilderness as he had, he came to a fork in the trail that led to the right, and even this may not have mattered except that it was on this same day that the British soldiers found stored powder and lead on the Bainbridge farm.

  Byam’s trail led to the Bainbridge farm and he knew the Bainbridges slightly as a quiet couple who spoke little and worked hard. He had stopped there and been given a hot meal on the way in—as, indeed, the Bainbridges provided for all travelers who passed by. Bainbridge was a nice man, and in fact it was this niceness that led him to trouble. Men had come in the night, men with tired horses and a wagon with shrunken and loosened spokes, and asked to bury their cargo—several hundredweight of lead and coarse-ground cannon powder—at the Bainbridge farm until they could come back for it. Bainbridge could have guessed the powder was for cannon, could have known it was to be used to fight the British, but he ignored it and simply nodded. He after all, American before he British—why shouldn’t he help?

  But somebody talked and a contingent of British soldiers came just an hour before Byam and found the store of munitions.

  Their laws were strict and plain: anybody caught helping the rebels with food, horses, shelter, and especially arms was subject to summary justice without trial and immediate execution by hanging.

  As Byam started into the clearing, roughly two hundred yards from the house, he saw two soldiers setting Bainbridge on top of a horse with a rope around his neck and his arms tied to the rear. His wife was standing to the side, her hands clasped in front of her mouth in a double fist, two soldiers in red coats holding her.

  Byam did not think about what he was doing except to know that somehow he could not let Bainbridge be hanged. The rifle snapped up, almost by itself; the tiny blade of the front sight settled on the officer sitting on his horse nearby, the sight raised slightly to compensate for distance, and the rifle cracked—one clean, smacking slap of sound across the clearing.

  The ball took the officer in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple, cutting through at a transverse angle to snap the spine and whip the man from his horse as if hit by a giant hand. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  The action did not save Bainbridge. The sound of the rifle startled the horse he was sitting on and it jumped forward, out from beneath Bainbridge, who pitched at an angle and broke his neck and hung there dying while for a stunned second a half-dozen British soldiers looked from Bainbridge kicking and dying to their officer, who was already dead and broken on the ground, and then up to the cloud of smoke that hung where the rifle had fired.

  But the surprise was only for an instant. They were, after all, soldiers and used to reacting to danger, and quickly the sergeant assumed command and pointed at the smoke. Byam was hopelessly out of range for the smoothbore weapons of the soldiers to have any accuracy, but they raised and fired on command and he heard the balls whistling as they went past him, over him, two skipping in the dirt well out in front of him, and he also heard a grunt as one of the balls hit his horse high in the chest.

  The wound was mortal. Byam could feel the horse sagging and he jumped free of the saddle as the animal hit the ground and then things began to happen very fast. The soldiers all had horses and they mounted, headed out across the field toward Byam.

  He could reload, he knew, and perhaps get two of them before they closed on him but that would leave four and they would get him. He pulled a long-bladed kni
fe from his belt and slashed the empty packsaddle from the packhorse, grabbed the mane with one hand, and swung up bareback. There was no time to change the saddle from the dying horse to the packhorse. No time now for anything but running. He threw one quick look at the farmstead where Bainbridge’s wife—now a widow—was trying to untie the rope holding her husband, then to the six mounted soldiers galloping at him across the field and he wheeled the packhorse, steering with his knees, and tore off directly into the woods off the trails.

  As it was they nearly took him. Byam hadn’t time to reload, nor do anything but run, holding the rifle with one hand and the horse’s mane with the other, slamming the horse’s ribs with his heels, wishing he had spurs.

  The English soldiers did have spurs and raked their horses to more speed and would have caught Byam except that he suddenly felt the horse drop out from beneath him into a ten-foot-deep ravine. The packhorse was surefooted after all the mountain work he had done trapping and he landed cleanly, pivoted, and ran off down the floor of the ravine as if he’d been doing it all his life.

  The English horses were not so good and the ravine proved a disaster for three of them, breaking their legs on impact. One other horse was badly sprained and most of the riders were knocked senseless. Two of them were all right, the sergeant and one private, but the sergeant shook his head and killed the chase. It was just as well, for the private remembered the shot Byam had taken across the field and had absolutely no desire to tear off after him with only one man.

  Byam went free.

  And once more fate took over. Had he simply melted back into the woods he would have been fine. The soldiers were never close enough to identify him, were from another sector and on temporary duty. Byam would have vanished into obscurity.

  But when he’d ridden hard for an hour—he thought six or eight miles—he burst into a smaller clearing, perhaps eighty yards across, and found himself the center of attention for nearly a hundred well-armed men all dressed in green with fringed coats, who all seemed to be aiming rifles at Byam.