The Fastest Gun Dead Free Ebook Reading

Title: The Fastest Gun Dead

Author: Julian F. Grow
Release Date: December 24, 2019 [EBook #61013]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FASTEST GUN DEAD ***
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The Fastest Gun Dead
BY JULIAN F. GROW
The skeleton had the fastest
draw west of the Pecos. Too
bad he was such a lousy shot.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

He was a big man, broad of shoulder, slim of hip. His Stetson was crimped
Texas-style, over slate-gray eyes that impassively had seen much good and more
evil in their twenty-six years.
He stood in the saloon door with the dust of the streets of Dos Cervezas
Pequenas still swirling about scuffed, range-rider's chaps. His left hand held
open the weatherbeaten swinging door. The right hovered over the worn
peachwood butt of the Colt holstered on his right thigh.
The slate-gray eyes, emotionless, swept the crowd bellied up to the bar, and
stopped at one man. When he spoke it was flat, but with the ring of tempered
steel, and every man but that one drew back out of range. "I want you, Dirty
Jake," the big man said. "Now."
Dirty Jake shot him into doll rags, naturally.
Dirty Jake Niedelmeier was, you might say, the most feared ribbon clerk in the
Territory. Easily the most.
I remember him from the early days, from the first day he came to town, in fact.
I remember because he got off the stage just as I was leaning out the window
nailing up my brand-new shingle, and my office was and still is upstairs next to
the stage depot. I was down on the boardwalk admiring it, all shiny gold leaf on
black like the correspondence school promised:
Hiram Pertwee, M.D.
His voice broke in on me, all squeaky. "Beg your pardon," he said, "where's the
YMCA?"
Well, that isn't the usual sort of question for here. I turned around. There he was,
a scrawny little runt about knee-high to short, wearing a panama hat, a wrinkled
linen duster and Congress gaiters.
He wasn't especially dirty then, of course, only about average for a stage
passenger. He kind of begrudged his face, with little squint eyes and a long thin
nose, a mustache like a hank of Spanish moss and just about chin enough to
bother shaving. Under his duster he wore a clawhammer coat, the only alpaca
one I ever saw, and I never from that day out saw him wear any other. He stood
there looking like he'd never been anyplace he really cottoned to, but this might
just be the worst.
I was just a young squirt then and not above funning a dude. I told him the
YMCA was around the corner, two doors down and up the back stairs at the Owl
Hoot Palace. He nodded and went the way I told him.
That was, and still is, Kate's Four Bit Crib. The girls there wear candy-striped
stockings and skirts halfway to the knee, and their shirtwaists are open at the
neck. Dirty Jake didn't speak to me for three years.
He wasn't Dirty Jake then, though, just Jacob Niedelmeier, fresh from selling
ribbons and yard goods in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and hot to find a fortune in
the hills. He'd been a failure all his natural life. This was a new beginning, for a
man 34 who was already at the bitter end and looking for the path back. Gold
was the way, he figured. He was going to get it.
But he didn't. He was back flat broke and starving in four months.
He spent the next seventeen years behind the notions counter at Martin's
Mercantile, selling ribbon and yard goods and growing old two years at a time. I
think it tainted his mind.
Leastways, from the time I got to know him, some fourteen years gone, he's been
what you might say, a queer actor. At first, when the store closed at sundown
he'd take off for the near hills with a pick and a sack, still seeking for color
somebody might have missed. After a while he didn't bother with the gear. He
just moseyed around all that rock mostly, I suppose, to be away from people.
Truth to tell, people were beginning to avoid him anyway. He was getting kind
of gamy over the years, and cantankerous generally.
Maybe it's kind of funny we got more or less friendly but doctors and ribbon
clerks aren't so all-fired far apart. They both have to do with people and their
ways, and like to get shut of both now and then. Every couple of months I'd go
along with him up in the hills, to get the sick smell out of my nose. Night air and
a night sky can be pretty fine if you've been looking at tongues and such long
enough.
Going out like that, we didn't say much. I preferred it that way since Jake
Niedelmeier was a boob.
A smart man can get on tolerably well with an idiot if both just have sense
enough to keep their mouths shut. One time he didn't was when he brought along
a bottle of rye. He got started and was going on to beat the band, yapping about
how life was a cheat and someday everybody'd respect Jacob Niedelmeier, until
finally I lost patience and told him that while I treasured our association beyond
pearls I'd chuck him off a cliff if he didn't shut the hell up. I was nice about it,
and after that it was like I said, tolerable.
Well, sir, about two years ago he came into my office while I was darning up
some fool borax miner that'd got himself kicked square in the bottle on his hip.
Jake stood in the corner picking his teeth while I finished. After the borax miner
limped out he spoke up.
"Comin'?" That was all the invitation he ever gave.
"I guess," I said. I sloshed the suture needle in a basin, gave it a couple of swipes
on the hone stone and threw it in my satchel. That miner had a tough rind.
Jake went out first. I closed the door behind us, not locking it, of course, because
our night marshal was kind of my relief surgeon whenever I was on calls. He
was a Secesh hospital orderly during the Rebellion. He was better with a saw
than with sewing, but he could tie up most wounds well enough to do till I got
back.
Jake and I set out south up the mountain trail, but pretty soon it hit me he was
heading someplace considerable more directly than we usually did.
Sure enough, he took off at an angle from the trail after a bit. We struck up into
some fairly woolly country. He wasn't following any sign I could see, at least not
by moonlight, but he kept going faster until I was plumb out of wind.
We were in the hills overlooking Crater Lake when we came to kind of an
amphitheater in the rocks, some twenty feet across. He stopped at the edge of it
and stood staring in, silent and breathing catchy.
Me, I just chased my own breath for a while, then looked too and saw what he
was aiming at. Right in the middle, shining pale in the moonshine like nothing
else does, was a pile of old, old bones. Jake, I saw, had seen it before. It was
scaring him yet.
Old bones, sir, are still bones. I've seen and set my fill. But after I got a good
look at these they scared me too.
There were four skeletons altogether, all nicely preserved, and only three of them
were men. Indians, I mean. You could tell that from the shreds of buckskin. Two
of them still had weapons near their right hands: one a stone knife, the other a
lance. And the top of each of the three skulls had been shot clean away.
At least, half of the top had, and the same half on all three. Almost the entire os
frontale and ossa parietalia on the left side was gone on each one. I hunkered
down to see closer, while Jake stood back and shook.
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
upwards 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 upcountry. 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 signalling 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."
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 truly 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 the 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 beginnin' 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, Redmeat 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 bare-headed 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 disc 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.
After he left I got out my tallybook and ticked off the men Dirty Jake had killed:
One Eye Jack Sundstrom, Fat Charlie Ticknor, Pilander Quantrell, Lobo
Stephens, Alec the Frenchman Dubois, some jackass Texas nobody even knew
and the rest, all men whose brains had telegraphed a special signal to Jake's gun
before it reached their own right hand. Well, there was a new pistolero in town.
A month and a half later I was craned around, trying to lance a boil of my own,
when out of the corner of my eye I saw Dirty Jake go by under my window. He'd
dug that hat with the ostrich plume out from under the rocks, his hand was
healed, he was swinging his umbrella and he didn't so much as look up. He was
headed for the Owl Hoot Palace. I decided the boil'd wait.
Less than five minutes later I heard the shots, two of them. A second later Jubal
Bean, swamper at the Owl Hoot, came pounding up the boardwalk and hollered
in the door:
"Doc, better come quick. Dirty Jake just took a couple slugs in the chest and he
never even got to draw!"
I took my time. "It was just a matter of odds," I said. "Who got him?"
"The new one," Jubal said, "the man they call Lefty."
Well, a couple more weeks to bleach, a little wiring, and I'll be heading East.
Look for the billboards:
MR. BONES
The Fastest Draw in the West
"Faster than Billy the Kid
and Twice as Dead"
presented by
HIRAM PERTWEE,
M.D.
All I've got to do is figure how to keep getting mad at Jake.
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