Kings Pinnacle Read Free Page B

to catch.
    Alex was all of that; he was
madly in love with Elizabeth Murray, and he was very wily and very
fast on foot and on horseback. So, as it turned out, the nickname
stuck, and it wasn’t long before everyone was calling him the March
Hare.
    Alex was pretty skinny, he
had to admit, and he did ride like the wind. He was also very fleet
of foot; he had outrun everyone he had ever raced, whether the
distance was long or short. He weighed about ten stone and stood
slightly less than six feet tall. Alex had green eyes and blond
hair with a reddish cast. He wore it combed straight back from his
forehead and over his ears, but it mostly fell forward into his
eyes when he wasn’t riding. He was constantly brushing his hair
back out of his eyes with his left hand.
    He carried a seventy-five
caliber musket that looked a lot like the Brown Bess carried by the
British Army. Alex had named his musket “Slayer”. The Brown Bess
musket had first been issued as the standard rifle of the British
Army about ten years earlier. Alex told everyone that he had
purchased his musket, but he had really acquired it while he was
riding with his outlaw band.
    Muskets were normally a
smooth bore rifle, but Alex had jammed a musket ball in his
original barrel and couldn’t knock it loose. So he finally took his
musket to a Scottish gunsmith who had examined the jam and told him
that it was impossible to clear, and that the barrel would have to
be replaced. Alex still remembered the conversation with the
gunsmith about the new barrel.
    “Can you build me a new
barrel?” asked Alex.
    “Aye, I could lad, if I had
a strip of gun steel long enough to make you a proper barrel for a
rifle like this one,” replied the gunsmith.
    “What have you got right
now?”
    “The only steel strips I
have in stock right now are too short. Would ye be willing to make
do with a shorter barrel?”
    Alex knew that a shorter
barrel meant reduced range, as well as reduced accuracy.
    “ Nae,” replied Alex. “How
long would I have to wait for the longer strips of
steel?”
    “It could be several weeks.
Good gun barrel steel is in very short supply right
now.”
    “Are there any other
alternatives?”
    “Not that I ken,” replied
the gunsmith.
    “Could you nae weld two
short strips together to make one strip long enough for a proper
barrel?”
    “I could lad, but the weld
would run perpendicular to the length of the barrel creating a weak
spot that might not stand up to the muzzle blast when the rifle was
fired.”
    “But don’t you have to weld
the barrel anyway?”
    “I do lad, but the normal
weld runs lengthwise along the barrel, which spreads out the weak
spot all along the entire length of the barrel.”
    “What if you took the two
strips of steel and welded them together to make one extra-long
strip of barrel steel and then forge them in a spiral around the
barrel mandrel, just like the red stripes of a barber pole wrap
around the tube? That way the weld of the two strips of steel would
run nearly lengthwise along the length of the barrel.”
    “ I have never been asked
to forge a barrel in that manner, but I suppose that it could be
done,” replied the gunsmith.
    Alex had insisted, offering
to pay additional for it, and the gunsmith had finally agreed to
make it. One unexpected benefit of making a musket barrel in this
fashion, which Alex and the gunsmith had not known would happen,
was that the weld line inside the barrel formed a spiral groove
rather than a straight groove. This spiral groove caused the musket
ball to spin as it traveled down the length of the barrel when it
was fired. The musket ball continued to spin after it left the
barrel on its way to the target.
    Most smooth bore muskets
were accurate up to a range of about a hundred yards but Alex’s
musket was accurate to a range of almost three hundred yards. This
was true because of the increased stability of the spinning musket
ball that it fired through the longer than normal