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."