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“I say, Joe, I want some cartridges.”

“What for?” the thin Joe asked.

“A barker,” the alderman replied, pleased with this word, and producing the revolver.

“Well,” said Joe, “you don’t mean to say you’re going about with that thing in your pocket, you?”

“Why not?”

“Oh! No reason why not! But you ought to be preceded by a chap with a red flag, you know, same as a steam-roller.”

And the alderman, ignoring this, remarked with curt haughtiness:

“Every man ought to have a revolver.”

Then he went to his tailor and had a right-hand hip-pocket put into all his breeches.

Soon afterwards, walking down Slippery Lane, near the Big Pits, notoriously a haunt of mischief, he had an encounter with a collier who was drunk enough to be insulting and sober enough to be dangerous. In relating the affair afterwards Alderman Keats said:

“Fortunately I had my revolver. And I soon whipped it out, I can tell you.”

“And are you really never without your revolver?” he was asked.

“Never!”

“And it’s always loaded?”

“Always! What’s the good of a revolver if it isn’t loaded?”

Thus he became known as the man who never went out without a loaded revolver in his pocket. The revolver indubitably impressed people; it seemed to match the gout. People grew to understand that evil-doers had better look out for themselves if they meant to disturb Alderman Keats, with his gout, and his revolver all ready to be whipped out.

One day Brindley, the architect from Bursley, who knew more about music than revolvers, called to advise the alderman concerning some projected alterations to his stabling–alterations not necessitated by the purchase of a motor-car, for motor-cars were not old English. And somehow, while they were in the stable-yard, the revolver got into the conversation, and Brindley said: “I should like to see you hit something. You’ll scarcely believe me, but I’ve never seen a revolver fired–not with shot in it, I mean.”

Alderman Keats smiled bluffly.

“I’ve been told it’s difficult enough to hit even a door with a revolver,” said Brindley.

“You see that keyhole,” said the alderman, startlingly, pointing to a worn rusty keyhole in the middle of the vast double-doors of the carriage-house.

Brindley admitted that he did see it.

The next moment there was an explosion, and the alderman glanced at the smoking revolver, blew on it suspiciously, and put it back into his celebrated hip-pocket.

Brindley, whom the explosion had intimidated, examined the double-doors, and found no mark.

“Where did you hit?” he inquired.

“Through the keyhole,” said the alderman, after a pause. He opened the doors, and showed half a load of straw in the dusk behind them.

“The bullet’s imbedded in there,” said he.

“Well,” said Brindley, “that’s not so bad, that isn’t.”

“There aren’t five men in the Five Towns who could do that,” the alderman said.

And as he said it he looked, with his legs spread apart, and his short-tailed coat, and his general bluff sturdiness, almost as old English as he could have desired to look. Except that his face had paled somewhat. Mr Brindley thought that that transient pallor had been caused by legitimate pride in high-class revolver-shooting. But he was wrong. It had been caused by simple fear. The facts of the matter were that Alderman Keats had never before dared to fire the revolver, and that the infernal noise and the jar on his hand (which had held the weapon too loosely) had given him what is known in the Five Towns as a fearful start. He had offered to shoot on the spur of the moment, without due reflection, and he had fired as a woman might have fired. It was a piece of the most heavenly good fortune that he had put the bullet through the keyhole. Indeed, at first he was inclined to believe that marksmanship must be less difficult than it was reported to be, for his aim had been entirely casual. In saying to Brindley, “You see that keyhole,” he had merely been boasting in a jocular style. However, when Brindley left, Brindley carried with him the alderman’s reputation as a perfect Wild West shot.