Holmes on the Range

by Steve Hockensmith

  “I’ll be damned,” he said when the lock clicked, the knob turned, and the door went swinging open.

  It was pitch-black inside the house, but that didn’t slow my brother. He knew exactly where he was going, and I followed behind more by sound than sight. Before long he struck a lucifer and touched it to a lamp, and when the room lit up around us, I saw we were in Perkins’s office.

  “Get those curtains, quick,” Gustav said, turning the flame down as low as it would go.

  “Sure, sure—just jerk me around like a pack mule,” I grumbled as I pulled the curtains closed. When I turned around, I found my brother opening the top drawer to Perkins’s desk. “You wanna tell me what the hell you’re lookin’ for?”

  “Can’t say cuz I don’t know,” Old Red replied, shuffling through paper clips, pens, and spare bottles of ink.

  “What?”

  Gustav moved on to the next drawer. “Perkins was holed up in this office for weeks before the spring roundups. Far as we know, there weren’t any new head counts to record. No sales, neither. So what was he workin’ on so hard?”

  “How do you know he was workin’? He could’ve been in here cuttin’ pictures of corsets and bloomers out of the Monkey-Ward catalog.”

  Old Red looked up just long enough to shoot me a frown. “Back when we were sprucin’ up the castle, we caught sight of the man every now and again, remember? You mean to say you never noticed he had ink on his fingers?”

  “Oh. I guess I would have to say that.”

  My brother shook his head, then disappeared under the desk. When he popped up again, he was holding a metal wastebasket. He peered into it, smiled, and tilted the top so I could look in, too.

  Piled up inside were at least twenty empty ink bottles.

  “You spent some time hunched over a desk,” Old Red said. “What do you make of this?”

  Being one of the few boys around Peabody, Kansas, with both a head for books and enough schooling to do anything with it, I’d worked two years as an assistant granary clerk before being dragged back to the farm seven days a week by family misfortune—in this case, my uncle Franz’s growing belief that he was Martin Luther and one of our pigs was the pope. That had been years ago, yet I still remembered enough from my clerking days to know Perkins hadn’t run through all those bottles without considerable effort.

  “With that much ink you could fill up three ledger books and still have enough left over to drown a dog,” I said. “But what difference does that make?”

  “Could make a lot . . .ifPerkins’s death wasn’t an accident.”

  “Oh,” I groaned. “That again.”

  “Yes, that again,” my brother snapped. “Look, we know somethin’ strange is goin’ on around here. We’re put to housework when we arrive, we ain’t allowed more than a few miles from HQ, the McPhersons watch us like hawks circlin’ a chicken coop, Perkins spends his days scribblin’ away at God knows what and then ends up under a stampede. Don’t all that make you the least bit curious?”

  “Curious, yes. Suicidal, no. If Uly and Spider catch us in here—”

  “All I wanna do is find whatever Perkins was—”

  My brother’s eyes suddenly went wide, and I’m sure mine did the same. We’d both heard the back door creak open, and the sound that followed could only be footsteps.

  We’d closed the office door behind us, but the faint glow from the lamp might still peek out through the keyhole and give us away. Gustav put out the light, leaving us frozen in a dark as deep as the blind must know.

  The hallway from the kitchen splits in two, wrapping itself like arms around the stairway to the second floor. On the north side of the house, the hall passes by a dining room and a parlor on its way to the foyer. Moving around to the south, it takes you by an indoor privy, unused “servants’ quarters,” Perkins’s bedroom, and the ranch office, where we were holed up.

  It sounded like whoever was out there was headed straight for us. I suddenly became very aware of the lightness at my hip—where the weight of a Colt would’ve helped me feel a lot less spooky. Not only were we facing this new danger without benefit of guns, we were facing it without benefit of pants, as we were both still in our long johns.

  “What’re we gonna do?”

  “Nothin’. . . yet,” Old Red whispered back.

  The footsteps slowed, then stopped. We heard a sigh, almost like a ghostly moan.

  “Ahhhhhh.”

  And next, a clink—the sound of glass touching glass. Then “Ahhhhhh” again.

  Much closer now, I heard more footsteps. But this time it was my brother creeping closer to the door. There was a low rattle—Gustav turning the knob—and then a narrow sliver of light appeared. Old Red had opened the door just enough to peek out. I moved up behind him and peered over his head.

  Across the foyer, stretched out on an overstuffed divan in the parlor, was the mirror image of Old Red and myself: a fellow in nothing but boots and a union suit. On the floor at his feet were a lit candle and three bottles—one deep amber, one straw yellow, and one bloodred.

  Scotch, beer, and wine.

  The man had a glass to his lips, and his head was thrown back so as to drain every drop.

  “Ahhhhhh,” he said.

  Then he moved the glass away from his mouth, revealing his face.

  He was too small a fellow by far to be Uly or Spider, and his hands didn’t have Boudreaux’s off-white buttermilk hue. Yet still I’d been so certain he was one of the McPherson men celebrating Perkins’s early retirement I almost blurted out in shock when I saw who it really was.

  Pinky Harris?

  I managed to keep myself stifled long enough for Old Red to close the door.

  “Shit,” my brother murmured. “I’ve got serious detectin’ to do, and one of the Hornet’s Nest boys has to go on a damn bender?”

  “I tell you what. I’ll step out there and join Pinky in a drink or two. That’ll distract him while you finish up your business.”

  Gustav rejected my noble offer with a snort. “I reckon Pinky’s only interested in Perkins’s liquor, but we can’t take any chances—he might go snoopin’ around for tobacco or dirty postcards or who knows what. So we’re gonna put everything back just like we found it, then we’re goin’ out the window.”

  I heard the sound of a desk drawer sliding shut, and a moment later metal clanked gently against wood as Old Red settled the wastebasket under the desk. In the deep silence of the house, both sounds seemed to echo like thunder. My brother and I stood there a while afterward, motionless, waiting for any sign that Pinky had heard.

  “Ahhhhhh,” Pinky said.

  Clink.

  “Alright,” Old Red whispered, “get over to the window—and don’t trip over anything.”

  That was easier said than done. We hadn’t been in the dark long, but I’d already forgotten every detail of the room around me. Chairs, cabinets, bookshelves—I couldn’t remember where they were or even if they were. The floor could have been littered with bear traps and roller skates for all I knew. And of course each step got the floorboards creaking like it was a two-thousand-pound elephant bearing down on them instead of a two-hundred-pound man.

  Somehow Old Red beat me to the window without making a sound. He pulled the curtains apart slow and easy, then eased the window open. When it was up just high enough, he ducked down and slipped through in one smooth motion.

  I followed—though I wasn’t so smooth. I had more man to maneuver than my brother, and one of my feet caught on the sill and toppled me over. I hit the ground outside with a thud.

  Old Red and I stared at each other, two cowboys statue-still in the moonlight wearing nothing but their Skivvies. A minute passed without any hint that Pinky or the boys in the bunkhouses had heard us, and we let ourselves breathe again.

  “You go back to your bunk,” Old Red said, still keeping his voice low. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  “You ain’t comin’ in now?”

  “S
omebody catches a peek of one feller tiptoein’ in, they figure he was out waterin’ the flowers. Two fellers—that raises questions.”

  It made sense, so I did as I was told, creeping back into the bunkhouse as silent as I could. My bunk squeaked so fierce as I hefted myself up into it you would’ve thought I was stepping on a mouse, but the sound didn’t set a single man off a single snore.

  As I stretched out and waited for Gustav, a familiar feeling came over me. Many’s the time my brothers and sisters told me, “Get back to your books. This here’s work for bigguns.” They’d be milking a cow or hitching up a plow, work I eventually learned was every bit as exciting as watching water evaporate. But as a little nipper it looked like a real thrill, if only because I wasn’t allowed to do it.

  Along the same line, I had the suspicion that Gustav had sent me into the bunkhouse just to get me out of his red hair. That stuck in my craw, for I was no longer the runt of the litter but was instead a sizable man with just as much curiosity and pride as the next fellow—unless, I suppose, the next fellow is Old Red.

  I figured it was that pride that drove my brother to act alone. It must be galling indeed to be both uncommonly intelligent and utterly unlettered. A fellow might feel he had to prove he had a brain, and mystery-solving would be a pretty showy way to go about it. Not to mention deadly.

  It vexed me to think I’d been dragged into danger by mere vanity. If Old Red wanted to poke his big nose into other people’s affairs, it wouldn’t be my fault if that nose got shot off.

  On the other hand, I owed my brother everything I had. Hell, he was everything I had. He’d been my guardian angel after the last of our family got swept away. Maybe it was my turn to wear the wings.

  I’d just about decided to hop from my bunk, search out Old Red, and either force some help on him or kick his scrawny ass, when. . . well, I fell asleep.

  When I awoke the next morning, I realized I’d never heard my brother come back in.

  Eight

  SPIDER’S BITE

  Or, A Hornet’s Nester Gets Hot Under the Collar

  The day started in the usual way—with the Swede banging a pot and shouting, “Eats! Eats! Eats!” at the top of his lungs. That always jerked me from my slumber with a jolt, but this particular morning I had even more reason to wake up jumpy.

  The second my eyes popped open, I rolled over and pointed them at the bunk beneath mine. I was half-expecting to see it empty, my brother having been caught by the McPhersons and strung up like a piñata. Yet there was Gustav, sporting that little smirk of his.

  I opened my mouth, but Gustav shut it by souring his smile into a scowl that said, Not now. I was so glad to see he’d survived his snooping I didn’t even get mad. I just holstered my questions and did like the other boys, racing out to get at the Swede’s flapjacks before they were all gone. I figured I’d get an explanation sooner or later—even if I had to beat it out of my brother with a stick.

  Old Red always let the rest of us stampede ahead come mealtimes, as he’s a bony fellow without the appetite necessary to keep fat on a flea. But this morning he wasn’t the only one to linger. The Swede’s grub call barely got a stir out of Pinky Harris. When I walked by his bunk, Pinky was buried facedown in his blankets, the only sign that he was alive a low, muffled groaning. Last night it had been “Ahhhhhh” for old Pinky, but now it was all “Ohhhhhh.”

  “Somethin’ wrong?” asked his bunkie, Tall John.

  Pinky’s only reply was another groan.

  By the time Pinky and Old Red moseyed out to the cookshack, the rest of us were halfway through our second helpings. When the boys weren’t stuffing their mouths, they were shooting them off at each other. The topic was Perkins again—specifically, what could’ve possessed him to gallop into a killer storm when none of us had even seen him in a saddle before.

  “Here’s what I think,” I said as Old Red settled down on a stool nearby, and I saw his eyes narrow, flashing me a warning not to let on about his deducifying. “Perkins just went stir-crazy cooped up in the castle all the time.”

  My brother’s gaze returned to his plate, and he set into his food. The Hornet’s Nest gang, meanwhile, set into my theory. Swivel-Eye thought I was onto something, as it was his days trapped in a schoolhouse that had sent him running for a horse and the open plains nearly twenty years earlier. Anytime agreed that hunching over a desk all day would surely sap a real man of his senses, but pointed out that Englishmen start out understocked on sanity in the first place. That put a burr under Crazymouth’s saddle blanket, as it was meant to, and the English-born cowpoke shot back some of his mixed-up jabber—something like “ ‘E was a right stuck-up Brighton Pier ‘e was, without the Niagara the old sod gave a house martin.” While the fellows were scratching their heads over that, Pinky put a stop to the fun by finally saying what everyone else had been trying not to say.

  “Perkins was crazy alright—crazy to trust Uly and Spider,” he croaked, his throat no doubt worn raw by all the alcohol that had washed over it the night before. “That’s what did him in. Those bastards saw a chance to grab the VR out from under, and they took it. Am I right?”

  No one said, “Damn straight, Pinky!” No one said anything at all. We all just stared, as silent and wooden-stiff as the stools under our rumps.

  Pinky broke the awkward silence with a hoarse, forced laugh. “Awwww, don’t listen to me. I’m just. . .well. . .”

  “Hungover?” Tall John said.

  “You smell like you just climbed out of a bathtub full of beer,” Anytime added.

  As his handle implies, Pinky was already rosy-skinned, but he turned even redder now.

  “Where you got it stashed, Pinky?” Swivel-Eye asked joshingly, obviously trying to keep things from getting too serious again.

  “And how come you won’t share it?” I threw in.

  “You suspicious sons of bitches think I got liquor, you go search my bunk,” Pinky teased back. “All you’ll find is lice. . .and you can have ‘em!”

  We all laughed a little too loud, and the conversation quickly turned to horses and cows and other safe subjects. When it came down to it, most of the boys didn’t want to know what had happened to Perkins—not if it meant they had to do something about it. They weren’t interested in mysteries or adventure. They just wanted their five dollars a week. I can’t say I blame them.

  We knew what our work was to be that morning, so we got to it. Pretty soon mama cows were lowing loud as Tall John and Anytime threw rope on their babies and brought them to the branding pen. The he-calves we were making into steers through the removal of certain dangling glands, and before long the fire outside the pen was not just heating up branding irons but cooking up a mess of prairie oysters, as well. Gustav and I were working inside the pen, notching ears and slicing off gonads with Swivel-Eye and Crazymouth, while Pinky kept the fire stoked and handed hot irons through the fence boards.

  After we’d been at it maybe an hour, the Swede pulled around to the corral in the buckboard he used to tote supplies in from town.

  “Hey, Swede! Bring me back some decent tobacco and a pretty gal, would you?” Swivel-Eye shouted at him.

  “Bring me two—of each!” I threw in.

  Instead of joshing us back, the Swede gave his head a quick shake, and his eyes rolled around to his left. We looked that way and saw Spider and Boudreaux riding toward us.

  Spider’s lean face was puckered with a little tight-lipped smile, as if he couldn’t wait to start laughing at some joke he hadn’t yet told. If Boudreaux knew what the joke was, he didn’t find it funny—the albino usually looked pretty sour, but just then he seemed practically curdled.

  “You set, Swede?” Spider asked.

  “Yas, Mr. Spiter. I em ready now to be going.”

  “Fine.”

  The Swede raised up his reins. But before he could give the leather a snap, Spider turned toward us and called out, “Jeee-zus Key-rist!”

  Gustav had just thrown a calf,
and I was moving in with an iron so flamed up it could leave a brand on the air itself. And I gave it every chance to do so, for Spider’s words froze me in my tracks.

  “I was just startin’ to think you pukes were real hands after all, and then I see a discouragin’ thing like that,” Spider said. “Where’d you learn to run a brand, Amlingmeyer?”

  I knew Spider didn’t want a real answer. But I also knew the smart thing to do was act thick and give him one.

  “Well, the first ranch I got on at was the Cross J down in—”

  “The Cross J?” Spider waved his hand before his nose as if shooing away a foul odor. “Those Panhandle shitheads couldn’t brand their own asses if their hands were hot iron. Let me show you how it’s done.”

  Spider dismounted, and Boudreaux did likewise.

  “Gimme that stamp iron there,” Spider said to Pinky.

  Pinky obliged, pulling an iron from the fire and handing it over just as Boudreaux stepped around and got hold of him from behind.

  “Hey! What’re you—?” was all Pinky got out before Spider swung that branding iron like a baseball bat. Pinky’s chin was the ball, and the way it whipped to the side at the force of the blow I almost feared the jawbone would fly through the skin and arc out of sight like a home-run hit. Pinky grunted and sagged back against Boudreaux.

  “Pay attention, boys,” Spider said as he brought up the still-glowing iron and pressed it against Pinky’s chest. “This is how you lay down a good brand!”

  Pinky’s shirt began smoldering, and pretty quick we heard the sizzling we knew to be fired metal on flesh. Pinky writhed and screamed in Boudreaux’s grip, but after the swat he’d taken he was too weak to escape.

  For once, the albino was having a hard time floating above it all. The marble hardness of his pale features finally broke, at last revealing a real feeling—disgust.

  Spider was giggling.

  The iron in my hand had cooled down some, but it was still hot enough to char a Bar VR across Spider’s forehead. I started toward the fence with exactly that in mind, but a hand caught my forearm and pulled me to a stop.