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A 1954 Gebrüder Merkel Model 303 Game-Scene Sidelock Over-and-Under:

Germany, in English…

An Imagined Journey

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Begin with a man and a stamp.

He steadies the right barrel against the bench, sets the die, and strikes, letter by letter, a single word: GERMANY.

Not Deutschland — the only name his country has in his own mouth. GERMANY. In English.

The word is not for him, and not for the town: nobody within a hundred miles needs telling where they are. It is for customs sheds and shop counters an ocean away, where the law wants a country of origin it can read — because the men in this room build one of the very few things their state can sell to the world it is against, and the world it is against reads English.

Follow the barrel back up the shop. At one bench a pair of blued tubes is being married to a silver-grey action. At another, checkering is being run across the three pieces of a forearm so that the pattern meets itself at every joint without a stumble. At a third, a man sits bent over a lockplate with a light hammer and a graver, cutting. What he is cutting can wait. His name will go into the factory’s card for this gun — entered line by line with the steels and the stock — and nowhere onto the gun itself.

The gun he is helping to finish is a twelve-bore over-and-under of the first quality: hand-detachable sidelocks, game scenes, figured walnut. It could be nineteen thirty-seven in this room — the year the house took the Grand Prix in Paris — and nothing on the bench would say otherwise.

The calendar on the wall says nineteen fifty-four. The town is Suhl, in Thuringia, and Thuringia is in the German Democratic Republic. The factory has been a people’s-own enterprise for four years. The three brothers whose name rides the tang founded it; their family was expropriated six years ago, and owns nothing here — not the benches, not the ledgers, not the name. The first guns these benches built after the war went east, to Moscow, as reparations, by order. And one year ago, the government that owns this room presented guns like this one to Eisenhower and to Khrushchev — a gun for each half of the world it somehow has to sell to.

So the gun will be proofed in the town, crated, and sent west across the very line its right barrel is lettered for. Somewhere on the far side, decades out, a bench in Houston is waiting to cut new threads into its muzzles — and a morning in America is waiting, when somebody will pick it up, read one word in his own language, and have no idea what that word is hiding.

What follows is that gun, and the year it refutes.

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A Badillini-Engraved Fabbri in .410 Bore, and the Three Hunts It Carries in Its Steel.

The Three Covers...

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Nothing in the cover is moving. Two dogs have gone to stone at the edge of the long grass, one spotted, one dark, both reading the same few feet of ground along a line of fence posts. They have been on point for decades. Nothing about them will ever move, and the covey they are holding will never quite finish rising. It hangs there, spread low and wide against the sky, every bird caught at the exact instant of the flush.

Another cover, and this one is birch country: white trunks in a loose colonnade, a pair of grouse tipping through them, a long valley of conifers rolling away beyond. Two more wait on the ground among the low growth at the foot of the trees, heads up, one beat from breaking.

In a third the country runs open. A cock pheasant climbs at full stretch out of the rough grass, beak open, tail pulling behind him like ribbon, his hen a wingbeat behind — and away to their left a knot of distant birds hangs against a sky of fine ruled strokes.

Three hunts. Three covers. One sky. And the sky, in all three, is silver. Each of these scenes is smaller than a playing card. The long grass is graver work under magnification. The birches are hairlines in steel. The open ground of the third is a few thousand cuts of a hand tool in polished metal. The scenes live on the lockplates and belly of a single gun, a .410-bore over-and-under weighing six pounds, four ounces, built in Brescia by a house that many in the trade, when nobody is quoting them, call the best gunmaker in the world. The banner on its action reads IVO FABBRI.

There is one more thing, set in gold in the wood of the forend: a shield with a lone bird standing in it, ribbons about it, and above them a crown that nobody has put a name to. We will get to the crown. First, the gun — because these three covers are exactly what they look like, and this is a gun engraved with the journey it was built to make; everything about it, from the steel of its barrels to the half ounce of shot it throws, says so.

As Built

The specification reads quickly and means a great deal. Twenty-six-inch barrels, choked full in both, under a ventilated top rib. A single trigger. Automatic ejectors. A chequered safety slide on the tang. A full sidelock action whose locks come away by hand. A stock of deeply figured Turkish walnut, cut to a straight English grip and finished with a chequered butt — bare wood at the shoulder, no pad, the oldest signal in the trade that a gun was built for game and meant to be mounted often. At the head of the stock the chequering parts around a smooth spear-shaped reserve of figure. The dimensions are classic game dimensions.

Full and full sounds severe until you remember what a .410 is asked to do. The shell carries half an ounce of shot. Pattern is the whole problem, and choke is the only answer. A maker who chokes a .410 tight is being honest about the work the little shell has in front of it. And then there is the weight.

Six pounds, four ounces is heavy for a .410 sidelock by London habit. The classic English .410 over-and-under is a wand, often a full pound lighter. Fabbri’s answer sits at the other end of the argument. Its sub-gauge guns weigh what their barrels weigh — the house will not thin a wall to flatter a scale — and those barrels are machined to its own standard from steel it refuses to compromise on. The result handles like a gun rather than a conjuring trick: steady on a crossing bird, unhurried on the second shot, built to be shot in volume rather than admired at the rack. There is no apology in it anywhere.

The Engineer’s House

Ivo Fabbri came to gunmaking from engineering, and he came armed. He had worked for Fiat. He thought in tolerances. When he and Daniele Perazzi joined forces in Brescia at the start of the 1960s, the partnership announced itself at the top of the sport almost immediately: at the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, Ennio Mattarelli took the gold medal in trap with an Olympic-record 198 of 200, shooting a gun from the young partnership’s bench.

Then the two men chose different roads. Perazzi built for champions, in numbers, and became one of the great competition houses of the world. Fabbri went the other way entirely, toward the fewest possible guns built to the highest possible standard, and by the end of the decade the firm carried his name alone.

The heresy, in London terms, was his conviction that machines could out-finish the file. Fabbri believed that measurement, repeatability, and aerospace-grade tolerances would produce a truer gun than the most gifted hand working by eye, and he spent the rest of a long life proving it. Everything is made under the firm’s own roof, down to the screws. Visitors to the factory have reported fit between barrels and breech face so exact that a single sheet of paper stops the gun from closing. And the output has stayed almost unbelievably small: two or three dozen guns a year, ever, for the whole world.

The Sentence on the Barrel

A best gun’s barrels will tell you who made it and where. This gun’s barrels also tell you what they are made of. Along one flank, in small roll-marked capitals: VACUUM ARC REMELTING STEEL. It may be the most honest sentence in gunmaking.

Vacuum arc remelting is a refining process, and an extravagant one. Steel that has already been made once is remelted by an electric arc inside a vacuum chamber and allowed to solidify again, slowly, into a new ingot. The vacuum strips out dissolved gases. The controlled second freeze sweeps the metal of the microscopic inclusions and hidden porosity that ordinary steel lives with. What comes out is among the cleanest steel human beings know how to make, and it is specified for the places where a hidden flaw is the one failure that cannot be allowed: the rotating heart of a jet engine, the implant that goes inside a human body. Fabbri put it in shotgun barrels, and then engraved the fact on the outside, where anyone could read it.

That inscription also tells us roughly when this gun was born. The vacuum-arc marking belongs to Fabbri’s work of the 1980s and into the early nineties, and the few sub-gauge Fabbris that surface cluster at the end of the eighties. The Italian proof house stamps a small date code on the barrel flats of every gun it passes, so the year is sitting under the forend, waiting to be read. Until then, the honest answer is: almost certainly the later 1980s, when Ivo Fabbri himself was mid-stride.

A Way In You Cannot See

The locks are the quiet astonishment of the gun. This is a full sidelock, and the locks come away by hand, a tradition with real logic behind it: a lock you can remove in the field is a lock you can dry, clean, and trust. The famous English version announces itself with a small crank-handled screw standing proud of the plate. Here nothing stands proud. The fastening that frees the locks is hidden, and you could own the gun for years without finding it.

The reason is standing right there in the engraving. On a gun conceived as a canvas, hardware is intrusion, and Fabbri engineered the intrusion away. The only metalwork the eye finds on the plates is the polished heads of the lock pins and screws, left bright inside the scenes, treated by the engraver as part of the composition — one of them hangs in the right plate’s sky like a small steel moon. How the locks actually release is the gun’s own business. The maker left no visible instruction, and that was the point.

The Hand Behind the Scenes

The cursive signature set into the right plate, near the fence posts and small enough to miss, is Badillini’s — Gianfranco Badillini, born in Brescia in 1942, named on the province’s own roll of its renowned arms engravers alongside the masters of its great postwar generation. The auction trade, which prizes his signed guns, has never quite settled the spelling of his first name; the Brescian record has, and it says Gianfranco.

The work is where to read him, and the work draws a clear map. Signed Badillini engraving appears on a Fabbri sidelock of exactly this era. It appears on Perazzi game guns cut in exactly this genre: coveys breaking, dogs on point, the same unhurried portraiture. It appears on masterwork for Krieghoff. And on at least one other maker’s gun, a crest inlaid in gold carries his signature. Hold that detail.

Reading the Plates

Go back to the quail, slowly this time. The right plate is staged in depth: the dogs anchor the foreground, the covey scatters across the middle distance, every bird at its own attitude, and the fence line carries the eye clean out of the frame past standing timber and a shoulder of rock, as if the birds were headed somewhere beyond the steel. The engraver’s cursive sits inside the scene, near the fence posts, faint as a watermark.

The left plate works the vertical. Birch trunks set the rhythm, the conifer valley rolls away behind them in strokes fine as etching, and the two grounded birds — one crested and fanned atop a deadfall — weight the composition the way a bass line weights a song. The belly of the action, the least visible surface on the gun, received the densest work of all: the cock and his hen climbing off the thistled ground.

Around the scenes runs the grammar of the best-gun trade: bouquet-and-scroll borders, the long S-curve of the sideplates, fine scroll carried onto the trigger guard, up the top lever to its chequered thumbpiece, across the fences — where a small fan of ornament opens just behind the rib — and onto the scrolled nose cap with its bright push button, down to the two silver teardrops let into the wood itself. All of it is fine line engraving, a hand graver drawn through polished steel, tone built stroke by stroke — hatched, crossed, deepened — the way an etcher builds a plate, thousands of decisions in a medium that keeps every one forever, including the wrong ones. There are no wrong ones here.

And notice what the scenes are. Quail over pointing dogs. Grouse in birch cover. Pheasants climbing hard off open country. Three subjects from the American uplands, on a gun from Brescia, in the bore Americans turned into a test of skill. Together they read less like decoration than like an itinerary — a commission with a destination in mind. That is an inference; the order book that could confirm it is in Brescia. But engravers of this rank do not choose their subjects at random, and nobody orders three American hunts by accident.

The Crown Without a Name

Now the crown. Turn the gun over. Down the spine of the forend’s chequering runs a line of three smooth reserves let into the wood: three carry the silver teardrops, each cut with its own tight scroll, and the third carries gold — a closed crown, arched over a beaded band and finished with a trefoil at its peak, and beneath it a bordered shield hung in ribbonwork, bows at its shoulders and a crossed bow below. Inside the shield, on a few strokes of engraved ground, stands a single bird. It reads as an owner’s device, set into the wood the way Fabbri stocks of the era sometimes carried an owner’s gold personalization: discreet, exact, permanent. A crown above a shield claims rank by long convention — and this one, arched and closed, is cut to the royal pattern, though engravers have always handed out royal crowns more freely than the heralds do. And Badillini, remember, signed just such a crest in gold on another maker’s gun, which makes the attribution here easy to believe and, so far, impossible to prove.

The bird is the tell, or the tease. To the eye it is a pigeon, or a dove, standing composed on its little ground. Heraldry has a long habit of letting a lone charge speak its owner’s name — canting arms, the heralds call them, a picture that puns on a surname — and Italian is rich in families named for exactly this bird. If that is what the shield is doing, the name has been sitting in the wood all along, one translation away.

That is where the trail stops. The record attaches no name to the shield, and this piece will not invent one. Somewhere behind it there was a first owner, someone who wanted a .410 from the least compromising house in Italy, and whose crowned bird went into the wood in gold. The gun keeps the secret the way it keeps its lock screws: in plain sight, and perfectly.

The Case for the Smallest Bore

Why a .410 at all? Because it is the hardest thing to do well, and this house only did things the hard way.

The .410 is the paradox of the shotgun world, the smallest shell in the field and the most demanding discipline in it. Half an ounce of shot leaves no margin. The gun must be pointed, truly pointed, or the bird flies on. American skeet made it one of the game’s four guns — the difficult one — and generations of quail hunters have carried it as a quiet boast, the gun of the shooter with nothing left to prove. An expert’s cartridge, in an expert’s gun.

Building a best gun around it is harder still. A sidelock over-and-under does not shrink gracefully. Every part gets smaller, every tolerance gets tighter, every flaw grows in proportion, and there is nowhere for a maker to hide. The great houses built them in handfuls across a century of work. Now run the arithmetic on this one. Fabbri builds two or three dozen guns a year, and that is the entire output of the house, across all gauges, for the whole world. The sub-gauges are a fraction of that. The .410s are a fraction of the fraction. Nobody outside the factory knows the true count; the examples that ever surface can be counted on one hand, and this is one of them.

Which is what makes the little gun in these photographs something more than rare. It is the smallest expression of the least compromising philosophy in the trade: aerospace steel, hidden fastenings, a Brescian master at full stretch, all in service of half an ounce of shot.

The Case Closes

The gun lives in a tan leather case, strapped and buckled, with burgundy cloth beds and the Italian casemaker’s gold script set inside the lid. It breaks down into still shapes in the cloth — barrels laid across the top, stock and action on the diagonal below, a lidded compartment with a round brass pull keeping its own counsel in the corner. The scenes go dark when the lid comes down, and nothing in them changes. The dogs hold their point. The covey hangs above the long grass. The grouse thread the birches on wings that will never beat, and the cock pheasant and his hen climb forever off the rough grass, into a silver sky with no night coming.

Somewhere under the forend, a small stamped code is waiting to tell us the year. Somewhere in Brescia, an order book may still hold a name for the crown. The gun is in no hurry. It has three hunts to keep, and it is keeping them.

PHOTO GALLERY:

The Tombstone Trio:

The Cowboys, the Gambler, and the Lawman...

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The first shot in the Tombstone Trio is fired seven months before four armed men walk down Fremont Street.

On the night of March 15, 1881, a Kinnear & Company stagecoach runs toward Benson through the darkness beyond Contention City. A voice calls for it to halt. Gunfire answers. Eli “Bud” Philpot is killed; passenger Peter Roerig is mortally wounded. Wells Fargo messenger Bob Paul, who had taken the reins that night, returns fire and drives the team clear.

The robbery does not end on that road. It draws Wyatt Earp and Ike Clanton into a secret arrangement to bring the suspects in, a bargain that later becomes one more source of mistrust, humiliation, and anger. By October, every grievance in Tombstone seems to be moving toward the same narrow vacant lot beside C.S. Fly’s boarding house.

Virgil, Morgan, Wyatt, and Doc Holliday come down Fremont Street. The Clantons, the McLaurys, and Billy Claiborne wait in the lot ahead. Only a few paces separate them. About thirty shots tear through the afternoon. When the smoke clears, Billy Clanton and both McLaurys are dead or dying. Virgil and Morgan Earp are wounded. Holliday is grazed. Wyatt stands untouched.

On the following afternoon, a brass band leads two hearses through streets crowded with mourners. Billy Clanton rides in the first; Tom and Frank McLaury lie together in the second. The procession moves toward Boothill while Tombstone watches from packed sidewalks.

The gunfight lasted about thirty seconds. The legend has been accumulating ever since.

Nearly a century and a half later, all of it—the stage, the bargain, the gunfight, the hearses—rests together inside a single glass case: not the weapons carried on Fremont Street, but three consecutively numbered Colt Single Action Armys from the hand of Master Engraver Michael W. Dubber.

Engraver Michael W. Dubber, whose master letter and accompanying note inform every panel described here, and with photography by MAVEN Photo + Film. If you have a fine gun with a story to tell, reach out to us at contact@roseandscroll.com—we would love to tell it with you.

The Commission

A commission of three Colt Single Action Army revolvers in .45 Colt, serial numbers S60805A, S60806A, and S60807A. The consecutive numbers use the split-letter serial format Colt introduced around 1993–94 after the earlier third-generation sequence had been exhausted. The guns take the three standard barrel lengths: 4¾, 5½, and 7½ inches, commonly called the Civilian, Artillery, and Cavalry lengths by collectors. Those names are conventions rather than first-generation Colt model designations; Colt also supplied other lengths to order.

The platform is the Model of 1873. First-generation production reached approximately 357,000 revolvers, nearly half chambered in .45 Colt. The serial sequence and three-length configuration are the more immediate points here. Dubber wrote in his accompanying note that he was unsure whether another such set existed. Consecutive engraved pairs and larger consecutive groups have appeared, including a second three-gun Dubber set and a six-gun commission shipped as three consecutive pairs in 1985. No second set of three consecutively numbered Single Action Armys spanning all three standard barrel lengths was found in the public records consulted for this feature. Its distinction lies in that precise combination.

Dubber’s accompanying note records 3.8 troy ounces of fine gold across the three revolvers. The master letter separately describes silver and platinum, flush and raised work over blued steel and French-grayed pictorial grounds, and twenty-four-karat gold lines bordering the principal panels. It calls the work Exhibition Grade. Katherine Plumer scrimshawed the elephant-ivory grips; “K. Plumer 2020” on the Wyatt Earp portrait dates her signed work, though not necessarily the set’s final assembly. Jim Hasson built the presentation case. H.B. Norris III served as Project Wrangler and secured the original U.S. Deputy Marshal badge mounted on the case. Turnbull Restoration finished and assembled the revolvers, and Reliable Electroplating of Chartley, Massachusetts, is credited specifically with gold plating.

The Cowboys Colt · 4¾ Inches · Serial S60805A

The shortest barrel keeps the hardest company. Across the topstrap, in rough-cut gold letters, runs THE COWBOYS, assigning the revolver to Ike and Billy Clanton, the McLaurys, Curly Bill, and the wider network covered by the name. Above the cylinder, a longhorn’s horn runs nearly the length of the top frame, gold wrapped at its center in silver.

The barrel returns to the robbery that helped set the later quarrel in motion. Across a French-grayed desert, a gold coach and team run at full stretch while a mounted gunman raises his pistol. The Kinnear stage robbery is documented; the scale of the treasure traditionally assigned to the stage remains disputed. More consequential was what followed: the search for the surviving robbers and Wyatt Earp’s secret arrangement with Ike Clanton, one of the grievances that would surface again in October.

The right frame carries a cattle-rustling panel: mounted men pushing longhorns through rough country. This is contextual imagery rather than a rendering of a single documented event. Cross-border cattle theft was part of the Cow-boy economy, and contemporary and later accounts tied the Clanton and McLaury ranching network to stolen Mexican stock, though individual allegations were contested. Violence answered the trade at Skeleton Canyon and, on August 13, 1881, at Guadalupe Canyon, where Newman “Old Man” Clanton was among the dead.

The remaining emblems complete the range vocabulary: a silver hat on a coiled gold lariat at the left panel; a gold rider roping a steer on the recoil shield; silver spurs at the loading gate; and crossed horseshoes, one gold and one silver, on the shovel head behind the hammer.

Plumer’s right grip shows the gunfight itself: coat-clad figures firing, crouching, and falling before low frame buildings, one man prone and shooting from the ground. The master letter describes the scene as historically correct—correct the way the fight itself survives, through the testimony taken at the Spicer hearing, where the men who walked out of the lot told those thirty seconds shot by shot.

The Doc Holliday Colt · 5½ Inches · Serial S60806A

The middle gun carries a dual title in the master letter, “Doc Holliday” and “The Gambler.” Its barrel states the theme in gold script: FARO, and beneath it, Bucking the Tiger. Faro, rather than poker, dominated much of nineteenth-century American commercial gambling. The tiger appeared on period card backs and case-box lids, giving play against the bank its enduring phrase. The burned soda card, two cards drawn each turn, the casekeeper’s abacus, and the copper token that reversed a bet gave an honest bank only a narrow advantage. Honest banks were less common.

Both Holliday and Wyatt Earp dealt faro, and Earp held an interest in the game at the Oriental. Around that documented association, the engraver built a period gambling vocabulary: fine-silver dice set with seven black diamonds at the loading gate; the four card suits in gold around the cylinder’s circumference; and a royal flush, ten through ace of spades, fanned across the recoil shield.

On the right frame, the legend finds its address. Beside a silver scroll reading “Tombstone 1881” stands a gold-and-silver vignette of the Bird Cage Theatre, opened that December. In the master letter’s words, “in 1881 it was where Doc Holliday dealt FARO,” and everything the town’s memory holds dearest gathered under that roof—the famous newspaper superlative, the poker game that ran for years, the faro bank and its tiger—with Holliday’s chair at the center of it. The vignette gives the gambler the room the legend built for him.

The personal effects fill in the man the legend remembers: Old Overholt, the Pennsylvania rye that tradition set at his elbow; the Remington derringer engraved “To Doc from Kate,” token of the stormiest attachment in the story; and the push dagger—period accounts agree the dentist carried a formidable blade. Each object is part of how Holliday has been remembered, and the engraver gives each its place.

A family piece anchors the firearms: a Colt Model 1851 Navy given to Holliday by his uncle, Dr. John Stiles Holliday, and kept through the family. At the Spicer hearing, witnesses remembered a nickel-plated pistol in Holliday’s hand on Fremont Street, and a nickeled revolver has ridden with him through every retelling since. The silver cup completes the table: whiskey, cards, dice, and the cup among them—the gambler’s still life in silver and gold.

The right grip bears Plumer’s portrait of Holliday, an oval medallion with beaded border and ribbon banner, the face built in line and stipple after the manner of a Victorian cabinet card. Holliday was a Georgia-born, Philadelphia-trained dentist who developed tuberculosis, went west at twenty-two, and died in Glenwood Springs at thirty-six. On this revolver, the dentist, the gambler, and the legend occupy the same steel.

The Wyatt Earp Colt · 7½ Inches · Serial S60807A

The longest barrel carries the memorial gun. Two badges appear in silver: a marshal’s star on the shovel head and a Tombstone deputy sheriff’s badge on the recoil shield—the emblems of a working life spent wearing metal. Earp was a Wichita policeman, a Dodge City assistant marshal, a Pima County deputy sheriff, a deputy under Virgil on the day of the gunfight, and, after Virgil’s ambush, a deputy U.S. marshal—the appointment he wired for on December 29, 1881, the day after his brother was maimed. The star and the shield gather that scattered service into the lawman the legend remembers.

The letter also notes that Earp “worked the outer margins of the law,” with gambling among his principal incomes. Modern biographers have described him as a sporting man first: faro dealer, saloon interest-holder, and intermittent officer. That record is less tidy than the screen marshal and more useful to understanding Tombstone.

The right frame shows Earp firing his revolver, with silver handcuffs at the loading gate. On the recoil shield, a gold banner lettered TOMBSTONE rises above an inlaid revolver identified by the master letter as his 7½-inch Colt.

The left panel turns memorial: a gold pocket watch and vest chain, the case engraved “Wyatt Earp 1848–1929.” The master letter remembers Earp giving watches to several confidants—keepsakes from a man who outlived nearly everyone who stood in the lot.

The barrel turns from lawman emblems to consequence: the funeral scene. Across a French-grayed ground, a gold horse draws a Tombstone hearse past grave markers and a small gold cross toward Boothill. Boothill is itself a later coinage—in 1881 the ground was simply the town cemetery—but it is the name the legend settled on, and the engraving speaks the legend’s language. The letter identifies the dead as the three men killed on Fremont Street. The October 28 Tombstone Epitaph called the funeral “numerically one of the largest ever witnessed in Tombstone,” described the brass band, and recorded two hearses: Billy Clanton in the first, the McLaury brothers side by side in the second. The rival Tombstone Nugget supplied the fuller procession count—about three hundred mourners on foot, twenty-two carriages and buggies, a four-horse stage, and horsemen, the line nearly two blocks long. The engraving compresses those two hearses and the larger cortege into one carriage.

Wyatt walked out of the lot untouched and stayed that way: the record contains no confirmed gunshot wound to him, ever, though later stories tell of bullets passing through his coat and his saddle. The charm held for forty-seven more years.

Plumer’s portrait grip completes the third revolver in the same oval-and-ribbon manner as Holliday’s. The three guns end in three places: the Cowboys’ in a gunfight, Holliday’s in a card room, and Earp’s in a cemetery.

The Hands

Approximately one percent of first-generation Single Action Armys received factory engraving. The vocabulary of those guns—vine scroll over punch-dot grounds, animal and emblem inlays, and precious-metal borders—developed under engravers including Gustave Young and Cuno Helfricht, with important independent work by L.D. Nimschke. Helfricht was at Colt from 1871 to 1921 and led its engraving shop from the mid-1870s. German immigrants both, Helfricht and Nimschke were living and working in America as the events of this story unfolded, and their work stands today at the top of serious collectors’ lists. Their styles are the foundations of American scroll, and working engravers have followed them ever since. It is the tradition Dubber inherits.

Michael W. Dubber of Evansville, Indiana, has engraved firearms since 1969. A founding member of the Firearms Engravers Guild of America, he served as its president from 1998 to 2004 and holds both FEGA Master Engraver and CCA Master Engraver designations. He has been commissioned for seven Colt Collectors Association Show Guns over a twenty-three-year period beginning in 2003 and has received multiple Howard Dove Awards for Best Engraved Colt.

The master letter distinguishes raised and flush inlay from gold plating. In inlay, channels are cut and undercut so that the precious metal locks mechanically into the steel; wire forms the line borders and sheet supplies the larger figures. Raised work stands above the surrounding surface, while flush work is leveled with it. The letter separately credits Reliable Electroplating for gold plating. Those processes should not be collapsed into a single description.

French-grayed grounds provide a soft, matte silver-gray field against which the cuts read, a half-tone above the surrounding blue. Even the screw heads are composed as gold rosettes. The 3.8 troy ounces of gold are best understood as a measure of the labor required to prepare, undercut, lay, and finish the inlay across three complete revolvers.

Katherine Plumer of Wilton, California, produced illustrations for the American Poultry Association’s American Standard of Perfection before turning to scrimshaw. Her line-and-stipple method draws on that background in draftsmanship. The three grips comprise two portraits and a gunfight scene, worked at a density that rewards magnification.

Jim Hasson of Apache Junction, Arizona, built the presentation: a footed, French-fitted case of Arizona mesquite trimmed in ebony, with museum glass, brass hardware, a flame-maple tombstone at the lock, and the four card suits inlaid in maple on the feet. At the top left of the case sits an original U.S. Deputy Marshal badge, historically correct to the period of the gunfight. The lawman’s Colt wears its badges in silver; the case wears the real thing. H.B. Norris III of Houston, Texas—Texas lawman, longtime friend of the engraver, and a hand in many of Dubber’s past commissions—obtained it for the Trio. On this one he is credited as Project Wrangler. Turnbull Restoration handled the gunsmithing and blued finish. Reliable Electroplating carries the master letter’s separate gold-plating credit.

Closing the Case

Inside the case, the three revolvers lie a hand’s width apart—closer than the sides they remember ever stood. The one afternoon those sides came near it, thirty shots crossed the lot in thirty seconds and settled nothing: the quarrel ran on through ambush and vendetta and a longer war of memoirs. It comes to rest here, the Cowboys’ Colt and the lawman’s side by side at last, the gambler’s between them.

Dubber’s gravers laid the story into the steel. Plumer’s needle drew its faces from ivory. Turnbull’s blue runs under it; Hasson’s mesquite closes over it. The set keeps its own arithmetic of threes—three graves, three barrels, three consecutive serials, 3.8 troy ounces of gold—and beneath the numbers, nearly a century and a half of telling.

Testimony aged into memory; memory hardened into gold. On the shortest barrel, the coach still runs. On the middle, the cards lie fanned and the tiger waits. On the longest, the hearse rolls toward Boothill forever. The glass comes down, and the legend keeps.

PHOTO GALLERY:

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On an April evening in 1930, in the hills of northern India, a man eased down a narrow ravine — a clutch of nightjar eggs carried with care, a rifle at the ready. He stepped clear of a great slab of rock, looked back over his right shoulder — and straight into the face of a man-eating tigress.

The rifle lay across his chest, pointing away from her. To bring it to bear, the muzzle would have to travel three-quarters of a circle. One-handed. So slowly that the movement itself could not be seen.

The man was Jim Corbett — and those few seconds have been argued over for ninety years. At the centre of the argument stands one particular rifle, with a number in a London gunmaker’s ledger, and a silver plaque engraved with the wrong initials.

But this is not the story of that rifle. It is the story of all of them.

The Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal presents…

This feature was created in collaboration with Ian Douglas, author of Undiscovered Corbett, published by Merlin Unwin Books. The book is available in the United States through independent bookstores and major online booksellers, and directly from the publisher in the United Kingdom.

Douglas found Corbett the way generations of readers have — as a child, in the pages of the books, “at once fascinated,” as he writes, “by his tales of the Indian jungles.” That fascination set the course of a life: forty years in nature conservation across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia, among the birds and mammals of the forests and wetlands; fifty years of returning to India; and beneath it all, decades of research into the man himself. Corbett ended as a conservationist. His chronicler began as one.

The research produced a book of discoveries rather than retellings — Corbett’s own previously unpublished writing, private letters, and ninety photographs never before printed. At the heart of Douglas’s research are Rigby’s ledgers, the surviving W.J. Jeffery day books, and the private hunting journals of Nawab Sultan Hussain of Barh — written in Persian script and presented in translation from the Urdu.

A man’s battery, read closely, becomes a kind of biography. Corbett’s begins with a broken gun.

The first gun Corbett carried was already a wreck when it arrived, and he loved it anyway.

Edward James Corbett was eight years old, a boy at Naini Tal raised on Fenimore Cooper, who had already worked his way up the small arms of childhood — catapult, pellet bow, a homemade bow and arrow — when his cousin Stephen Dease presented him with an old muzzle-loading shotgun. It had begun life as a double. The right barrel had split in use, and the gun had been reduced to a single-shot, the damage bound up with copper wire. It was heavy and unwieldy and Jim was immensely proud of it. For two years he carried it through the forests around Naini Tal and Kaladhungi, learning the coordination of hand and eye, learning fieldcraft, learning the woods.

The first gun established a pattern: practical use mattered more than finish or price. The cabinet begins with copper wire.

The second gun was never his. The Naini Tal Volunteers kept a cadet company at Jim’s school, drilled and equipped with the .450 Martini-Henry carbine — a single-shot, but high velocity for its day — and probably in the winter of 1885–86, at the age of ten, Jim was offered the loan of one from the company armoury. The conditions of the loan are the interesting part: the rifle was to be properly cleaned, and the used cartridge cases returned.

Return the empties. It was standard military practice, and it opens a door onto a world the modern shooter has largely forgotten: the economy of brass. A centre-fire case was designed to expand on firing until it sealed the breech perfectly, and it could be resized, re-primed, recharged and re-bulleted several times before it was spent. The armoury held the tooling, usually by Joyce & Co.; the knowledge passed from old soldiers to cadets. Every cartridge was an object with a working life, like the rifles themselves. The company sergeant major, generously, kept the boy in ammunition — and so equipped, Jim wandered where he chose in the jungles around Kaladhungi, and shot his first leopard at the age of ten and a half.

Hold the Martini in mind. A rifle of this pattern will reappear, decades on, on the road to the most consequential hunt of the whole story.

In the winter of 1892–93, seventeen and a half years old, Corbett left Kumaon for Bihar and a railway job. Douglas notes a detail of the period that deserves to be better known: hardware stores in small Indian towns sold guns alongside tools and building materials, stocked by departing British officers offloading their weapons at the end of their service. Quality secondhand arms could be had for a fraction of the price of new. Before leaving for the railway’s headquarters, Jim acquired a used British-made BSA .303; passing through Lucknow, he added a used BSA 12-bore. Two working guns for a working man, both previously owned, both immediately put to feeding the camp.

It was at Mokameh Ghat, where he would spend twenty-two years managing the trans-shipment of goods across the Ganges, that the cabinet acquired its social life. In November 1901 he met the Nawab Sultan Hussain of Barh — Trinity College, Cambridge; a double-breasted suit spotted across a railway platform — and the friendship that followed is one of the central discoveries in Douglas’s research. The Nawab kept a shooting journal, volumes of which survive, written in Persian script, and which Douglas presents in translation from the Urdu.

Through the journals we watch the young railwayman received into a princely sporting world. At the Christmas shoot of 1901, Jim shot his BSA hammer gun while Tom Kelly, the station master, borrowed Jim’s .303; the first evening’s bag ran past three hundred duck and geese to sixteen guns, and when the elephants beat the riverside grasses next day, a boatload of the wild boar was sent back, in the care of the station master, as a feast for the labourers who worked under Jim. On the second day Jim was stationed in the favoured place beside the Nawab and lent a Joseph Manton pigeon gun chambered for 2¾ inches.

A journal entry from January 1902 records the Nawab sailing his barge downstream to collect Jim and Kelly, a line of six boats and a kitchen boat in tow, for a shoot that yielded 452 duck in an afternoon and a morning. In another entry, Jim asks leave to try the midnight flights of greylag geese raiding the winter wheat; the Nawab, doubtful that shooting geese on their feeding grounds at midnight was quite fair sport, granted permission anyway, wrote a slip for two hundred cartridges from his armourer, and lent the barge. The party came home after dawn with exactly four dozen geese.

The cabinet fills with working guns; the life fills with friends.

In the summer of 1906, the Nawab gave Corbett a rifle. The two men, both in Calcutta on business, spent their days at the showrooms of Manton & Co. There, with Jim’s full agreement, the Nawab ordered a new W.J. Jeffery .450/400 Nitro Express double rifle. He then passed on the rifle it replaced: his Jeffery .450/400 Black Powder Express, a hammer gun thought to date from about 1895 with a Jones underlever, the strong, deliberate, twin-lugged action developed in 1859, in which the lever must be worked by hand both to open and to relock. It was an excellent rifle by a well-respected maker — one which, bought new, would have been far beyond Jim’s means. The Nawab’s own note of the gift survives in his papers, recording his pleasure in arming “my young friend” against, among other things, rogue beasts and tigers past their prime.

And then the gun disappears. Douglas is candid about this: the gifted Jeffery is never specifically mentioned again. A generous gift from a close friend is unlikely to have been quickly passed on, and Corbett may well have kept separate batteries at Kumaon and Mokameh — but the record simply goes quiet.

What the record offers instead is a ghost. Soon after the gift, Corbett’s writing begins to mention a heavy double — a .500 Express firing modified Cordite — with no maker named, no origin given. Douglas suggests it may have been on loan, or bought used. This is the rifle Corbett describes taking to Champawat in 1907, against a tigress the authorities had spent years failing to kill — army officers from the Almora cantonment, Government-appointed shikaris, a paid reward that proved premature; and it surfaces again in The Temple Tiger, where Corbett describes cocking both hammers, and then struggling to reload because the underlever was held by two lugs on the trigger guard. That, as Douglas observes, is a precise description of the same action as the gifted Jeffery — though the calibres differ, and he is scrupulous in stopping short of declaring them one gun. Two descriptions of underlever rifles, then, one gifted and one unnamed, moving through the same years; a resemblance, and a mystery the ledgers cannot close.

The terminology itself tells a story. Cordite became available in 1891, producing pressures beyond those for which older black powder rifles had been designed. A generation of sportsmen with perfectly sound Black Powder Express guns wanted the new power without the new bill. The trade’s answer was modified Cordite — the propellant reformulated with less nitro-glycerine, burning at a lower temperature and placing less strain on old chambers. A “modified Cordite rifle” was thus usually an old Black Powder Express gun granted a second life. The unnamed .500 appears to have been just such a survivor: yesterday’s technology, in experienced hands, against a tigress that had defeated every previous effort the district could mount. It worked. And then it, too, vanished.

The confusion is common and worth correcting plainly: the famous Rigby did not kill the Champawat tigress. The Champawat was won with the unnamed rifle — and, in the preliminary goral hunt Corbett describes, a single-shot Martini firing black powder, an echo of the borrowed carbine of his boyhood; elsewhere he writes of taking his first tiger with an old army rifle, almost certainly a .577/450, bought for fifty rupees from a seafaring man he suspected had stolen it. The tools of the first man-eater were old, cheap, borrowed or anonymous.

The Rigby was the reward. Sir John Hewett, Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces, had a rifle purchased from Manton & Co. of Calcutta and presented to Corbett — at a Durbar in Naini Tal, by Jim’s own account — in recognition of Champawat. Rigby’s ledgers, which Douglas reproduces, show an original order from Manton’s dated 19 April 1905, for three best Mauser sporting rifles, numbers 2508, 2516 and 2517, at £39 6s. Number 2516 became Corbett’s. A .275 on the Mauser 98 action, it carried five 7×57 rimless cartridges in the clip magazine and a silver plaque let into the stock — engraved, incorrectly, to “Mr. J. G. Corbett.” He was Edward James.

The campaigns of number 2516 need only be named, because Corbett himself narrated them for the world: Rudraprayag, Talla Des, Chowgarh. But Douglas’s book restores the physical cost that the published accounts omitted or softened, and two episodes belong to the rifle’s biography.

The first is Talla Des. In February 1929, at Bindukhera, a heavy rifle was discharged close beside Corbett’s head; the blast scorched the lining of his left ear and burst the eardrum. His response was to go hunting — he set out for the Talla Des man-eaters that April, by his own reasoning to distract himself from the pain, and conducted the entire campaign with his left eardrum destroyed and his hearing badly impaired, the injury worsening into an abscess as he hunted. The magazine readers of 1930, Douglas notes, were spared the full significance of what he achieved on that trip.

The second is the accident. In notes written after her brother’s death, Maggie Corbett recorded an evening at Kaladhungi — the date is lost; either side of the Great War — when Jim, following a tiger’s prints across a river in fading light, slipped on a wet rock. The rifle shot from his hand, the butt struck stone, and the piece discharged past his head. He recrossed the stream over a fallen tree and walked home hiding a hand that had been furrowed open, his shoulder peppered, what Maggie called Cordite up his arm. Douglas’s reconstruction is a model of quiet forensics. The rifle was the .275; he argues that it was most likely loaded with a 173-grain round-nosed bullet, probably jacketed in nickel. What struck Corbett was not shot but the splash of the bullet off rock — jacket fragments, lead and stone. Maggie, raised among black powder guns, reached for the vocabulary of her girlhood. Douglas finds the likely mechanism in the Rigby’s three-position safety: carried at the intermediate position, it could be thumbed off quickly and could also be jolted to fire by just such an impact. Pure bad luck, on loose wet stone, in failing light. In both episodes, a rifle injured the man — but only in the second was it the rifle he carried.

Which brings the story back to that hillside — to five o’clock on the evening of 11 April 1930, and the most analysed few seconds in the literature of shikar. Corbett is easing down a narrow nala, a clutch of nightjar eggs cupped in his left hand, the rifle placed in his right by Madho Singh, who has whispered that something has growled — and stepping clear of a giant slab of rock, he looks back over his right shoulder straight into the face of the Chowgarh tigress. The rifle lies diagonally across his chest. To bear on her, the muzzle must travel three-quarters of a circle, one-handed, so slowly as to be imperceptible. It does. That same evening he writes to Maggie: a bullet through the heart, no sitting up and no fuss — and, he is careful to add, the eggs unbroken.

Readers have debated for ninety years whether the feat was physically possible. Douglas gave it the most direct practical test available. At Rigby’s London premises, wearing white cotton gloves, Marc Newton — Rigby’s managing director — handed him number 2516. As archivist Diggory Hadoke read from the firm’s own copy of Jungle Stories — the privately printed 1935 first telling — Douglas reenacted the motion: rifle across the chest, imaginary eggs in the left hand, the muzzle swung slowly and without tremor through three-quarters of a circle until it came to bear. Entirely possible, he concluded; absolutely plausible. The adjoining gunsmiths, who had stopped work to watch, applauded when Hadoke closed the book.

The Rigby is the famous rifle. By Douglas’s documented tally, it is not the one that accounted for the most man-eaters.

That distinction belongs to the other great rifle in Corbett’s battery: a W.J. Jeffery & Co. .450/400 3-inch Nitro Express, built around 1909 and probably bought in India in 1911 or 1912. Where and how Corbett acquired it is unrecorded — Douglas raises, as speculation only, the possibility that the Nawab’s old Black Powder Express rifle went in part-exchange — but its likeness to the rifle the Nawab had bought new at Manton’s in 1906, which Jim had years to handle and admire in the field, can hardly be coincidence. Douglas’s inference is that Corbett chose a pattern he had learned to trust in the Nawab’s hands.

Its record is the working ledger of Corbett’s career: the grown cub of the Chowgarh tigress; the famed tiger known as the Bachelor of Powalgarh, shot in 1930 at what was probably the culmination of Corbett’s sporting life; the man-eaters of Mohan, Kanda, Chuka and Thak. Through the interwar years the .275 and the .450/400 travelled almost as a pair, the light magazine rifle and the heavy double, each covering the other’s weaknesses — the classic Indian battery, reduced to two guns and perfected.

As an object, the Jeffery repays close looking. Douglas — working from the rifle itself, its case, and the firm’s surviving day books, now held in Houston, which confirm serial number 20176 — gives a detailed

physical description. Its 24-inch barrels are stamped Krupp Gussstahl and proved for Cordite; a doll’s-head extension locks into the standing breech; a Purdey double under-bolt sits beneath a top lever, the snap action securing itself as the barrels close; it has double triggers and folding leaf sights graduated from 100 to 500 yards, each shallow V centred with a line of platinum. That range was optimistic: most of the rifle’s documented work was done inside a hundred yards. The safety is the non-automatic pattern, its gold-inlaid SAFE sliding forward with a click to fire.

The maker’s name does not tell the whole manufacturing story. Jeffery of King Street were better understood as retailers and finishers; much of the actual gunmaking was carried out by the Birmingham trade, dispersed among small workshops. The distinctive scalloped boxlock on Corbett’s rifle points to its probable builder: Daniel Leonard & Sons — by 1909 in the hands of Henry Leonard, at 35 Whittle Street — specialists in double rifles who sold the majority of their work through W.J. Jeffery. The name on the barrel was London; the probable maker was in Birmingham.

The rifle’s wear records its use. The blueing is largely gone. The chequering is worn smooth in places. Elmer Keith, who owned it later, judged that it showed “more use and less abuse than any old rifle I have ever seen,” the action still perfect — which indicates that Corbett carried it across decades of hill country and long nights in all weathers, and cared for it with exceptional thoroughness. The original case survives, its leather and canvas cover showing, as Douglas puts it, the signs of a full life.

The Jeffery’s last man-eater was the Thak tigress, in November 1938, and Corbett’s letter to his friend Ibbotson, written in the immediate aftermath and printed by Douglas, gives the rifle its retirement scene in its owner’s own hand. The second barrel, fired as the recoil of the first carried him off his ledge — fired, as he writes, while he was more or less in the air — threw the rifle against his cheek and left a swelling he measured against a cricket ball, and sent him heels over head onto the men below, who caught him; the rifle, he admits, would otherwise have gone. And then the sign-off: “this ends my thirty-two years service on the active list.” The letter retired both rifle and owner from man-eater work.

Every cabinet has its shallower drawers, and this one is no exception.

There is the Westley Richards .275 of 1909, bought off a glass showcase at Manton’s — a new model the makers were anxious to introduce for Indian hill shooting, sold to Corbett on the understanding he could return it. Douglas’s reading of its trigger is the key to one of Corbett’s most famous failures: the rifle may have carried a double-pull arrangement in which the rear trigger set the front to a two-pound release, and a man who forgot the drill and kept pulling the rear trigger would find the gun simply declining to fire — which is precisely how the Temple Tiger walked away from him. The rifle is never mentioned again; returned to Manton’s, or otherwise disposed of, nobody knows.

There is the 28-bore — origin unknown, most likely a Birmingham double — which Corbett brought along on the Rudraprayag campaign on the chance of a chukar shoot with Ibbotson, and which found itself lashed into the famous gun-trap set across the leopard’s track, his .275 alongside it. Lord Hailey thought there was something uncanny in Corbett’s performance with so light a gun. It may also have been the shotgun Corbett offered Mr Verma before leaving India in 1947; Douglas suggests the choice was between the 12-bore and the 28-bore.

And there are the Webleys. The .455 service revolver Corbett almost certainly carried during his First World War service, and the little .32 Webley & Scott that appears on his firearms licence of 1947 — his last year in India.

What became of them all is a study in the two fates available to a famous gun.

The Jeffery was auctioned directly from Corbett’s estate on the instruction of his executors, and has passed since through a succession of North American collectors, changing hands most recently in 2015. The Nawab’s own Jeffery, the near-twin bought at Manton’s in 1906, remained in his family in India until 1995. And the Rigby — the rifle Corbett called his “faithful old friend” — went the other way: retired from Africa to his publishers at Oxford University Press, it sat with them until 2015, when John Rigby & Co. brought it home to London — and, in 2016, carried it back to India.

One rifle is publicly displayed; the other remains in private hands. The first is the presentation piece. The second is the rifle that, by Douglas’s documented tally, accounted for more of the man-eaters.

The journey had been negotiated through two governments. At Rudraprayag, several hundred people gathered to see the rifle arrive, because the leopard it killed there in 1926 had taken 125 human lives, and the district has not forgotten. But the moment that matters happened in a quiet room at Kaladhungi, where the glass-panelled rack still stood empty in the corner.

Marc Newton noticed it, crossed the floor, and set the butt of number 2516 into its original slot. It fitted perfectly. Nothing had to be forced or explained. After more than sixty years, the fit remained exact.

Jim Corbett has been present in every chapter of this story, though we have approached him almost entirely through his guns — the broken muzzle-loader bound in wire, the borrowed Martini and its returned empties, the secondhand BSA guns, the Nawab’s gift, the nameless .500, the reward rifle with the wrong initials on its plaque, the worn Jeffery with its cricket-ball recoil and its ten-word retirement. That is what a cabinet can hold beyond walnut and steel. A man’s battery, read closely, becomes a kind of biography; and this one, thanks to Ian Douglas’s patient work in the ledgers and journals, can now be read in considerable detail.

A Life in Steel was created in collaboration with Ian Douglas. Undiscovered Corbett is available now from Merlin Unwin Books. Readers in the United States can order it through independent bookstores and major online booksellers. UK readers can purchase it directly from Merlin Unwin Books, whose website also directs international customers to the appropriate distributor.

If you have a book, fine gun, collection, or business you would like to share with readers of Rose & Scroll, we welcome advertising and collaborative inquiries. Write to advertising@roseandscroll.com.

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A K.C. Hunt–Engraved Rigby .470 Nitro Express:

The Eye-Line Through the Steel...

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Three Cape buffalo stand in open grass: an old bull square in the middle of it, head raised beneath the great sweep of his horns, a second at his flank, a third just breaking the surface of the grass. Behind them a mountain holds down the horizon. Nothing moves. The country belongs to them.

Turn the rifle in your hands and they are gone, and there are lions. A lioness stands in front, head lowered, watching something past the edge of the world. The male rises behind her, taller, mouth open, looking the same way. A single small tree, a plain running out to a low horizon, and nothing else.

Turn it again — onto its back, the way a rifle in a rack or a photograph is never seen — and two bull elephants come head-on through dry grass, trunks down, tusks carried forward. They are close, and they keep coming.

Go back to the lions and you find what she was watching. It is on the other side of the rifle. Between the two locks lies the whole width of an action, and the engraver cut an eye-line straight through it.

All of it fits in the span of your two hands, in dots and lines almost too fine for the unaided eye. The rifle is a John Rigby and Company best sidelock ejector in four-seventy Nitro Express, proofed in London in nineteen eighty-two and completed in nineteen eighty-four. Beneath the buffalo, and again beneath the lions, in script you need good light to read: K.C. Hunt — a man who learned his trade in a Soho workshop from engravers trained in the reign of Victoria, and who worked past midnight to finish things. And while this rifle was on the bench, the house that built it — a house begun in Dublin in seventeen seventy-five — was passing into new hands.

What follows is that rifle, scene by scene.

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A Holland & Holland Royal Modèle de Luxe .375 Flanged Magnum:

The Bestiary of Bond Street…

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No. 98 New Bond Street, some rain-darkened afternoon in the later nineteen-thirties. Someone we cannot name is bent over the order book. The request is not a rifle so much as a small mythology — serpents for the action bars, a chimera for the trigger guard, a mask to keep a spare sight bead behind its jaws. The cartridge is real enough: the .375, for the largest and least imaginary animals on earth. Everything else on the steel will be invented.

No name travels with the rifle — no monogram on the grip cap, no owner’s inscription anywhere on the steel, only the maker’s own words. The client remains what the object itself suggests: someone of means and unusually particular taste, standing in the front shop of the most decorated riflemaker in England and asking for more than its best gun. The Royal was only the beginning: the order called for the grade above it — the Modèle de Luxe — and the difference was never mechanical: better wood, longer hours, and above all the carving — months of a craftsman’s life spent raising monsters out of hardened steel a few thousandths of an inch at a time.

Imagine the rest, because imagining is what the evidence permits. The order traveling up to the Harrow Road works; the barrels soldered, proved, regulated and regulated again until both bores consented to a single opinion; the lockplates going out to an engraver’s bench where a man with a graver and a chasing hammer began, surface by surface, to populate them. Then the trunk case coming down the stairs at last — brass corners bright, the black-and-gold label pasted in the lid — and one plausible passage East for such a rifle in such a decade: the P&O boat, the Bombay customs shed, the up-country train, a forest bungalow at the end of a red-dust road. Lantern light finds the trigger guard, and the chimera’s round eye catches the flame. Somewhere beyond the verandah, something entirely real is calling in the dark.

And there is the paradox at the heart of this rifle: nothing real appears anywhere on it. Whoever stood at the order book commissioned a weapon for the most dangerous living animals on earth, and had it guarded, every inch of it, by animals that never lived.

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What Lies on the Bench

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A Francotte–Abercrombie & Fitch Eagle Grade Double Rifle in .22 WRF:

The Best Gun, Writ Small…

The Smallest Case in the Gun Room

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One can imagine the lift rising through the Madison Avenue store some evening in the late 1930s — past floors of fly tackle and oilskin, past the canoes and safari kit, the whole apparatus of the firm that outfitted Roosevelt for Africa and called itself the Greatest Sporting Goods Store in the World. The doors open on the seventh floor, and the noise of the street is gone. This is the gun room: racks of doubles, glass-eyed game heads, the smell of oil and walnut, and somewhere behind the counter, ledgers in which every gun that passed through the room was entered by hand.

The clerk does not reach for the racks. He goes instead to the case shelf and brings down a tan leather trunk noticeably smaller than its neighbors — the size of case a man might carry for opera glasses and a picnic. The lid opens on burgundy baize. Barrels above, action and stock below, an oil bottle in its compartment. And on the belly of an action you could very nearly cover with your palm, a gold eagle spreads its wings, the American shield on its breast.

He lifts the pieces out and joins them — barrels to action, forend snapped home — and hands across a complete double rifle that weighs less than five pounds. It has everything: the quarter rib with its folding leaves, the double triggers, the ejectors, the carved fences, the game scenes in the plates. It is, feature for feature, the equal of the elephant guns down the rack, and it would be lost inside one of their cases. The customer turns it to the light, and the clerk names the chambering — a rimfire cartridge made for squirrels.

Two rifled barrels, built on the double-rifle principle, at Liège’s full price, for the smallest game there is. Who asked for such a thing — and why?

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The Rifle in the Hand

The rifle answers some of that question the moment it comes out of its case today. The barrels run twenty-one inches to a small front sight, blued to a depth that reads almost liquid against the coin-bright action; a raised quarter rib carries the two folding rear leaves low and tight to the metal. Double triggers sit in an engraved guard, ejectors throw the spent cases, the splinter forend locks close under the tubes with a gently beaked nose, and the pistol grip fills the hand more than the four-pound, twelve-ounce weight suggests it should. The pull is fourteen inches. Nothing about it is a toy, and nothing about it apologizes for its size. It handles like a serious gun because it is one.

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A Parker CHE 28-bore, Meriden, circa 1915–16:

A Small-Bore Old Reliable…

An Imagined Journey

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One can imagine the gun where it was meant to be: in cover, late in the season, on the kind of cold bright morning that makes a man glad of a light gun. Frost still silvers the broomsedge in the low places the sun has not yet reached. A setter quarters the ground ahead, swinging into the wind, and the man behind it carries the little Parker the way one carries a gun he trusts — broken over the forearm, barely felt, five and a half pounds asking nothing of the arm that holds it.

The dog draws on, slows, and locks. The man closes the gun and steps past the setter’s nose, and the covey goes up in a hard grey rush. The 28 is at his shoulder before he has told it to — a gun this light and this short is already moving when a heavier gun is still being lifted — and two reports come close together over the dog’s head. The little gun has done what it was built to do, and done it faster than its size has any right to allow. He breaks it, and the cases clear; the morning smells of burnt powder and frost.

Such a gun does not happen by accident. Someone wanted it — wanted smallness without any loss of quality, the hardest thing a maker can be asked for — and went to the best sporting house in New York to have Meriden build it: short in the barrel, light in the hand, finished to the full, and cased in leather and red baize. A little gun, made on purpose, for exactly the morning above.

A century of seasons later it is still light in the hand, still quick to the shoulder, still carrying its colour. This is the story of why a man would choose such a thing, and of the house that could make the choice possible.

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The Object in the Hand

Take the gun up and the first fact is scale. Everything about it is small and nothing about it is slight. The action is jewel-like — a trim little body beneath the standing breech, no broader than it must be — and the eye reads the weight before the scale confirms it at five pounds eight ounces. The barrels are twenty-four inches, deep blue-black and even, the kind of finish that lies down in the steel rather than sitting on top of it. They rise from a silver-grey action across whose surfaces the original case colour still moves in soft traces: grey, blue, a smoky green, a straw note at the edges. The fences are fully sculpted and engraved, the breech ends crisp, the rib neat and restrained.

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A VENZI-Signed Beretta SO9 EELL in 20-Bore

The Featherweight Aristocrat

An Imagined Journey

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In a narrow valley north of Brescia, where the Mella runs cold off the Alps and men have cut and blued steel since before there were nations to sell it to, a blank of walnut is turned in the light. Someone is looking for the figure — the dark river of grain that will, one winter morning years from now, catch a low December sun. The blank is set aside. It has been chosen.

A few benches away, an action no larger than a man’s palm is taking shape under the file. It is being made small on purpose, scaled down so faithfully to its gauge that the finished gun will weigh less than six pounds and still lock up like the door of a vault. There is no hurry here. The valley has had five hundred years to learn that haste is the enemy of a best gun, and it has forgotten nothing.

When the metalwork is right, the action travels a short distance to another bench, and another man bends over it with a loupe screwed into his eye. He works in silence, a fine graver tapping at the steel — not cutting so much as drawing, building a woodcock out of the valley’s grey light one fine line at a time, until the bird seems to lift off the floor plate under its own power. Around it, scroll begins to flow like water finding its level. At the last, a sliver of gold is let into the steel and burnished until it glows: a small crown, no taller than a fingernail, the old mark of the very best a house can make.

And then, at last, the gun goes where all of this was always pointed. A frosted edge of cover on an upland morning, breath showing, dogs working ahead. A bird gets up hard and the gun comes to the shoulder before the mind has fully caught up — light, quick, alive in the hands in a way no heavy gun ever is. One report rolls across the field. Afterward the gun goes back into its leather case, into the green baize cut exactly to its shape, and waits for the next morning as patiently as it waited to be born.

The gun in the case is a Beretta SO9 EELL in 20-bore, weighing five pounds and fourteen ounces, its locks signed by the master engraver Silvano Venzi. It is, by a number of measures, about as close as a production house has ever come to the platonic ideal of the small-bore game gun. This is its story.

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What it is

To understand why a gun like this matters, you have to understand that Beretta has always made two kinds of gun: the ones that come off the line in the thousands, and the ones that do not. The SO sidelock belongs entirely to the second kind. Sovrapposto — “superimposed,” the Italian term for an over-and-under — gives the line its initials, but the letters that follow are what tell you where you are standing. An SO is a true full-sidelock best gun, built by hand in a dedicated custom department at Gardone Val Trompia, apart from the factory that makes everything else.

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A Browning B25 Exhibition Set, Signed by Martens:

A Windmill in the Steel…

An Imagined Journey

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The wind comes up before the light does. You can hear the mill turning somewhere ahead of you in the grey, the long vanes ticking around on their tower, drawing water up into a tank that catches the first colour of the morning. The grass is dry and pale and waist-high, gone over to seed, and it holds the cold the way only autumn grass does. You walk into it, past a lone stand of trees, the light coming up slow and level across the open ground. Then a bird goes up — a dove, quick off the grass on whistling wings — and another behind it, and for a moment the whole still scene is in motion: wings against a pale sky, the mill turning, the morning arriving all at once.

It is a fine place. It is also about two inches wide, and it is made of steel.

What you have been standing in is the left side of a shotgun’s action: a hunting scene cut by hand into the bright flank of a Browning, the windmill and the water tank and the rising doves all rendered in line and shadow on a surface you could cover with your thumb. The gun is a Belgian gun, made at Herstal, in the old Liège gun country that has built fine arms for centuries. The field is an American one. How that prairie came to be living in that steel, and whose hand put it there, is the whole of the story — but it is worth saying at the outset that the gun gives you the field before it gives you anything else. That is the kind of gun it is.

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The specimen

Set down plainly, before it is dressed in any history: this is a Browning B25 Exhibition, a two-barrel set in 28 and 20 gauge, engraved and signed by Martens, and built at the FN/Browning Custom Shop in Herstal, Belgium, in 2005.

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A 1931 J. Albrecht sidelock drilling:

The Forester’s Three Barrels…

An Imagined Journey

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The frost has not yet left the low ground. He comes up through the spruce in the gray before the sun finds the valley, the gun balanced across his forearm with the unthinking ease of long habit — the weight already part of him. Three barrels. He has never wanted for a fourth.

The hare goes first. It breaks from a tuft of dead grass at the edge of the cut lane, ears flat, running the way hares run, all hindquarters and panic. His thumb has already found the right place. The front trigger folds back under his finger as the gun comes up, and the right barrel speaks once, and the hare turns over in the wet grass and is still.

He breaks the gun, thumbs out the spent hull, feeds in a fresh shell, walks on.

The covey he does not expect - and when the partridges come up out of the stubble in that hammering rush of wings, the gun is already swinging. The first bird folds to the right barrel; he pulls through onto a second as the covey breaks for the tree line, and the left barrel takes it cleanly. Two for the morning, and the sun not yet over the ridge.

He is reloading, head down over the open breech, when the boar comes.

It does not announce itself — no slots to read at leisure, no patient stalk to make. It is simply there: broken out of the blackthorn not forty paces off, heavy and black, crossing the lane and then checking at its far edge, the half-second a boar gives a man and no more. His shot barrels are empty in his hands. It does not matter. His thumb finds the small lever and drives it over, and somewhere inside the gun a mechanism shifts its loyalty — the front trigger letting go of the right barrel and taking up the single rifled barrel beneath, the rear leaf springing up off the rib to meet his eye. The heavy eight-millimeter speaks once, low and flat against the cold, and the boar drops at the edge of the timber.

He stands a moment in the quiet. One gun. A hare, two birds, and a boar that gave him no warning at all — and the gun answered each of them in its turn without ever leaving his hands.

This was the promise. This was always the promise.

What the gun does not tell you, standing there in the gray light, is everything else it has to say — who made it, and where, and how to read the small forest carved into its sides. For that, you have to take it in hand.

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The Forester’s Three Barrels

A drilling is the most honest gun in the world about what it is for. It makes no pretense of being a single elegant idea, the way an English best gun does — one purpose, executed to perfection. It tells you plainly that it was built to do three jobs, and it carries all three in the open: two shotgun barrels riding above a rifle barrel, a small lever to govern which of them you mean. It is a gun built by people who had thought hard about what a day in the field actually demands, and who had decided that the answer was: more than one thing.

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A F.lli Bertuzzi Twenty-Bore, Built on the Boss System:

The Coronet and the Rose…

Twenty-bore · over-and-under · sidelock · engraved by Ferraglio · Gardone Val Trompia, 2000

An Imagined Journey

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There is a moment, on a high September morning, when the bird is still only a thought — a dark mark lifting over the brow of the hill, carried sideways on a wind that has been building since first light. The loader’s hand finds your shoulder. You do not look down at the gun. You have stopped needing to. It comes up the way water finds its level, the muzzles already moving before the mind has finished its arithmetic, six pounds and twelve ounces of walnut and steel that weighs, in the hands, like nothing at all and like everything that has ever been made well.

It is a small gun for a large morning. A twenty-bore, where the men on either side of you carry twelves, and yet the bird folds cleanly against the cloud and the second barrel is never needed, and the empty case turns lazily in the air behind you as the action falls open. You break it across your arm to reload, and the low sun runs along the bright action and catches, on the underside of the forend, a small inlay worked into the chequering in gold. A coronet set above an ornament of scroll and leaf, the kind of mark a man asks for when the gun is to be wholly his own.

Someone ordered this gun — not bought it from a rack, but ordered it, to these dimensions, with this wood, with that coronet on the forend, in the way a man does when he means a gun to be his for life and to outlast him. He chose well, and he chose people who knew their work: two brothers in a workshop in the Italian Alps who built the action, and an engraver named Ferraglio who covered every surface of it in roses. To understand what he commissioned, you have to take the gun apart in your mind and look at it a piece at a time.

Begin, as the gun does, with the valley.

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I. The Valley and the Brothers

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The Gun in the Hand

Let us start with what is in front of us.

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A Cogswell & Harrison Best Sidelock Double Rifle in .375 Flanged Magnum:

Late Light at Piccadilly…

The Rose & Scroll Fine Gun Journal

An Imagined Journey

The Rifle Before Us

Let us put the artefact on the bench and describe it plainly, before we open the books.

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The Gun Revealed — Form and Purpose

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A Study in Balance and Intent

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A Rifle of Quiet Precision

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The L.C. Smith Crown Grade 12 Gauge Two-Barrel Set

A Crown Among American Sporting Arms

An Imagined Journey

The morning air carries the scent of frost and fallen leaves.

A pickup truck rests at the edge of a wide Midwestern field where the tall grass bends gently in the early light. Beyond the hedgerow, the countryside stretches into rolling farmland and scattered oak groves—perfect country for birds. Somewhere ahead, a covey of quail will erupt with the sudden roar of wings upland hunters know so well.

On the tailgate sits an oak-and-leather gun case, its corners worn softly by decades of careful use. The leather has darkened with age, the brass fittings polished by time and handling. When the lid is opened, the interior reveals a deep blue cloth lining, carefully fitted compartments cradling the contents within.

Inside lies an American classic—an L.C. Smith Crown Grade, its walnut stock glowing warmly in the low morning sun. Beside the action rest two sets of barrels, each polished and blued to a quiet brilliance.

For a moment the hunter pauses.

The longer barrels—thirty-two inches of deliberate steel—suggest distance, precision, and patience. They would serve well in open fields where birds flush far ahead and shots stretch longer.

But the twenty-eight-inch barrels promise something different. They suggest speed and balance, the quick instinctive swing needed when a bird rises suddenly from close cover.

The gun itself is lifted gently from the case.

The walnut is alive with flame and fiddleback grain, the straight English grip falling naturally into the hand. Along the lockplates, finely cut engraving flows across the steel in delicate scrollwork. In the center of each lockplate, dogs move through upland grass, forever locked in the moment before a bird takes flight.

Above the scenes, subtle sunburst elements radiate across the background, lending a sense of depth and motion to the composition.

A small detail catches the light.

At the pivot of the top lever, a gold crown gleams softly. It is a small detail, easily overlooked at first glance, yet unmistakable once seen.

It is a fitting emblem.

For this shotgun—as its name suggests—was among the finest regular production offerings of the Hunter Arms Company of Fulton, New York, a gun built in the great age of American sporting arms.

To understand the significance of the Crown Grade, it is worth stepping briefly into the history of the L.C. Smith name itself.

The Legacy of L.C. Smith

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A Kennedy–Burgess–Kaye Custom Winchester Model 70 in .300 H&H Magnum

A Collaboration in Steel and Walnut

An Imagined Journey

The morning air carries the thin, quiet chill that comes just before sunrise in the high country. Frost still clings to the grass and the first pale light begins to touch the tops of distant ridges. A hunter pauses along the edge of a slope, the valley below still shaded in blue shadow.

In his hands rests a rifle that feels immediately right—balanced, deliberate, alive in that quiet way only a finely made sporting rifle can be. Walnut and steel come together in a form shaped by experience rather than fashion. The stock settles naturally into the shoulder, its checkering catching lightly against the palm, the grain of the walnut flowing through the wrist in dark marbled streaks.

The bolt lifts smoothly. There is no hurry in the movement, only precision. When the bolt slides forward again it chambers the long tapered case of the .300 Holland & Holland Magnum with effortless ease.

The rifle comes to the shoulder and the hunter looks down the sighting plane of the barrel. The matted flat along the top of the barrel absorbs the rising sunlight, eliminating glare and framing the standing rear sight. The front bead glows faintly against the distant hillside.

For a moment, the rifle catches the light. The scroll engraving along the receiver edges shimmers softly. On the underside of the rifle, unseen but no less carefully executed, a gold bear moves across the floorplate in a landscape of engraved steel.

This is not merely a hunting rifle.

It is a custom sporting rifle built on the legendary Winchester Model 70, bearing the combined work of three accomplished craftsmen: stockmaker Monty Kennedy, riflemaker Tom Burgess, and engraver Tommy J. Kaye.

In the world of American custom rifles, the appearance of these three names together represents an extraordinary convergence of talent.

Together, their work reflects a tradition that defined the golden era of American custom rifles—where mechanical excellence, artistry, and field performance were brought together in a single sporting arm.

The Foundation – The Pre-64 Winchester Model 70

At the center of the rifle lies one of the most respected sporting rifle actions ever produced: the Winchester Model 70, introduced in 1936 by Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

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The Auguste Lebeau of Liège

Elegance in Steel

An Imagined Journey

Morning settles softly over Liège. The streets are narrow, worn smooth by centuries of trade, their stone reflecting the pale light of another working day. Behind modest façades, workshops stir to life. The sound is quiet but constant — steel being filed, walnut shaped by hand, engraving tools tapping rhythmically as patterns emerge from polished surfaces.

Inside one such atelier, time moves differently. Nothing is rushed. A barrel maker checks alignment by eye. An engraver leans closer to his work, coaxing flowing scrolls from steel with patience earned over decades. Nearby, a stockmaker studies a block of walnut, turning it slowly until the grain reveals the direction it wishes to go.

These craftsmen are not building products; they are building reputation — one gun at a time.

From places like this came the finest sporting arms of continental Europe, guns born from collaboration and skill rather than spectacle. They were made to function perfectly, certainly, but also to carry something deeper: balance, refinement, and the unmistakable touch of human hands.

Among them is a sidelock double bearing a simple inscription that ties it forever to its origin — AUG. LEBEAU FABRICANT LIEGE — a gun that reflects the restrained elegance of Belgian best gunmaking.

The House of Lebeau and the Liège Tradition

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