The Rifle (2 page)

Shaping the rest of the stock was more difficult yet. The rigidness of the wood and the hundreds of small knots fought him all the way, forced him to use hand rasps and files to get the curves and shapes he wanted, and when the stock was at last roughed into shape and it was time to fit the lock and trigger to the stock and barrel, he had come to nearly hate the wood for its stubbornness.

The function of a flintlock rifle was simple. Powder would be put down the bore, a patched ball on top of it pressed firmly into position, then in a little place on the lock another small amount of powder ground much finer than the powder in the main charge would be placed below a striking plate in a small cup called the pan. The hammer held a piece of flint in a small vise, and there was a tiny hole drilled from the pan through the side of the barrel into the chamber where the main charge waited. When the hammer was cocked and the striking plate (called a frizzen) placed over the powder, the piece was ready to fire. Pulling the trigger dropped the hammer, the flint struck the frizzen, showering sparks down into the finely ground powder, which detonated and shot a piercing jet of intensely hot flame through the little hole into the main charge which in turn set it off and propelled the ball out of the barrel.

It all sounds very slow-firing but in reality, if it is all done correctly—if the powder is dry and in good shape, if the flint is clean and with a new sharp edge, if the frizzen is wiped dry with the thumb just before firing, if the spring on the hammer is strong and slams the flint hard against the frizzen, and if the powder is positioned correctly in the pan—it is nearly instantaneous. There is no discernible pause from when the trigger is pulled and the rifle fires.

But with a flintlock there are no unimportant parts. The lock, the trigger, the position of the lock and the pan against the barrel, the strength of the springs, the speed of the hammer fall, the crispness of the let-off of the trigger—every single thing matters or the rifle will not fire correctly and, even if it somehow does, it will miss.

Since missing can mean starving or even death, no shortcuts can be taken, and Cornish went to work each night with a quiet intensity that often left him with a headache and pain in back of his eyes from squinting in the dim light from the candles.

He worked on the lock, hand filing the shape and tempering the springs, night after night until it fit perfectly in the inletted side of the stock and nestled snugly against the barrel.

The hammer he shaped with a serpentine jaw at the end to hold the flint and positioned the jaw so that it held the flint at a slight back angle from the frizzen, so that when it struck it also scraped and added to the number of sparks.

By shaping the top of the trigger in a flattened manner, he made it not to have movement. When the trigger was pulled there was an even hardness to it—he estimated three pounds—and then suddenly it let off and the hammer dropped with nothing seeming to have moved at all.

He used finely polished brass for the butt plate—ornately curved to cup the shoulder—and the patch box on the side of the butt and on the keys that held the barrel to the wood as well as the cap at the end of the wood and barrel to join them with an opening for the hole that ran beneath the barrel groove to hold the hickory ramrod. When it was all fitted and joined, he spent a month of nights smoothing the wood to a marble finish and polishing the brass until it shone like gold, and finally he rubbed warmed beeswax into the wood of the stock until the grain and the bird's-eyes seemed to jump out of the wood.

The last thing he did was to drill the tiny hole from the pan through the side of the barrel for the jet of flame to light the main charge.

And the rifle was done. It was easily the most beautiful rifle he had ever made and he thought, trying to be objective, that it might be the most beautiful rifle he had ever seen. He carefully placed it on wooden pegs covered with bits of lamb's wool over his workbench so he could see it as he worked on trade guns and repairs. Many who came to the shop saw the rifle and admired it and offered to buy it, but he was too close to it and thought it would be like selling an infant or somebody he loved, so he held back—though he could use the money because he had decided it was time to take a wife.

Besides, there remained the final test, the firing of the rifle, and strangely he was reluctant to do this, hesitated almost in a kind of fear that he would find some flaw. If it did not shoot straight, then it did not matter how beautiful it was—a rifle must work, must deliver the ball to the right place or it was worthless.

But there came a day, an afternoon when his work was caught up as much as it would ever be and the sun was high and there was no wind, a beautiful summer day, and he decided to try the rifle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had nothing to sell except the rifle.

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

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

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

“Made with your hands?” he asked.

Cornish nodded.

“Is it a good piece?”

“It's a sweet shooter, very sweet.”

“Is it offered?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How far?”

“Thirty paces.”

“Can I shoot it?”

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

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