Gaunt gave the automatic rifle to Lenore Potter

Leland Gaunt’s arming of Lenore Potter transforms a grievance over ruined flowerbeds into the immediate possibility of lethal violence. By placing a fully loaded automatic pistol in her hands, explaining its safety catch, and directing her suspicion toward the Bonsaint woman, Gaunt turns Lenore’s agitated anger into a threat she can carry home.

The grievance and its escalation

Lenore is already growing agitated despite Gaunt’s calming influence. She says that her flowerbeds, lovely the previous day, have been ruined, and casts the destruction as an assault on everything that soothed her aura and nourished her calava. Her accusations fix on the Bonsaint woman, whom she condemns as responsible. The scene’s pivotal shift begins with this interpretation: damaged flowers become evidence of personal hostility, and Lenore’s distress finds a target.

Gaunt answers the complaint not by investigating the damage or calming Lenore’s suspicions, but by offering what he calls just the thing. He asks her to sit and think blue thoughts while he leaves. The pause makes the return with a weapon seem like a solution tailored to her grievance, even though the pistol cannot restore the flowerbeds and instead raises the stakes from imagined injury to possible physical harm.

The weapon as an instrument of suggestion

Gaunt returns with one of the automatic pistols that Ace Merrill had brought back from Cambridge and puts it in Lenore’s hands. The weapon is fully loaded; under the display lights, it gleams greasy blue-black. Lenore raises it to eye level, looking at it with pleasure and relief. Its weight and ready condition make Gaunt’s intervention practical as well as suggestive: this is not merely an image of power but a firearm she can take away and use.

Gaunt couches his encouragement in a disclaimer. He says he would never urge anyone to shoot anyone else without a very good reason, then tells Lenore that she sounds like a woman who might have one. He adds that the flowers are not the important thing. The qualification does not withdraw the threat; it supplies a moral frame in which Lenore can imagine violence as justified by an unstated, more serious grievance. Gaunt thus leaves the decisive judgment to her while carefully directing what she is invited to believe.

Instruction and implied target

Lenore points the automatic at a wall and fires off imaginary shots in words, directing them at the woman she blames and wishing misfortune on her and her husband. Gaunt uses this moment to point out the safety catch. He explains that Lenore would want to push it first if the woman came over again to do more damage, and Lenore says she understands. The instruction converts a display of anger into a basic lesson in preparing the gun for use.

Gaunt describes the prospective shooting as protection of property and karma, then predicts that the Bonsaint woman probably will not return. The reassurance is paired with a pointed condition: if she does return, it will be for the last time. Lenore raises the short barrel to her lips and kisses it softly. That intimate gesture marks the pistol’s change in meaning within the scene. It has become an object of relief and attachment, and Gaunt’s conditional warning gives its presence a potentially fatal purpose.

Departure and immediate consequence

Gaunt tells Lenore to put the gun in her purse and go home, adding that the suspected woman could already be in the yard or inside the house. Lenore becomes alarmed; sinister purple threads begin twisting through her blue aura. Once Gaunt looks away, she blinks rapidly, then abandons her plan to look at Howdy Doody another time and hurries home, repeating her fear that the Bonsaint woman may be there.

The encounter ends with Lenore carrying a loaded automatic pistol away from Gaunt’s shop, primed to interpret a return by the suspected vandal as a reason to act. The evidence establishes neither that she fires the weapon nor what follows after she leaves. Its decisive consequence here is the altered situation: a conflict over flowerbeds has been furnished with a firearm, an imagined justification for using it, and an immediate sense of danger. Gaunt’s careful combination of apparent caution, technical instruction, and fear leaves Lenore holding both the weapon and the suspicion that makes it seem necessary.