It was late 1980 or early ’81 when a stone-faced man in a dark suit stepped into the shop of up-and-coming gunsmith Terry Tussey. Stoneface surveyed the room with scorched-earth eyes, and then closed the door. Terry quickly spotted the bulges under Stoneface’s arms, and felt a little relief when his coat parted to reveal a gold badge clipped to his belt.

Though decades younger then, Terry already knew serious armed thugs had occasionally hit gunsmiths’ shops. After all, that’s where the good guns were. And this guy looked nothin’ but serious. Sure didn’t look much like “Officer Friendly” though. He wasn’t.

Stoneface laid a blue box and an envelope on the counter. The box contained a spanky-new Colt Mark IV Series 80 Government Model 1911A1 pistol. The envelope held a sheet listing operations to be performed on it. Most were reliability mods, like lowering and flaring the ejection port; throating the barrel and polishing the ramp; tuning the extractor and smoothing the trigger; combat sights and more, finished off with a frosted matte industrial hard chrome job. Terry spontaneously started to ask a routine question.

“So, the primary purpose of …” and Stoneface cut him off.

“Gunfighting,” he said, and tapped the list. “You may shave a little accuracy for absolute reliability, but she’s got to shoot into eye sockets at 15 and fists at 50 — with government hardball.” He dropped his card on the counter and turned to leave.

“Fists?”

The man silently laid a big fist over the center of his chest. Terry nodded; he understood.
“I’ve heard you’re good,” Stoneface said. “Show me.”

Terry looked at the card, made a coupla phone calls, muttered “Hmm …” a few times, and then — Oh, boy, did Terry show HIM! When his two descending Ts in an oval were finally stamped on that Colt it was a gunfighter’s grail, brutal and beautiful at once; elegant and ominous; a pure bullet-launcher and deadly serious, like the man it was made for.

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