That brought Jake up short.
The Territory is kind of violent generally, and anybody or anything good along that line would be bound to have the sober respect of a ninny like Jake.
I dug up an old glove and used spirit gum to stick in its palm the little disk from the skeleton’s hand. I pulled the glove on my right hand, and stood up with my hand about a foot over the umbrella handle.
“Okay,” I said, “kill me.”
He was so orry-eyed by then he damn near did it just to be obliging. But then the recollection of the night on the mountain, and the three Indians with their heads shot off, sifted through and he shied off. “Hell no,” he hollered, “I seen that thing go before! I ain’t about to get my head blowed to bits!” And he went on.
Well, it took me the best of two hours. I showed him the two studs on the underside that most likely were a safety device. I explained how probably the gun wouldn’t go off unless somebody was holding it with a finger between those studs, which was why it didn’t shoot when it went into the skeleton’s hand that night. I finally got him by telling him if I was right, we’d wire the fourth skeleton together, take it back East and earn a mint of money on the vaudeville stage showing the fastest cadaver in the West.
“Mr. Bones: Faster than Billy the Kid and Twice as Dead,” I said we’d bill it. Jake, he thought that was a lovely idea, and decided to go along.
Fourteen times that eternal jackass raised his right arm at me, while I held my own gloved right hand over the weapon. But he didn’t have any real heart for it, and fourteen times the gun just lay there. Then I got a mite impatient, and kicked him in the kneecap. That fifteenth time he was really trying.
Skinny as he was he’d have driven me clear through the floor, except that umbrella handle jumped into my glove and aimed dead at his forehead, snarling like a cougar. More correctly, the left side of his forehead. If I hadn’t braced my index finger out stiff, that fifteenth time would’ve had him a dead man.
Jake froze like a statue and hung in the air staring at the gun, snarling away in my hand. Finally I pulled the glove off with the gun still stuck to it, and flung it on the desk.
Then Jake gave me the sixteenth, and by the time I got up again he was gone and the gun and glove with him.
Next morning the borax squabble blew up again. What with miners getting stomped I didn’t get to bed for a week, much less have a chance to find out where Jake and that damned weapon had lit out for. By the time I did, it was too late. Jacob Niedelmeier, the ribbon clerk, after seventeen years was on his way to glory as the legendary Dirty Jake.
I got the start of the story from a drifter, name of Hubert Comus. He’d got into kind of a heated discussion in a saloon south a ways that ended with him and this other man going for their hardware. Hubert got his Merwin & Bray.42 out and, being a fool, tried fanning it. Of course it jammed and he laid the heel of his hand open clear to the bone.
‘Twasn’t the hand bothering Hubert though. Like most, the other man missed him clean, but when the barkeep threw them both out Hubert lit sitting on the boardwalk and took a six-inch splinter clear through his corduroys.
While I was working on him he told me about Jake.
A man, it seems, had turned up in a little settlement called Blister, about two days down the line. Nobody noticed him come in, except that he was wearing one glove, a shiny clawhammer coat and Congress gaiters. The general run in the mining camps doesn’t wear Congress gaiters.
He got noticed, though, when he showed up in a barroom wearing a pearl-gray derby with an ostrich plume in the band, and carrying a rolled-up umbrella under his arm. The little devil had stuck the shaft of a regular umbrella in the muzzle of the skeleton’s weapon.
It turned out he’d bought the derby that the storekeeper there had planned to be buried in. Where the ostrich plume came from I never did find out.
“He come right in the swingin’ door an’ stood there,” Hubert said over his shoulder, “lookin’ at the crowd. Purty quick they was all lookin’ right back, I kin tell you. That feather fetched ‘em up sharp. Take it easy back there, will you, Doc? Then Homer Cavanaugh, the one they called Ham Head, he bust out laughing. He laughed so hard he bent over double, and the rest of the boys was just begin-nin’t’ laugh too when the little feller picked up a spitoon and dumped it down Ham Head’s neck.
“The boys got mighty quiet then. Hey, easy, Doc, will you? Ham Head straightened up and his face went from red as flannels to white, just like that. He stood glarin’ at the little feller for a couple of ticks, openin’ and closin’ his fists, and then that big right hand went for the Smith & Wesson in his belt.
“Well, it was a double-action pistol and had a couple notches in the grip, but Ham Head never cleared it. I never even seen the little feller draw, but there was Ham Head fallin’ with half his noggin shot away. Gently, will you, Doc, gently!
“The little feller stood leaning on his umbrella, lookin’ down at him. ‘What was that man’s name?’ he says. ‘Ham Head Cavanaugh,’ somebody says back. ‘Ham Head Cavanaugh,’ the little feller says, ‘he’s the first.’ Then he shoves the umbreller back under his arm and goes out. We never saw him again.
“Some say it was a bootleg pistol he used, or a derringer in his sleeve. And some say he had a pardner with a rifle in the street, but there wasn’t nobody there. I was standin’ as close to him as I am to you, Doc, and I swear — it — was — that — um — breller — OW!”
Ham Head Cavanaugh was the first. I had kind of a personal interest in Jake and his weapon, so I kept track. There was Curly Sam Thompson, Big John Ballentine, Red-meat Carson, Uriah Singletree and twelve others known of, all dead within eighteen months. Any man Jake could hoorah into a fight. With never a chance to get his right hand on iron before his head gave the signal and got blown off. He took them all on. And he never lost — because he couldn’t.
Jake was king-o’-the-hill now, all right. He had the success he yearned for.
Yet when he came back to see me last April it wasn’t to brag. He was in trouble. I looked up from a customer, a damn fool that’d sat on a gila monster, and there he was, sneaking in the door bareheaded like a whipped hound, not the cock of the walk in the whole Territory. He slid into the back room like a shadow, and the man I was working on never even knew he’d come.
When I went in afterward the lamp was out, the shade was down and he was in a corner, nervous as a jackrabbit an eagle just dropped in a wolf den. “Buried my derby under a pile of rock up in the mountains,” he whispered. “Look,” and he held out his glove.
It was plumb worn out. The little metal disk was hanging on by a strand of spirit gum, and the fabric of the palm was in shreds.
I looked at him for a minute without saying anything. He was still wearing the clawhammer coat, over B.V.D. tops, but it looked like he’d been buried weeks in it and dug up clumsy. He had on greasy rawhide breeches and battered cowhand boots for shoes. He had a month’s beard on his lip and he stunk.
This here was legendary Dirty Jake, no question about it.
“Get a new glove,” I said.
“Nope,” he answered, “no good. Last week in Ojo Rojizo I took the glove off to scratch and right then a man braced me. He threw me in a horse-trough when I wouldn’t fight I want you to fix me up good.
“I want you to open my hand up and set the dingus just under the skin, and sew it up again. Knew a feller did that with five-dollar gold pieces cuz he didn’t like banks. Worked fine till he got a counterfeit, and it killed him.
“I’ll lay low in the hills till the hand heals. No problems after that”
No problems? Maybe so, but I’d been doing some thinking. Still, I kept my mouth shut and did what he wanted, and he slunk off with no thanks. Don’t guess I really had any coming.