Free The Rifle by Gary Paulsen

The Weapon
    It is necessary to know this rifle.
    In 1768, west of Philadelphia, a man named Cornish McManus established a new gunsmithing business. He was thirty-five years old and had been an apprentice and then an assistant to a master gunsmith named John Waynewright for nearly fourteen years. Waynewright had spent much of his life perfecting the concept of rifling—putting a set of spiral grooves down the bore of a rifle to spin and thereby stabilize the patched ball as it sped on its way—and it was said that his rifling was unique. He used a twist of one turn in forty inches, slightly faster than others who made rifled barrels, and this slight increase made the ball spin faster and become more stable, or fixed, on its trajectory.
    Because rifling of a bore was, historically speaking, a relatively new concept—less than a century old—most rifles were not as accurate as they could be. But compared to smoothbore guns, which were most decidedly
not
accurate and allowed balls to wobble to the side and actually take off in a curved trajectory, rifles were an enormous improvement.
    But within the field of rifling there was wide variance. Some rifles were not as accurate as others; their accuracy was based on how they were made and who made them. Many were simply utility rifles, good out to fifty or sixty yards—still much better than the smoothbores—and men were happy with that, but now and then . . .
    Now and then, with great rarity, there came a blending of steel and wood and brass and a man’s knowledge into one rifle, when it all came together just . . . exactly . . . right and a weapon of such beauty and accuracy was born that it might be actually worshiped.
    Such rifles were called “sweet” and were, almost literally, priceless. In that time weapons were much more important than they are now—were, indeed, vital to survival, for putting food on the table, for defense, for life—and a sweet rifle was revered and adored.
    What made such a rifle, a sweet rifle, so rare is that even if a gunsmith made one, achieved such a pinnacle of art, there was absolutely no guarantee that he would ever be able to do it again. It was said that a bad gunsmith could never make a sweet rifle but that even a great smith might make only one in his life.
    Waynewright was a competent gunsmith and could make serviceable weapons, but he lacked the spark of genius that would make him brilliant. His rifles were plain, functional, dependable, and would never be sweet.
    Cornish McManus was something else again. Waynewright often chastened him for daydreaming, for spending too much time on a rifle’s form or finish, for wasting more time on silly sketches of new shapes for stocks or trigger guards—in other words, for being artistic.
    The truth is that Cornish was an artist, pure and simple; he was that perfect blending of artistic thinking and force of hand that it took to make a sweet rifle.
    Still, it did not come soon. Waynewright held Cornish back as long as the man worked for him. Cornish never got a chance to express himself, and the spark would have died except that in the evenings he spent time drawing on scraps of paper that he hid from Waynewright to avoid ridicule. There were new shapes for rifles, new lines, delicate filigree—all the beauty he wanted to put into his work that Waynewright held back survived in Cornish’s drawings, and when it came time for him to leave and be a journeyman gunsmith, he took the drawings with him.
    When he started his new shop near Philadelphia, Cornish was near penniless, and for nearly two years he worked only on bread-and-butter items—repair, retuning rifles and shotguns for hunters, making cheap trade rifles for barter with the Indians—just to get by. As it was, he barely kept his head above water and his artistic abilities were fading, perhaps would have gone altogether except for a piece of wood.
    It came with a