Walls paneled in knotty cedar, half a dozen rifles and shotguns in a glass-fronted cabinet, a pair of swords crossed on one wall, a matched pair of dueling pistols to their right. A picture window opened onto a rail-fenced paddock, where a pair of horses as well matched as the pistols stood enjoying the morning sun. And the window faced north, Keller saw, so the sun wouldn’t come into the room and cause trouble. One of a pair of glass-fronted bookcases held books unrelated to stamp collecting, most of them history, along with a dictionary of quotations and a few volumes of poetry. The other case contained the owner’s philatelic library. There was a full set of the Scott catalogs, each volume two or three years old, and there were other catalogs as well, Michel and Yvert and Gibbons and more. And the shelves were filled with books and pamphlets on one stamp-related subject or another. The majority dealt with European nations and their colonies, but Keller spotted Michael Laurence’s study of the ten-cent covers of 1869.
