Havilah Babcock “Fallen Lady”
Tomorrow I would give those New Englanders a lesson in the art of eye-wiping, but right now I would gloat over my beauty alone. I'd doll her up just a bit. Later I'd remove the old black paint from the barrels and have them reblued, of course, but right now I'd merely hit the high spots, like that paint smudge on the left barrel.
Daubing it with a little paint remover, I waited a moment, then brushed the paste off. The exposed metal didn't look quite right; it seemed to have a spiral pattern. I stopped dead still, a chilling suspicion at my throat. Removing the forearm, I went to work vigorously with an emery cloth. Again the telltale spirals leaped at me.
The sickening truth was irrefutable: the barrels of my precious gun were visibly, unmistakably, and irreparably Damascus, made in the old black-powder days by twisting strip steel around a mandrel, then heat-welding it. For unnumbered years Damascus barrels were highly regarded, but the coming of smokeless powder doomed them. In simple fact, nitro loads blew many of them apart, with resultant damage to the shooters.
“Fallen Lady” first appeared in Field and Stream in the late 1940s (the “Lady” then may have been a Lefever), was re-published in May 1962 (now a Parker), and is included in The Best of Babcock, published in 1974.
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