Mark, I can only speculate that your horn tip may have aquired that color from oxidation or something like that. My horn tip is black for better choice of words with the typical lighter lamination streaking you normally find in horn.

That said I have the original horn forend tip for my Lefever Optimus? quality that was a funky shade of green when I received the gun. So who knows what causes some of the things we see on these old guns

Doug Mann