The Rifle

In 1768, a gunsmith named Cornish McManus built a rifle of such accuracy that he know he could never create another like it. He intended to treasure his masterpiece, but with a new wife to provide for, he felt pressed to sell it. Soon the rifle was helping one John Byam become a legendary sharpshooter in the American Revolution. But when Byam succumbed to dysentery, the weapon was passed on to yet another owner...and then to another and another, until the present day.
Strangely, in all the time of the rifle after John Byam's death and through all the people who looked at it and held it to their shoulder, not once in the life of the rifle did anybody ever think to see if it was loaded.
The rifle was loaded.