“Still more tests!”

“Didn’t I tell you that we had to be sure that a gun could be made not only to shoot but to shoot straight?  Our crack shots get the guns next.”

“What do they do?” asked the boy, “fire at targets?”

“Yes.  But first a man, incased in an armored barricade, shoots a few extra heavy cartridges in each rifle, in order to make sure that no weakness has been caused by the various processes through which all the parts have passed.  Then he turns it over to the crack shots.  They fire half a dozen shots at a target, then look at the target through a telescope.  Those men know that they can hit the bull’s eye every time, so that if the shots are wide of the mark, either there is a defect in the gun or the sights are not true.  In nine cases out of ten it is the fault of the sights, and they file them true.”

“Then really every gun has been fired before being sold?”

“We turn out about sixteen hundred guns a day, and each one has been fired several times.”

“Shotguns, too?”

“The same standard of accuracy is needed in those.  It is just as important that a shotgun should throw a certain percentage of its shot within a certain radius as it is that a rifle bullet should go straight.  Down in this little room,” he continued, “a man stands all day shooting down this gallery, forty yards range, and each target is brought back and measured.  In a circle with a fifteen-inch radius a boy counts the numbers of holes made in the paper by the tiny shot.  There should be 300.  If there are 290 the gun is passed, but if less it is rejected.  Sometimes you get very queer shot patterns without knowing why.”

“Do all shotguns throw as evenly as that?”

“All good ones should.  It is astonishing to see how regularly the ‘scatter’ of a barrel will work out.  Every barrel, of course, is stamped with the number of shots it has put into the fifteen-inch circle.”

“And you make cartridges, too, don’t you?” Hamilton asked.

“That’s one of the largest branches of our business,” his guide replied, “but there’s not very much in that to show you, except of course the making of the metal caps, and this is simply the punching of circular pieces of copper or brass, turning up the edges, or ‘cupping’ them, as it is called, drawing them to length, inserting the primer pocket and heading—­the filling is done in a building perpetually closed to visitors.  We think too much of our visitors,” he added with a smile, “to risk blowing them up.  I don’t suppose really, that there would be any danger,—­we have not had an accident for years,—­but it’s a business in which accident is only prevented by extreme care, and we believe in being thorough.”

Chatting pleasantly, Mr. Nebett showed Hamilton through the various general offices, the payroll department, and the draughting and designing room, and finally returned to the business manager’s office, where they found the schedule awaiting him, filled out in almost every detail.  A few spaces had been left blank until the boy’s return, some trifling explanation being readily answered by him.