Let me pitch the AyA Model 100 alternative, just a bit more.
The Model 100s had selective ejectors, a beaver tail forend, and were finished inside and out, like a Swiss watch.
When I shoot one of my Model 100's at a sporting clays range, it's quite often somebody comes up and complements my nice Model 21 Winchester. From a few feet away, they look like a Model 21 flatside, only with dark, European walnut stocks and forends.
For just a few years in the middle 50's, Sears imported and branded FN Mausers as JC Higgins and the Model 100's from AyA, and offered elaborately hand engraved High Standard pump and automatic shotguns, as Imperial grades.
The Model 100's aren't flat out copies of a Model 21, but you can tell that Sears aimed the Model 100 straight at the Model 21 buyers that wouldn't, or couldn't, justify $300 for a Model 21. Money was worth about ten times what it is today. The Model 100's weren't cheap, and the Model 21's were very expensive.
A wise seller, knows what an AyA Model 100 is, and they keep it, or price it near a thousand dollars. The trick is to find a seller that thinks he's selling a Sears and Roebuck branded Matador, and you'll buy them for three or four hundred bucks.
Like a lot of "Wish Book" guns, you can often find a J.C. Higgins Model 100 that looks like it was opened by dear old Dad on his last Christmas, shot a few times, and then stayed in the family until the ungrateful grandchildren sold it because it didn't have choke tubes.
It's not a Model 21, anymore than a real A.C. Cobra is one of those replicas that cost a tenth of the real thing.
But it sure ain't no Matador, either.
They were solid, well built, nice double guns that anyone should be proud to own.
