Albeit is so tiny that this is a far fetched guess.
But, it appears that the item has brass tips and a wood center and the nearest thing I've seen to match this description was a connector used to splice some sort of rod together.
In this case maybe a rifle or pistol cleaning rod.
My experience with this sort of thing, although quite larger, was used to connect the center pole sections of a two man Army tent together.
AT Pro/GPP-AT/$9.98 Ebay Digger/Fiskars Diggers