“Mostly look about,” Rand said.  “Is Mr. Rivers in?”

“Mr. Rivers is having luncheon.  He’ll be finished before long, if you care to wait....  Have you ever been here before?”

“Not for some time,” Rand said.  “When I was here last, there was a young fellow named Jordan, or Gordon, or something like that.”

“Oh.  He was before my time.”  The present functionary introduced himself as Cecil Gillis.  Rand gave his name and shook hands with him.  Young Gillis wanted to know if Rand was a collector.

“In a small way.  General-pistol collector,” Rand told him.  “Have you many Colts, now?”

There was a whole table devoted to Colts.  No spurious Whitneyville Walkers; after all, a dealer can sell just so many of such top-drawer rarities before the finger of suspicion begins leveling itself in his direction, and Arnold Rivers had long ago passed that point.  There were several of the commoner percussion models, however, with lovely, perfect bluing that was considerably darker than that applied at the Colt factory during the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century.  The silver plating on backstraps and trigger-guards was perfect, too, but the naval-battle and stagecoach-holdup engravings on the cylinders were far from clear—­in one case, completely obliterated.  The cylinder of one 1851 Navy bore serial numbers that looked as though they had been altered to conform to the numbers on other parts of the weapon.  Many of the Colts, however, were entirely correct, and all were in reasonably good condition.

Rand saw something that interested him, and picked it up.

“That isn’t a real Colt,” the exquisite Mr. Gillis told him.  “It’s a Confederate copy; a Leech & Rigdon.”

“So I see.  I have a Griswold & Grier, but no Leech & Rigdon.”

“The Griswold & Grier; that’s the one with the brass frame,” Cecil Gillis said.  “Surprising how many collectors think all Confederate revolvers had brass frames, because of the Griswold & Grier, and the Spiller & Burr....  That’s an unusually fine specimen, Mr. Rand.  Mr. Rivers got it sometime in late December or early January; from a gentleman in Charleston, I understand.  I believe it had been carried during the Civil War by a member of the former owner’s family.”

Rand looked at the tag tied to the trigger-guard; it was marked, in letter-code, with three different prices.  That was characteristic of Arnold Rivers’s business methods.

“How much does Mr. Rivers want for this?” he asked, handing the revolver to young Gillis.

The clerk mentally decoded the three prices and vacillated for a moment over them.  He had already appraised Rand, from his twenty-dollar Stetson past his Burberry trench coat to his English hand-sewn shoes, and placed him in the pay-dirt bracket; however, from some remarks Rand had let drop, he decided that this customer knew pistols, and probably knew values.

“Why, that is sixty dollars, Mr. Rand,” he said, with the air of one conferring a benefaction.  Maybe he was, at that, Rand decided; prices had jumped like the very devil since the war.