I have four and wish I had room and $$ for more: a custom Ruger 1A in .22 Hornet, a Lo-Wall in .25-20WCF (made up from about 7 different rifles and some homemade and aftermarket parts--shoots great but not quite up to Mr. Hughes' cosmetic standards...), an NEF "Sportster" in .22WRM (I bought a factory replacement wood buttstock and forend to replace the plastic, expected "pallet grade" and they sent me the nicest fiddleback birch buttstock you have ever seen! Gun shoots 'way above it's price range, too.) and a Savage 220 16-bore with a spare 219 .25-20 WCF barrel I found in a "barrel of barrels" in an old gunshop in Maine. Tried finding a 219 barrel in ANY caliber recently?
I didn't get in on the "stalking rifle" discussion of the .25-20 WCF but will throw in my two bits. When I was a kid in Northern California in the '40s and '50s (before it became the "Wine Country," yuck) we used to shoot deer with whatever was legal and many ranches had .25-20s. You need to wait until you are very close and have a broadside shot to get both lungs. This requires more discipline and more time out in deer country than most people have nowadays but it worked for country people who lived among MANY small blacktail deer and could wait for the right shot. Now you need at least a .243 or some of the same discipline and time and a .223 with "deer bullets." The deer are still there--they just love suburbs and vineyards...
I use all of my single shots for woodchuck hunting in upstate New York and find that the two .22s are more reliable woodchuck killers. With the .25-20 you need to get closer and hit a vital spot; basically you need to act like you are shooting at big game.
