The woman slipped the little Kit Gun back into her purse, but before she left, she asked, “Will it still shoot?”
“Everything,” he said, picking up a tattered copy of the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson .
The gunsmith tilted the revolver into the cone of light from his magnifier lamp. He pressed the cylinder latch, swung out the cylinder, and read the number stamped on the frame’s underside: . smith and wesson 34-1 serial numbers
He opened his logbook. “The last 34-1 serial number I have recorded is M 99999. Yours is only a few thousand before that. She’s a late first-variation J-frame Kit Gun.”
The gunsmith spun the cylinder. The hand-fitted lockup was still tight. “He wasn’t wrong. The 34-1s with serials in the M range are some of the finest rimfire revolvers Smith ever built. They were still hand-fitted back then, before the mass-production changes of the 1970s.” The woman slipped the little Kit Gun back
“There it is,” he murmured.
The woman smiled. “He carried it fishing in the Adirondacks. Said it never missed.” He opened his logbook
She wanted to know its story.
He handed it back gently. “You don’t have an old gun. You have a time capsule from the last years when a master revolver was built one at a time. The serial number is its birth certificate — and yours says 1968, Springfield, Massachusetts, made by men who cared about the click of a cylinder stop.”
“The dash-one means ‘engineering change number one,’” he said. “In this case, the change was the frame itself. Your father’s gun was made after 1960 but before 1969, when they changed the extractor rod.”