Each
would contain a pistol or pair of pistols, with cleaning and loading
tools. In the corner farthest from the desk, he saw the head of the
spiral stairway from the library below, mentioned by Gladys Fleming.
There were ashstands and a couple of cocktail-tables, and a number of
chairs, and the old maple cobbler's bench on which Lane Fleming had died.
The only books in the room were in a small case over the workbench; they
were all arms-books.
Then he looked at the walls. On both ends, and on the long inside wall,
the pistols hung, hundreds and hundreds of them, the cream of a
lifetime's collecting. Horizontal white-painted boards had been fixed to
the walls about four feet from the floor, and similar boards had been
placed five feet above them. Between, narrow vertical strips, as wide
as a lath but twice as thick, were set. Rows of pistols were hung, the
barrels horizontal, on pairs of these strips, with screwhooks at grip
and muzzle. There were about a hundred such vertical rows of pistols.
Rand was still looking at them when the butler brought in the drinks;
when Gladys told the servant that that would be all, he went out, rather
reluctantly, by the spiral stairs to the library.
"Well, what do you think of them, Colonel Rand?" Gladys asked.
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