Holmes on the Range

by Steve Hockensmith

“It ain’t fair,” I groaned as we rode out of town. “You throw down the last of our money on liquor, and I’m the one with the hangover.”

  “I appreciate your sacrifice, Brother,” Old Red said, showing me that little smirk of his. “I knew I could count on you to get a rave-up goin’, and you did.”

  Having a brain pickled in nickel beer, I had to ponder on that a moment before I caught its meaning. Despite the alcohol haze that clouded the previous day, I had dim recollections of my moody, mopey brother laughing it up with the boys in the Hornet’s Nest, swapping stories and jokes. . .and gossip about the Bar VR.

  “You wanted everybody drunk,” I said. “You wanted everybody talkin’.”

  Gustav let his smug smile grow a little larger. He’d used me as his liquored-up Judas goat, and it rubbed on me like sandpaper—though I had to admit I’d had plenty of fun.

  “So?” I growled. “That firewater smoke anything out?”

  Old Red nodded at the open range ahead and kicked his horse up to a canter. I knew what that meant: Not in town. I got my mount moving, too, every jouncing jostle shooting a jolt of pain through me. While I waited for Gustav to slow his horse and open his mouth, I got my mind off my suffering—and my irritation with my brother—by chewing over what I already knew of the Bar VR.

  Like a lot spreads, it was owned by Englishmen, lords and earls and such in this case. That’s why it even had a name that acted uppity: the Cantlemere Ranche. As is the custom, the outfit was more commonly known by its brand, that being a stubby line over the letters VR.

  A few years back, the Bar VR wasn’t much different from any other big ranch. The winter of ‘86–’87 changed that. The Big Die-up it’s called, for that was the winter more than a million cows froze solid on the plains. At the time, I was trying to keep our family afloat by clerking in a Kansas granary—a job that let me ride out the blizzards as cozy as kittens in a sweater. Old Red was earning money, too, though he didn’t have it so soft: He was fighting frostbite in a Panhandle ranch shack. The snow got so high he saw dead steers in treetops when it melted, and the smell of rotting cow flesh hung on the prairie for a year.

  Most of the so-called cattle barons sold out after that. The VR’s owners stuck firm, though they did make one big change. A new general manager showed up, handed the foreman his walking papers, and brought in his own man—Uly McPherson.

  Now, up to here the VR’s story was common knowledge. But once McPherson got mixed up in it, details were a lot harder to come by. Apparently McPherson didn’t like any flannelmouthing about himself or his outfit, a point he’d made on more than one occasion by decorating the floor with a fellow’s teeth. Which is why Old Red had sprung for the rave-up. Fear can freeze men’s tongues, but liquor’s a surefire way to thaw them out.

  “The locals knew of McPherson even before he hired on with the VR,” my brother said when we were out on the plains with only prairie dogs around to eavesdrop. “He was a nester with a little spread just south of the ranch. Had him a reputation as a brand artist. The VR’s first general manager even accused him of cuttin’ wire and helpin’ himself to cattle. Then a new manager came over from England—Perkins is his name—and he went and hired the son of a bitch.”

  “Invites the fox into the henhouse.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Peculiar.”

  “It gets more so. When Perkins took over, the VR had thirty thousand head spread over half a million acres. That’s enough to keep thirty men busy. But from the provisions they buy in town, the best guess is they’ve got no more than ten men out there. No one can say for sure, for they run off every visitor they get—even hungry fellers ridin’ the grub line in the dead of winter.”

  “Unneighborly.”

  “Mighty. The only VR man people see in town other than the McPhersons is the cook. The Swede they call him, for reasons even you could deduce.”

  “He’s from France?”

  Gustav ignored my little funny.

  “Apparently, he speaks English about as good as a fish can whistle. So folks don’t get much gossip out of him. But it ain’t always what a feller says that tells you something. One of the boys from the Hornet’s Nest saw the Swede go into Langer’s Sundries yesterday and pick up the makings of a banquet—canned oysters, a keg of cod, currant jelly, hams. Then McPherson struts in. . .and tells him don’t forget the smoked salmon! And in his hands he’s got two bottles of thirty-dollar Scotch he just bought at the Gaieties.”

  I puzzled on this a moment, then gave it a shrug. “I don’t see the mystery. McPherson’s havin’ the Swede lay out an extrafine table the first day we’re there so none of us are turned back to town by lousy chow.”

  Old Red looked at me like you’d look at a man whose britches fell down as he strolled into church. “Brother,” he said, “if our first meal at the VR is oysters and Scotch, you can call me Old Shit-for-Brains from now on.”

  We rode on in silence for a stretch after that. I was thinking I had half a mind to wheel my mount around and head back to Miles, as the VR didn’t exactly have a welcoming glow about it.

  But I’d been following Gustav’s lead so long I didn’t even know if I had my own lead to follow. Whatever path in life I’d been on had been washed away the night the Cottonwood River jumped its banks and swept away the family farm—and the rest of our family with it. Who could say where life would’ve swept me if Gustav hadn’t offered me an anchor?

  Of course, for an anchor my brother sure drifted around a lot. But I’d done fine enough drifting with him. I’d just decided to keep at it—for now—when Old Red spoke up and shook my newfound resolve.

  “Don’t see the mystery!” he snapped out of the blue. “Feh!”

  My doubts came stampeding back, the herd even bigger than before.

  I’d assumed we were headed out to the VR on a job. But in my brother’s mind, I feared, we were headed out there on a case.

  Three

  THE CASTLE

  Or, We See a Cabin Fit for a King

  The McPhersons were to meet us that afternoon where the eastern trail crosses the Powder River. When we arrived, the rest of the new hires from the Hornet’s Nest were already there: Tall John, lean and long; runty, ruddy Pinky Harris; stooped, cross-eyed Swivel-Eye Smyth; Crazymouth Nick Dury, cocky and full of nonsense; and glowering, quick-tempered Anytime McCoy, the biggest asshole west of the Mississippi . . .or east ofit, for that matter.

  The boys were keeping themselves warm through the vigorous working of jawbones and playing cards, and I jumped right in. But Old Red just hunkered down next to the fire, lit his pipe, and stared into the flames, content with the company of his own thoughts.

  Spider showed up before too long. Riding with him was the strangest-looking puncher I’d ever come across. Everything about the man was yellow-white, even his kinky hair and dead eyes. He looked like he’d been dipped in egg and rolled in flour. When he and Spider got up close, I realized he was an albino Negro.

  “We’re all gonna ride in together, and I don’t want any strays,” Spider said without so much as “Hello” as a warm-up. “Around here, you only go where you’re told, when you’re told. Wander off to pick daisies and you’ll regret it.”

  From the way he glared at us, I couldn’t tell whether he meant we’d be fired or fired on. His clothes were faded and worn, but his Peace-maker was polished to a shine.

  “Before we go, Boudreaux here’s gonna collect your artillery,” he went on, nodding at the albino. “Six-shooters, hideout guns, rifles—whatever you got.”

  Boudreaux dismounted and took a couple gunnysacks out of his saddlebag. He shook one out with a quick snap of the wrist.

  “In the bag,” he said, his voice a lifeless mumble, as if he was speaking to us from beneath six feet of earth.

  Tall John unholstered his gun, emptied out the cartridges, and dropped the whole caboodle in Boudreaux’s sack.

  No one else moved.

  “VR hands don’t go about heeled. That�
��s the rule,” Spider growled. “You don’t like it, you can haul your sorry asses back to Miles and starve.”

  I shot a look at Old Red that said, I vote we give starving a try. But my brother was already pulling out his .45. One by one, the rest of the boys did the same—though Anytime McCoy grumbled about handing his hogleg over to a “damned whitewashed nigger.”

  The albino didn’t bat an eye. He just moved from man to man filling his sacks with iron and lead.

  My Colt was the last bit of hardware to go in.

  Giving up my gun made me feel more like a prisoner than an employee—and that impression stirred in me even more once we got riding. Spider led the way, with us Hornet’s Nest boys bunched up behind him and his man Boudreaux riding drag. It struck me as just the way two lawmen might line up a string of rustlers they were taking to the hoosegow . . .or the hangman.

  We followed a trail south for more than an hour before we spotted anything other than rolling hills and snow-dusted brush. It started as a speck on the horizon, then grew into what looked like a castle out of a history book, complete with turrets and spires and other fancy doohickeys. As we got closer, I could see that it was built from ponderosa and cottonwood, not stone. It was half-palace, half-cabin.

  And totally dilapidated. The paint was peeling, the glass in the windows was sooty and smudged, and someone’s boot had put a hole in the steps to the porch. There were a couple of bunkhouses and a barn not far off, and they looked even worse. Whatever the McPhersons had been up to out here, it sure as hell wasn’t housekeeping.

  “That’s your place there,” Spider said, naturally pointing to the most beat-up building in sight. “Get yourselves situated. . .and don’t go wanderin’ off.”

  Then he did exactly what he’d told us not to do. Boudreaux stuck around, watching as we stowed our riding gear, his eyes so cold and hard they could have been yellow marbles.

  “I’ve seen plenty of spooks in my time, but damned if you ain’t the spookiest,” Anytime snarled at him.

  The albino didn’t take the bait. He just sat atop his horse as motionless as a man sculpted out of chalk.

  He didn’t follow us into our bunkhouse. If he had, he would’ve gotten an earful from all of us. The dust was thick enough to make a fine mattress, while the wood was so rotted out Swivel-Eye went straight through to the floor when he tried to take a seat on his bunk.

  “Home sweet home,” he sighed as he hauled himself up.

  “God damn,” Anytime spat. “They may as well have us bunkin’ in a hole in the ground.”

  “Ain’t been nothin’ but snakes in here in years,” Pinky added.

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” I replied, hefting my war bags onto a more sturdy-looking bunk. “I bet it’s been empty so long even the lice have died.”

  “That other bunkhouse looked a little bigger,” my brother said, heaping his things on the bunk below mine. “I reckon that’s where—”

  Before Old Red could finish reckoning, someone hollered outside.

  “You new boys get out here!”

  It was Uly. With him was Spider and another fellow we’d never laid eyes on. Plainly, he wasn’t a cowboy, what with his clean white shirt and black frock coat and pale face. In fact, he had every appearance of being a gentleman, which made him seem out of place betwixt the raggedy-assed McPhersons. He was like a cut of choice sirloin sandwiched by two wormy pieces of moldy bread.

  “This here’s Mr. Perkins, the general manager,” Uly said. “Listen up to what he has to say.”

  We all had permission to stare at the gent now, so I made the most of it. He was a lean fellow, with piercing blue eyes and wavy golden hair that had turned to silver here and there. The gray in his locks notwithstanding, he was no Methuselah, being no older than thirty-five. I’d learned to judge handsome from my sister Greta, who was never shy about expressing her opinion on such things. Her heart would have skipped a beat at the sight of Perkins, as he had the unblemished skin, jutted-out jaw, and general lack of disfigurements she declared essential to a man’s good looks.

  “Welcome to the Cantlemere Ranche,” he said, his cold tone conveying little in the way of genuine welcome. His English accent was still strong after his years in the West, and as he continued the long fingers of his left hand began fiddling nervously with a gold chain that looped down from his vest pockets.

  “You are now employees of the Sussex Land and Cattle Company. As such, you will be expected to obey all rules at all times. This means you will not drink, you will not fight, you will not steal. Visitors are not tolerated, nor are unapproved absences. To harbor one or engage in the other is to invite the severest consequence. We do not ask for or reward personal initiative. Quiet obedience is all we want. Mr. McPherson will tell you what to do and what not to do. There is no reason whatsoever for you to speak to me. Am I understood?”

  We all mumbled yessirs, and that was enough for Perkins. Without another word, he walked off toward the castle.

  “What Mr. Perkins said don’t need explainin’,” Uly said. “Only I’m goin’ to tell you one thing again, cuz I want you to remember it. You go where I say the work is, and that’s it. Anyplace else may as well have barbed wire around it. I’d like a ‘Yes, boss’ on that.”

  We gave him what he wanted, and he smiled. “Well, we just might get along then. Now—you see that barn there?”

  We did indeed, and an uninspiring sight it was. McPherson must have agreed, for our first job as VR hands was pulling out rotted wood, patching up holes, and slapping on a fresh coat of paint. We were at it until the sun went down and then some after, with no one telling us to stop until a croaky voice called out, “Alright, boyce! You drope dose pentbrooshes end you coom here geeting soom veetles!”

  We turned to see a gray-whiskered old coot standing near our bunkhouse. We just blinked at him for a few seconds, none of us knowing what the hell he was yelling about. Old Red broke the code first.

  “You say you got vittles?”

  “Ya!” the old-timer shouted back. “Veetles!”

  That cleared things up—it was the Swede, the cook my brother had heard talk on back in Miles. Fortunately, his cooking was more to be admired than his talking. He’d filled his cookshack with a fine welcome for us—biscuits and beans and sonofabitch stew. But there was nary an oyster nor a drop of Scotch, of course.

  Once we had ourselves stuffed, the Swede wished us a good night—or, to be more exact, a “goot neat”—and we ambled on over to our bunkhouse. While the rest of the boys digested over dominoes, Old Red drifted to the front of the shack and leaned in the doorway sucking on his pipe. I got up and joined him.

  “What’re you stewin’ on?”

  Gustav answered with a shrug.

  Across the way, a light burned in the castle. It put a glow in a couple of the widows, giving them the look of fiery eyes staring at us from a huge, dark face.

  “What do you make of him?” I asked, nodding at the big house. “Perkins.”

  “You know what the man said,” Old Red replied, his voice low. “ ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.’ ”

  “The man,” of course, was Sherlock Holmes, and the quote was from “A Study in Scarlet,” one of the Holmes tales Old Red had found after hearing “The Red-Headed League.” Accounts of Holmes’s exploits were like strays roaming the prairie, and my brother had rounded up a small herd. They were stuffed in his war bag, the yellow magazine paper worn so thin by my reading and rereading that the words had little more than a sense of duty to hold them together anymore.

  “I don’t need more evidence,” I said. “He’s a boiled-shirt son of a bitch.”

  “Well. . .I suppose that’s a safe deduction,” Gustav conceded.

  Jangling footsteps reached out of the darkness to grab our ears, and we turned to see a couple of seedy-looking drovers walking from the corral to the VR’s other bunkhouse. They stared back at us, their sneers plain enough even
in the dull glow of moonlight.

  “You see what I see?”

  “I see,” Old Red said.

  Of course he did. No cowboy would’ve missed it.

  The noise those fellows made as they walked didn’t just come from their spurs. There was the squeak of leather and the slap of heavy iron on thigh.

  They were wearing holsters—and those holsters weren’t packing fresh-picked daisies.

  “So that rule about guns—” I began.

  “—only applies to us,” Old Red finished.

  The men we’d been watching disappeared into their bunkhouse just as the light in the castle went out.

  Four

  A VISITOR

  Or, The Law Comes A-Calling and Is Welcomed with Folded Arms

  Cowboys,” of course, are fellows who work with cows. Along the same track, “housemaids” are gals who work in houses. It follows then that for our first three weeks at the Bar VR, Old Red and I were “houseboys.”

  McPherson had us new hands shining up the castle, painting, roofing, and even dusting, sweeping, and cleaning windows. We washed linens, we scrubbed floors—and we fought the urge to nip samples from the castle’s curiously well-stocked pantry. Pinky Harris was particularly enticed by the impressive store of alcohol, and every few hours one of us Hornet’s Nesters had to stop him from sneaking off with a bottle.

  Pinky didn’t thank us, of course—though he should have. There was little chance a hand could get away with shenanigans in the big house, as Perkins was ever drifting about the place like a ghost. He seemed to be a lonely sort, and he moped around with the doleful air of a man pining for something long lost. One day I accidentally discovered just what that “something” was: a someone. I came around a corner upstairs and nearly flattened Perkins, who was gazing down at a small object he held cupped in his open palms. It was a locket attached to the gold chain that ever dangled from the pockets of his vest. He snapped the locket shut and snapped at me to get back to work, but not before I got a look at what he’d been mooning over—a photograph of a slender, dark-haired woman. I saw her upside down and in black and white for all of a second, but that’s all I needed to know she had a beauty well worth pining for.