I struck a sulphur match and saw something else about those three redskin skulls. The edges where the bone was gone weren’t fractured clean like a bullet or a club would do. They were charred.
The three were sprawled around the fourth skeleton and that was the one gave me the vapors. It was more or less man-shaped. But it wasn’t a man, that I know. I don’t believe I care to find out what it was. Instead of ribs there was a cylinder of thin bone, and it had only one bone in the lower leg. What there was for a pelvis I’ve never seen the like, and the skull was straight out of a Dore Bible. There was a hatchet buried in that skull.
The bones of the right arm were good and hefty, and it had two elbows. The left arm was about half the size — not crippled, but smaller scale. Like it was good for delicate work and not much else.
About ten inches from the widespread six fingers of its right hand was what you knew right off was a weapon even if it did look like an umbrella handle.
I was just reaching down to touch it when that fool Jake made his move.
He’d been standing behind me closer I bet than he’d ever got before, staring down at that fourth skeleton and making odd noises. I tell you, it was something for a medical man to see. Suddenly he grunted like he was going to be sick. He snatched up a femur from one of the Indians and swung it up to smash that fourth skeleton to smithereens.
Well, sir, quicker than the eye could see the umbrella handle smacked itself into the palm of that bony hand, sending fingers flying in six directions. It hung there in the air against what was left, trained dead on Jake’s head, and it hummed.
The femur dropped from Jake’s right hand like he’d been shot. He hadn’t, though, because he was still wearing his skull and by that time running. Soon as he did, the umbrella handle flopped over and just lay there, the hum dying away.
When it stopped the place was pretty quiet, because Jake was off in the rocks and I was going over some things I wanted to say to him immediately I was able to talk again. That fourth skeleton had the fastest draw I’d ever seen.
Jake stuck his head up from behind a boulder. “Doc,” he said, “why didn’t he shoot?”
The question wasn’t as all-fired pip-witted as Jake was capable of. It took me upward of three weeks to work out why a weapon that could draw and aim itself didn’t shoot too.
I’d heard a little clink when the weapon flew into the skeleton’s hand. It came from a metal disk that lay in its palm, toward the heel of the hand.
The disk was thin and only about as big as a two-cent piece. A mate to it was set in the butt of the umbrella handle, convex where the other was concave.
Going at it kind of gingerly, I slid the disk in my vest behind my watch and put the umbrella handle in my right coat pocket.
It was a key-wind repeater with a gold hunting case, that watch, and I worried about it every step down the mountain. I walked a good four hundred yards behind Jake all the way back into town, just to be on the safe side. We didn’t linger, either. We wanted lights..
By the time I got the two objects locked in my rolltop my heartbeat in anybody else would have had me telling the sexton to start his hole. I prescribed bed for me, told Jake, who hadn’t hardly even drawn breath the whole time, to go to hell and retired.
Next day a squabble came up over some borax rights up-country. I didn’t get to open that rolltop for a time. Then one early morning coming back in the buggy from a house-call in Pockmark, forty-odd miles north, I got to worrying again at the umbrella handle and those dead Indians.
Seems like four, five times a week some chunkhead hunkers down hard with his spurs on. When I got to the office that night there was one waiting — a bad one, Spanish rowels— and Jake was sprawled in my chair, picking his teeth with my spare scalpel. I patched up the chunkhead, took the scalpel from Jake and rinsed it off and watched him suck his teeth for a while. It began to look like he was going to be stubborn. So finally I said: “Say, Jake.”
He grunted. “Jake,” I said, “I think I’ve got that dingus figured.” He snuck a glance over at the desk so I knew he knew what I meant, but he was busy pretending that wasn’t what he came to talk about.
“I think it’s a gun that can read minds like a gypsy,” I said. Jake still looked bored, so I took the umbrella handle out of the rolltop and waved it at him. He dove off the chair and started rolling for the door.
“You damn fool,” I said, “it won’t go off.” I was reasonably certain it wouldn’t, but I laid it back down by the disk gently anyhow and sat in the chair. I’ve only got the one chair, on the theory that anybody who isn’t bad enough to lie on the table is well enough to stand. Jake edged over and stood like a short-legged bird on a bobwire fence. “It kin whut?” he said.
“It can read minds,” I said. “You were going to bash those bones. The gun knew it and trained square on your head. You remember?”
He remembered. “And those Indians,” I went on. “You remember them? The left side of the head on each of them was blown off.”
I hauled down a roller chart of the human skeleton, first time I’d done that since I don’t know when.
“This up here is the brain,” I said. “We don’t know a hell of a lot about it, but we do know it’s like a whole roomful of telegraphers, sending messages to different parts of the body along the nerves. They’re like the wires. This left hemisphere — right here — sends to the right side of the body. Don’t fret about why, the nerves twist going into the spinal cord.
“Okay. We know, too, that the part of the brain that sends to the arm is right here, in the parietal lobe. Right under the chunk of skull that was shot off on those three Indians.”
“Shaw,” Jake said, perching on the table. The old billy-goat was beginning to get impressed, even if he didn’t have any notion of what I was talking about.
I didn’t have exactly much notion either, but I kept on. “The brain works by a kind of electricity, same kind as in the telegraph batteries at the depot. This gun,” I tapped the umbrella handle and Jake started off again, but caught himself, “has some sort of detector, a galvanic thermometer that senses electrical messages to the nerves.”
From here on in it was pure dark and wild hazard. “Obviously,” I said, “whenever one of those signals goes from this cerebral motor area here in the left hemisphere down to make the weapon hand move, it must be a special signal this gun was built to catch. Just like a lock is made for one particular key.
“And near as I can figure, the gun has to be able to tell when that move coming up is going to be dangerous to the man holding it. Stands to reason if it can tell when a brain’s signaling a hand, it can tell too if that brain is killing-mad. Some people can do that, and most dogs.
“So, if it senses murderous intent and a message to the weapon hand to move, it moves too, and faster.
“It homes on this disk like a magnet right into the hand of the gent that owns it, and aims itself plumb at the place the signal is coming from.” I tapped the chart. “Right here.”
I poked the gunk out of a corncob, packed it and lit up before going on. Jake stared at the umbrella handle like a stuffed owl.
“Now, that fourth skeleton we saw sure as hell isn’t human. He isn’t from anywhere on this green earth, or I miss my guess. Might even have something to do with Crater Lake there, years ago. But we aren’t likely to find out.
“But we do know that he fought three Indians that probably jumped him all at once. And he killed every one of them with this gun before he fell.”