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.  That’s a good one.  Those things are scarce, too.”

“Yes.  You’ll find a hundred wheel locks for every matchlock, and yet there must have been a hundred matchlocks made for every wheel lock.”

“Matchlocks were cheap, and wheel locks were expensive,” MacBride suggested.  He spoke with the faintest trace of Highland accent.  “Naturally, they got better care.”

“It would take a Scot to think of that,” Karen said.  “Now, you take a Scot who collects guns, and you have something!”

“That’s only part of it,” Rand said.  “I believe that by the last quarter of the seventeenth century, most of the matchlocks that were lying around had been scrapped, and the barrels used in making flintlocks.  Hester Prynne, over there, could easily have started her career as a matchlock.  And then, a great many matchlocks went into the West African slave and ivory trade, and were promptly ruined by the natives.”

“Yes, and I seem to recall having seen Spanish and French miguelet muskets that looked as though they had been altered directly from matchlock, retaining the original stock and even the original lock-plate,” Trehearne added.

“So have I, come to think of it.”  Rand stole a glance at his wrist-watch.  It was nine five; he was wishing Stephen Gresham would put in an appearance.

MacBride and Trehearne joined Pierre and the girls in showing him Gresham’s collection; evidently they all knew it almost as well as their own.  After a while, Irene Gresham ushered in Philip Cabot.  He, too, was past middle age, with prematurely white hair and a thin, scholarly face.  According to Hollywood type-casting, he might have been a professor, or a judge, or a Boston Brahmin, but never a stockbroker.