“There aren’t five men in the Five Towns who could do that,” the alderman said.

And as he said it he looked, with his legs spread apart, and his short-tailed coat, and his general bluff sturdiness, almost as old English as he could have desired to look.  Except that his face had paled somewhat.  Mr Brindley thought that that transient pallor had been caused by legitimate pride in high-class revolver-shooting.  But he was wrong.  It had been caused by simple fear.  The facts of the matter were that Alderman Keats had never before dared to fire the revolver, and that the infernal noise and the jar on his hand (which had held the weapon too loosely) had given him what is known in the Five Towns as a fearful start.  He had offered to shoot on the spur of the moment, without due reflection, and he had fired as a woman might have fired.  It was a piece of the most heavenly good fortune that he had put the bullet through the keyhole.  Indeed, at first he was inclined to believe that marksmanship must be less difficult than it was reported to be, for his aim had been entirely casual.  In saying to Brindley, “You see that keyhole,” he had merely been boasting in a jocular style.  However, when Brindley left, Brindley carried with him the alderman’s reputation as a perfect Wild West shot.

The alderman had it in mind to practise revolver-shooting seriously, until the Keats coachman made a discovery later in the day.  The coachman slept over the carriage-house, and on going up the ladder to put on his celluloid collar he perceived a hole in his ceiling and some plaster on his bit of carpet.  The window had been open all day.  The alderman had not only failed to get the keyhole, he had not only failed to get the double-doors, he had failed to hit any part whatever of the ground floor!

And this unsettled the alderman.  This proved to the alderman that the active use of a revolver incurred serious perils.  It proved to him that nearly anything might happen with a revolver.  He might aim at a lamp-post and hit the town hall clock; he might mark down a burglar and destroy the wife of his affections.  There were no limits to what could occur.  And so he resolved never to shoot any more.  He would still carry the revolver; but for his old English gentlemanliness he would rely less on that than on the gout.

But the whole town (by which I mean the councillors and the leading manufacturers and tradesmen and their sons) had now an interest in the revolver, for Brindley, the architect, had spoken of that which he had seen with his own eyes.  Some people accepted the alderman without demur as a great and terrible shot; but others talked about a fluke; and a very small minority mentioned that there was such a thing as blank cartridge.  It was the monstrous slander of this minority that induced the alderman to stand up morally for his revolver and to continue talking about it.  He suppressed the truth about the damaged ceiling; he deliberately allowed the public to go on believing, with Brindley, that he had aimed at the keyhole and really gone through it, and his conscience was not at all disturbed.  But that wicked traducers should hint that he had been using blank cartridge made him furiously indignant, and also exacerbated his gout.  And he called on his cousin Joe to prove that he had never spent a penny on blank cartridge.