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.”
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 w
orking 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.
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 Texan 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.
<
* * * *
ALL THE TEA IN CHINA
by R. Bretnor
I was suitably startled to learn last year that a recent conference of the Modern Language Association had included a seminar on science fiction—but my sense of shock was in no way due to the realization that s-f has exerted its influence on our language, as it had on our literature. What surprised me was that official cognizance of this self-evident phenomenon should have been taken, so readily, by a learned body of academicians.
Actually, publishers of science fantasy have known for some time that the colleges and universities provide some of their best markets! but s-f reading was something almost everybody did, and practically nobody talked about. I wonder how much of this emergence of science fiction from the academic kitchen to its parlor is due to the change in media (so much easier to discuss a story from Atlantic or even the Post, than one from Thrilling Wonder), and how much to the persistent subversive efforts of a few literary guerrillas who have been sniping steadily from positions of irreproachable intellectual eminence at the guardians of literary snobbery. The more celebrated of these have included Anthony Boucher, Clifton Fadiman, and the late Fletcher Pratt; but none have been more staunchly effective than Reg Bretnor.
Linguist, Orientalist, lecturer, critic, and author, Bretnor’s last two books have been a translation of Moncrif’s Les Chats (Golden Cockerel Press; 400 copies; morocco, $40; cloth, $20); and a paperback collection of vignette-length extended s-f puns. In the past he has served as adviser on Asian affairs to the U.S. Government; taught writing at San Quentin; edited one of the earliest and best volumes of s-f criticism (Modern Science Fiction, Coward-McCann, 1953). His short stories appear, ordinarily, either in literary quarterlies or in s-f magazines.
* * * *
It was mighty lucky for me that my Grandma Whitford caught on in time. If she hadn’t, chances are I would’ve grown up just like her Great-uncle Jonas Hackett, and come to the same sort of end, shaking hands with the Devil himself before breakfast, and with not even a Christian tombstone over me at the last for folks to come look at.
I was down in an empty stall at the barn, making a trade with Jim Bledsoe. Jim was sniveling and crying and begging me not to make him go through with the trade, which he’d already agreed to, and I wasn’t giving an inch.
He picked up his 12-gauge Iver-Johnson, and his two Belgian hares, and his skates, and fondled them kind of, and put them back down with the rest of his stuff; and he said, maybe for the twentieth time, “Aw, B-Bill, you—you can have all the rest. But p-p-please lemme keep my old shotgun, p-please.”
And I said, “Not for all the tea in China, I won’t. No sirree bob!”
It was right then Grandma showed up, her little eyes crackling and sparkling, and her lips set as tight as when she was mad at some fresh city peddler. Small as she was, she grabbed my left ear and twisted real hard.
“Ow!” I said.
She twisted again. “All the tea in China, indeed!” she snapped. “I’ll all-the-tea-in-China you, boy. Now you give those things back to Jimmy—this instant! And Jimmy, you take ‘em and skeddaddle on home.”
“Aw, Gran’ma,” I grumbled, “we’re only making a trade. There’s nothing wrong with just— Yow!”
“Don’t lie to me, boy. You were chiseling him out of his eyeteeth. That whole big pile for a one-bladed jack-knife and a busted war sword! It’s that bad Hackett blood in you, I do declare. You’re getting to be as wicked and sinful as Great-uncle Jonas.” She looked at Jimmy again, who was fiddling around, still scared to pick up his things. “Go ahead, take ‘em,” she told him. “The sheriff won’t ever hear how you burned down his outhouse—that’s a promise. When I get through with Bill here, he won’t say a word.” She twisted my ear harder than ever. “No sirree bob—not for all the tea in China, he won’t!”
And as soon as Jimmy had beat it, she marched me out of the barn, and straight past the house while the hired-hand snickered, and around the big corn-patch and right up the east slope of Hackett’s Hill. She didn’t slow down or let go of my ear till we got clean to the top; and even though Hackett’s Hill isn’t more than a couple hundred feet high, I was just about out of breath.
She told me to sit. “Wonder why I brought you up here?”
Hackett’s Hill wasn’t worth climbing. It was sort of lumpy and brown, with nothing but scrubby dry weeds growing on it. All you could see from the top was the Post Road winding around it before straightening out down the valley, and our house, and Smathers’. So I nodded.
“I brought you,” she said, “because it was right about here that Jonas Hackett’s place was before he was took by the Devil, and because I can see his spirit’s strong in you, and because I aim to drive it clean out.”
She stared at me till it seemed that a cold little wind blew across Hackett’s Hill and into my spine. “Boy,” she asked, “what do you want to be wh
en you’ grown?”
I looked down at my shoes. “I want to be rich,” I told her defiantly. “I want to move down to Boston, and have a big house, and a carriage, and a gold watch and chain, and tell folks what to do.”
“I thought so,” she said. “Well, that’s all right for some, whose natures are honest and can stand off temptation—but it isn’t for you. You’re going to Harvard College instead, and let ‘em make you a doctor.”
“No, ma’am,” I answered right back. “I wouldn’t do that. No, siree bob. Not for—” Then I remembered my ear and shut up.
“Not for all the tea in China,” she finished up for me. “No siree bob. And that’s just what Great-uncle Jonas answered them back when they wanted him to go down to Harvard. Now you sit real still, and don’t interrupt, and I’ll tell you the story. Only don’t go telling anyone else, because it’s nothing we’re proud of, and it’s best kept in the family.”
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