All angles machined into it were true. All springs of the finest metals. All steel of that superb blend of strength and flexibility. The trigger was almost as soft as a woman’s most private part, and it took a refined finger that had already pulled a trigger a hundred thousand times to nurse the finest action from it. People don’t realize how much of the gun is about the machinework and what miracles a man who has spent his life shaving pieces of metal to an exact measurement can do. The receiver is epoxied and bolted into the stock, so that the hold is again true, so that no oddities of alignment will haunt a shooter years on down the line. You could use it as a hammer and build a house with it, though to its owners such a thing would seem a desecration. The barrel—barrel making is an art in and of itself—drew even more attention than the other parts, because the barrel, that long steel tube embracing the supersonic missile driven down its bore toward the target, couldn’t be merely excellent, it had to be perfect. Perfect is never cheap, neither in effort nor cost. The men who made the barrels had practiced their crafts for years in such British houses as Purdey or Holland & Holland or Westley Richards. They knew the interior dynamics of steel and how it responds when grooves are engraved along the tube’s polished interior. They hunted with spectroscopes for inner flaws that might play hob with vibrational patterns, because they knew the vibrations must be true as a violin’s strings to deliver the kind of accuracy that they demanded. None of this happened easily, but only after so much experimentation, so much trial and error, all of it piled atop the years of experience.

Then came the scope. It was German, as are all the best optics, a thirty-four-millimeter tube of aluminum, steel, plastic, and polished glass, studded with dials that control adjustments for magnification, focus, windage, elevation, even a laser whose pinprick of red light focused on the target’s center, making it stand out to the shooter’s eye in the dark world of the lens. Its magnification runs from a power of 5 to 25. And the internals on such an instrument are dazzling, as is the machinework that makes everything not merely function but function smoothly as if sheathed in petroleum lubricant so that the sliding between focal distances or in and out of magnification is accomplished without notice by the adjuster. All scopes do this reasonably well, but the S & Bs do it better.