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.