Chapter 17

Spring turned into summer, and it didn’t take long for my new business to bring in more work than a body could do by himself. Nervous Texians brought in their rifles to have me replace springs that were perfectly good, and do a little filing here and there to make them feel better to the shooter. I also converted old flintlocks to caplocks and sold the owners more caps than a body would need any time soon, but it might be that they figured to practice.

Most had hard money, usually Mexican silver. Politicians were scheming on both sides of the border, but reasonable folks figured that business was business. If a Mexican trader had something you could sell at a profit, it only made sense to buy it. It went the other way too and I was glad to get the money.

Jean-Louis was selling horses too, and as soon as he could afford it he used that money to buy good Mexican breeding stock. I hired a man who claimed to be a gunsmith, then another one who was.

Folks were nervous. There was a lot of this and that going on down in Mexico, and Mexico wasn’t all that far from Victoria. By sea, a ship leaving Matamoros had an easy voyage to Matagorda Bay where an army and its supplies could be offloaded. By land, it was longer, but if the army crossed at Laredo and headed northeast it was less than 200 miles by road. If things kept on the way they were going, I figured it was only a matter of time before the war started up again.

I talked it over with Jean-Louis and he agreed. From that day on, we had a wagon ready-packed and parked in the barn. I might not make it out of Victoria, but as soon as the baby was born I intended for Priscilla to move to Ten Springs Rancho, what I’d named my grant. If I got cut off in town, Jean-Louis would try to get our families to safety. Once a month, sometimes more often, we all got together so the women could gossip about having babies and what-not while Jean-Louis and me talked business.

One day, a man came in with something I’d never seen before. I held it and it seemed to fit my hand. The long barrel was steady when I pointed it at a hook I’d mounted on the wall, but that fat round thing in the middle was like no pistol I’d seen before. “What do you call this?” I asked him.

“That’s a Colt’s Revolving Pistol,” the man said. “He calls it the holster model, and I reckon that makes sense seeing as how it won’t fit a pocket. It ain’t all that easy to load, being as you have to pop out that barrel wedge to start, and a feller has to be careful doing it. As soon as you’ve done that and slid the barrel forward, you can take out the cylinder, that part you mentioned, and reload it. Put ‘er all back together, stick the wedge back in, and you’re ready to cock the hammer and shoot. It can hold five loads, though most figure it’s better to keep one chamber empty. But if a body was expectin’ trouble, the thing to do would be load all five.”

“I’ve seen twister pistols and this looks kind of like one of those, but it’s lighter! Pepperboxes, too,” I said. “What would you take for this one?”

“It’s not for sale,” he said, which I figured meant he was going to get as much from me as he could.

Meanwhile, I had removed the caps, cocked it and let the hammer down, my thumb holding on to make sure it didn’t damage the nipple. I watched what happened when I cocked it and noticed a small piece of iron slide into a cutout on the cylinder. Smart, I figured, to lock the chamber in line with the barrel that way!

He wanted more than I was willing to pay, so I didn’t buy it, but he told me that the factory was in Paterson, New Jersey. I straightened the bent trigger and filed it smooth to keep it from hanging up, which was why he’d come in in the first place, and handed it back. I made up my mind to write to Colt and ask how much he’d charge me for some of his pistols. But then I thought that maybe I could shorten the time that would take; it was said during my sailing days that if a body had the money, he could buy anything he wanted in New Orleans.

I hadn’t heard of my uncle Henry for more than a year, but a letter addressed to him in Galveston would reach him in as little as two weeks. I penned the letter, and a chore it was, then sent it off. The next day, after I’d thought on it, I wrote another letter, this one to Samuel Colt, asking how much he would charge to ship me two dozen of his pistols. After that, I put it out of my mind. He might not write, and if he did I might not have enough silver to pay him what he wanted, but I figured it didn’t cost nothing to ask.

I forgot about it in the excitement of what happened next. A young woman who was servant to the family that lived near our house came running in and told me Priscilla had gone into labor. I took off my apron and shrugged into my coat, then grabbed my hat and cane. The sword-cane might not be needed, but times were still unsettled and I hadn’t taken to carrying a pocket pepperbox as some did. I didn’t trust the things, being as it was apt to freeze up when a feller needed it most, and until then it was heavy and awkward. Gamblers kept one in a pocket, but they did their work sitting down.

Time I got there, my son Edward Samuel Jennings was squalling like a catamount and waving his little fists around. The two women there with Priscilla, who looked plumb tuckered out, told me how much he looked like me, but I figured if I looked that ugly then Priscilla wouldn’t have married me. But it made them happy, so I just nodded.

It was more than a month later that I got Sam Colt’s letter. He’d crossed out more lines writing it than I had writing mine to him, but I could read it. He thanked me, offered me a job if I was a master gunsmith, and explained that they were hard to come by back there in New Jersey. Men who could operate his machines were fairly plentiful, but those who could do the careful filing and polishing and fitting that was needed during final assembly were as hard to find as hairs on a frog!

As for cost, the .36 caliber pistols, the kind people living on the frontier wanted, weren’t available. In fact, despite the Army rejecting them for use as a service pistol, there was a waiting list that he proposed to fill eventually. He’d added my name and in a year or two I could expect one that would have the improvements he was already planning to make.