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.