Book: The Fastest Gun Dead
Author: Julian F. Grow
Release Date: December 24, 2019
(✍️ This article is collected from this book 📚
(All Credit To Go Real Hero The Author of this book 📖)
🙏 Please buy this book hardcopy from anyway.)
🧾In This Book____________________________
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.
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