On items like this I keep checking to see if it gets resisted. Sometimes it is a non paying bidder, sometimes a bidder who demands a full refund for some real or imagined reason and sometimes it is a shill bidder. When every I see the second bidder has a very low number of feedbacks or worse none at all I approach with caution. Don’t let a shill bidder run the price up. Set your limits and walk away above that. There will always be another one along soon enough.
I was the other bidder on that gun. This newly registered buyer with no rating showed up with about 4 hours left and started bidding. We were the only two bidding and he drove me up from $1700 to $2400, and I quit.
Several years ago, I bought a late production Savage Sterlingworth 16 at Jaquas which had the original Hardware Store hangtag and literally looked unfired. It also had an amazing stock (probably a leftover inventory piece) which Walt Snyder said in a post was the nicest stock he had ever seen on a Sterlingworth. Being an idiot, I sold it a few years ago. Lately I have been trying to accumulate a set of working grade classic double smallbores in nice original shape. The Stirlingworth is being a problem. I only bid as much as I did on this one since I had lost out on a much nicer one about an hour before that was really correct and finally pushed almost $3000. This gun was the fallback, and I lost it too.
The smallbores are really escalating. I know because I have been trying to buy several recently.