“Sure thing, much older,” agreed Jim. “Those pictures were bought in London by Ben’s great-grandfather.”
The little girl returned the portfolio to its place and drew forth a shallow box of polished mahogany.
“Have you seen these, Uncle Jim?” she asked.
McAllister smiled. He had seen the contents of the box, but he also saw what she was up to. She was entertaining him in the hope that by so doing she might be allowed to sit up a few minutes past her usual bedtime.
“I don’t mind seeing them again,” he said.
She raised the lid of the box and disclosed to view two short brown pistols beautifully inlaid with silver about the grip and lock, a little metal flask, a cluster of bullets, a little ramrod, a lot of paper wads and dozens of tiny metal caps. All these curious articles lay on dark-green felt, the pistols in a central position, each of the different sorts of munitions in its own little compartment. The barrels of the pistols were short but large of bore.
“Ben showed me these,” she said. “He told me all about how to load them. They are very, very old. You don’t just put a cartridge in, like you do with a rifle or shotgun, but you ram the bullets and powder and wads down the muzzles, with that little stick and then put those little caps on, the same way Noel Sabattis does with his duck gun. I’ve seen Noel put the caps on his gun, but dad’s was like a rifle. Noel’s duck gun must be very old.”
“Yes, but it’s still of more use than those pistols ever were,” replied Jim, thinking of the good work the Maliseet’s great weapon had done only yesterday and of the purpose for which the little dueling pistols had been so beautifully and carefully made in the ignorant days of the gay youth of one of Ben O’Dell’s kind but conventional ancestors.
“What were the little pistols used for, Uncle Jim?” asked Marion.
“Well, you see, in the old days it wasn’t all clover being a man of high family,” he said. “It had its drawbacks. You were a man of mark, for sure. If a man is sassy to you nowadays, calls you names or anything like that, all you got to do is sass him back or kick him if you can; and all he can do is kick back—and that’s all there is to it, no matter who you are or who yer grandfather used to be. But in the old days when these pistols were made it was different. If a man was rude to you then—said he didn’t like the way yer nose stuck out of yer face or that the soldiers in yer regiment all had flat feet or maybe got real nasty and called you a liar—you had to throw a glassful of port wine or sherry wine into his face. Then it was up to him to ask you, as polite as pie, to fight a duel with him. And you had to do it or yer friends would say you weren’t a gentleman—and that was considered a rough thing to say about a man in those days. So you had to do it, even if the law was against it. That’s what those little pistols were for.”