Holmes on the Range

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Wait,” Gustav said.

  I tore my arm from his grip. “Wait for what? For them to kill him?”

  I turned back toward Spider and Boudreaux, but the branding was over, and they let Pinky sink to the ground in a whimpering heap.

  “You’re fired,” Spider said to him. Then he looked up at the rest of us, and his right hand settled a few inches from the grip of his spit-polished six-gun. “We don’t need thieves or bigmouth troublemakers around here. Any of you forget that, you’ll get the same treatment . . . or worse.”

  I managed to keep a rein on my anger while Spider and Boudreaux loaded Pinky in the back of the wagon—where they’d already piled his saddle and war bags, we now saw. Once they had him stowed, Spider walked back to the fire, snatched up a smoldering pair of huevos, and popped them in his mouth. He grinned as he chewed, and after he’d swallowed and given his lips a big wet lick, he and Boudreaux horsed themselves. Spider gave us a jaunty wave of his hat as they set off for Miles City.

  When they were out of sight, I roared like a grizzly passing a kidney stone.

  “God damn! What is wrong with us? Standing by and watching a thing like that!”

  The boys just shook their heads or stood there, frozen, their eyes still wide with surprise. Even Anytime was quiet for once, simply turning away and kicking at the dirt.

  “We’re nothin’ but a bunch of cowards!” I hollered.

  “Button your lip, Brother,” Gustav said.

  “Oh, to hell with you! I’m sick and tired of your bull—”

  Old Red grabbed a fistful of shirt and jerked me down so our eyes were but inches apart.

  “I said shut up.”

  I’ve felt like taking a poke at Gustav many times over the years, though I’d never been quite mad enough to do it—until that moment. My fist was clenched and ready to shoot up to the side of his skull. But when Old Red spoke again, his words took the fight right out of me.

  “Damn it, Brother, don’t you see? We gotta watch our step,” he whispered. “One of the Hornet’s Nest boys is a spy.”

  Nine

  HORSE SENSE

  Or, A Clue Gallops Right Under Our Noses

  Somehow us Hornet’s Nesters managed to brand calves for the next two hours with barely twenty words passing among us. What did get said was on the order of “That one next” or “Hot iron here.” I reckon most of the boys were feeling guilty about not helping Pinky. I was trying to figure out who didn’t feel guilty.

  I’d picked up on Old Red’s point about a spy right off. Given Pinky’s bloodshot eyes and rummy breath, it would’ve been easy to peg him as the thief who’d helped himself to the castle’s liquor the night before. But Spider wouldn’t know he was a “bigmouth troublemaker” unless he knew what Pinky had said at breakfast—which meant someone had tattled.

  The easiest fellow to point a finger at would be the Swede. He was a VR man before any of us, and he could’ve gone running to Uly after we’d headed out for work. But given that English for the old cook seemed to be less a second language than a fifth or sixth, I couldn’t believe he’d be much good at eavesdropping. With Pinky hardly a sensible candidate and my brother and myself disqualified for equally obvious reasons, that left the other Hornet’s Nesters to consider: Tall John, Swivel-Eye, Anytime, and Crazymouth.

  Unfortunately, once I’d tallied up all the jaunts to fetch saddles and catch mounts and take pisses and squats, I realized every one of them had been out of my sight that morning at one point or another. In the end, I settled on Anytime as my main suspect for the not exactly airtight reason that he was a nasty son of a bitch.

  Despite my irritation with Old Red—it still chafed on me that we hadn’t stood up for Pinky—there was nothing I wanted more just then than to pick my brother’s prickly brain. I didn’t see how I’d get a chance, though, as we were still branding calves with Swivel-Eye and Crazymouth, and neither man was more than a dogie-length away at any given moment. I was trying to figure how to get Gustav alone when my brother let out a mighty “Damn it all!”

  We’d just mugged a calf, twisting her head and bringing her down on her side—and it looked like we’d brought her down on Old Red’s foot, as well. Since punchers find nothing more amusing than humiliation and pain inflicted on another, this gave the boys a good guffaw. As usual, Anytime was the first to get a dig in.

  “You’re supposed to wait till the skin’s leathered up before ya try to wear it!”

  “Yeah!” Tall John called out from his spot by the fire, where he’d taken Pinky’s place. “That boot’s got too much beef in it yet!”

  “Haw haw,” Gustav yelled back, taking a wobbly step toward the fence. “Help me out here, Brother.”

  I wrapped an arm around him, and together we hop-walked to the far side of the pen. Old Red sat in the dirt and tugged at his boot.

  “Damn, that smarts.” Then, in a much softer voice, he added, “Quick—what do you want to know?”

  “What?”

  Gustav got himself unshod and took to inspecting his toes as if to make sure they were all still there.

  “I could tell you were bustin’ apart with questions. So I’m givin’ you a chance to ask ‘em.”

  “You sayin’ you dropped that calf on your foot on purpose?”

  “I didn’t drop that calf on my foot at all. Now spit it out—I didn’t go to all this trouble so we could squat here and play pat-a-cake.”

  A low growl rumbled in my throat. Even when my brother was doing me a favor, he had to be high-handed about it.

  “Alright,” I said. “Why’d you take so long gettin’ back last night?”

  “Didn’t you notice somethin’ missin’ yesterday mornin’? Some-thin’ we should’ve found when we were buryin’ the body?”

  “I don’t know. A head? I believe men usually have such things attached to their necks, but Perkins seemed to have misplaced his.”

  “I’m not talkin’ about the body itself.” Gustav’s voice took on an edge of exasperation. “I’m talkin about—”

  “Oh.” I nodded, embarrassed that it had taken any prodding to get me pointed in the right direction. “His mount. Puddin’ -Foot.”

  “Thank God. I was beginning to worry about you. Thinkin’ of the man’s horse don’t call for detective know-how—it calls for cowboy know-how.”

  “Yeah, well, so,” I said, eager to move beyond the subject of my mental shortcomings. “If Puddin’ -Foot had gone down in the storm, he would’ve made an even bigger mess than Perkins.”

  “And if he didn’t go down, why, Puddin’ -Foot bein’ gentle-broke the way he is and smart as a sheepdog, he would’ve come back to headquarters to get the saddle off his back.”

  “So you went lookin’ for him?”

  “And he wasn’t anywhere around HQ.”

  “He could still be south of here somewhere, runnin’ free or flat as a frying pan.”

  “Could be. If so, one of the boys’ll run across him sooner or later.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “ ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.’ ”

  “Well, how do you expect to gather any evidence with a spy doggin’ us?”

  Old Red started to pull his boot back on, and he made a big show of grimacing as the leather slid up over his shin.

  “I ain’t got that figured yet,” he whispered. “We gotta be careful, that’s for sure. If I’d known Uly had such a sharp eye on us Hornet’s Nesters. . .”

  Gustav let his words trail off, leaving me to wonder what if he’d known. Would he have stayed in his bunk last night? Would he have unhitched himself from his notions about detectiving? Would he keep his eyes and ears and mind closed, the way the McPhersons wanted?

  I didn’t think so. Pinky proved otherwise. My brother didn’t get in fights often, but he wasn’t shy about setting people straight if they couldn’t tell right from wrong. There’d been a time when he would have set Spider strai
ght con mucho gusto—and con mucho knuckles to the nose. Instead, he’d stood by while a man was beaten and branded. And what’s more, he’d made me stand by.

  Thinking of Pinky got me heated up to quite a blaze again, and I was just about to singe Old Red’s eyebrows with some hot talk, spy be damned, when Anytime put out a shout that rescued my brother from the barbecue.

  “Hey, Big Red—get back to work! Just cuz your brother can’t keep his feet out from under don’t give you an excuse to lollygag!”

  “We’ll both get back to work,” Old Red snapped, hauling himself off his duff. “If I sit here much longer, you’ll make such a mess of things it’ll take the rest of the week just to fix your mistakes.”

  My brother mock-limped to the center of the corral while the boys fed him more sass about his supposed clumsiness. The only talking he and I did after that was about hot brands and fresh-cut balls—not the sort of thing a spy would feel the need to report back to Uly.

  Despite his “sore foot” (which he remembered to fake long after I would’ve forgotten), Gustav volunteered to tend to the saddle horses at the end of that day and the beginning of the next. Each time, he came back and gave me a quick shake of the head when he was done. I knew what he was looking for, so it wasn’t hard to figure what that signal meant.

  Puddin’ -Foot had not returned.

  Ten

  NEWS FROM ENGLAND

  Or, Old Red Is Reunited with One Partner and Loses Sight of Another

  Spider, Boudreaux, and the Swede returned from Miles City the next afternoon. Though Spider and the albino were hardly a welcome sight, we were mighty pleased to see our biscuit rustler. While the Swede was gone, Uly had Tall John doing the cooking, even though the man couldn’t so much as pop corn without scorching it black. On top of that, most of us Hornet’s Nesters had put in special wink-anda-handshake orders with the Swede in the hopes of getting around the VR’s “company store”—aka Uly, who charged prices for tobacco, rolling paper, chewing wax, and other necessities that would’ve gotten a cowtown shopkeeper lynched.

  Unfortunately, the second I laid eyes on the Swede, I knew the company store wouldn’t be losing my business. The old cook had a sheepish look about him, and as soon as he was free of Spider and Boudreaux he began handing out money and apologies.

  “I em sewry, boyce. Spiter vas over my shoulder all de time looking.”

  The only fellow who got a smile instead of a refund was my brother.

  “Ahhhh, Old Red! I have what you ask fur, I tink.”

  The Swede had brought back a pile of newspapers, which we would soon put to use as reading material, kindling, wallpaper, and asswipe. Buried at the bottom of the stack were three magazines, and when the Swede pulled them out I knew exactly how I’d be spending the next few evenings.

  They were copies of Harper’s Weekly, the “Journal of Civilization”—and, much more important as far as my brother was concerned, the journal of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

  The magazine had begun printing accounts of Holmes’s cases in January. Prior to that, Gustav had run across but two Holmes tales: “The Red-Headed League” and “A Study in Scarlet.” Thanks to Harper’s, he acquired several more. These weren’t tattooed on my eyeballs to the same extent as the first two, for Old Red had stopped pestering me for repeat readings once we were bunked at the VR. I knew his reason, though he never spoke it.

  Cowboys can be uncommonly open-minded on many a surprising subject, but there is one upon which their minds snap shut like a steel-jawed bear trap: They hate an “uppity” man. For one of their number to grudgingly admire a gentleman like Sherlock Holmes might be tolerated. To aspire to become him would invite scorn of the most venomous variety. So Old Red had kept his detective stories—and his dreams—out of sight.

  But I knew the temptation of three new Holmes cases would be too much to resist. And sure enough that night in the bunkhouse Gustav handed me one of his treasures and said, “If you feel up to it, Brother, I’d sure enjoy a little oratory.”

  Now I’m not one for holding grudges. They usually slip through my fingers within a day or so. I’m especially apt to let them wriggle free if they involve my brother, as I’ve had years to accustom myself to his cussedness, just as he’s had more than enough time to get used to whatever flaws I might allegedly possess.

  But I was still stewing on what Spider had done to Pinky—and what we hadn’t done to stop him. So while I always feel obligated to read when Gustav requests it, that doesn’t mean I can’t roast him over the fire a bit before I do so.

  “Why, sure,” I said. “This here Harper’s has got a story on that World’s Columbian Exposition they’re plannin’ in Chicago. Gonna be like ten state fairs and a hundred carnivals rolled up in one. And you’d never guess how much concrete they’re shippin’ in to build the exhibit halls and such. This article just goes on and on about it. It should only take an hour or so to get through.”

  Hats, boots, and curses came flying my way, while Old Red suffered in stone-faced silence.

  “Well, my goodness! If you fellers don’t have strong opinions about literature!” I said. “This next story looks like it’s about a stolen race-horse, so I don’t suppose you’d want to hear that. Now here’s an article about the Idaho Populist Party. How about if I—”

  As I expected, there were cries of “Whoa there!” and “Back up!”

  There are two things cowboys can talk on all day long: horses and gambling. Combine them into one story—and throw in the appeal of crime to boot—and you’ll have any puncher downright hypnotized. So naturally the boys were anxious to hear that racehorse tale. . .which just happened to be “Silver Blaze” by Sherlock Holmes’s pal John Watson.

  The story had much to grab the ears of my audience. There was that stolen Thoroughbred, a death, a crooked bookmaker, and even Gypsies. Yet while keeping the Hornet’s Nesters happily diverted, all this was but trimming as far as my brother was concerned. The meat of the matter was how Holmes found that missing horse. As I read certain passages, I slowed my pace and glanced at Old Red, certain that he’d be doing his best to commit these words to memory:

  “The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists. . ..

  “I follow my own methods and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial. . ..

  “See the value of imagination. . ..We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified.”

  When I was finished, Gustav stretched out on his bunk looking like a man who’s stuffed himself full of duck and pudding on Christmas Day. The rest of the boys seemed pleased enough, though the story lacked the perils and bloodshed they consider essential to truly rousing tale-telling. Still, the next night I was able to talk them into hearing two more Holmes cases: “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” and “The ‘Gloria Scott.’ ”

  Though these stories struck me as skimpy on the instructive deductions my brother craved, Old Red had no complaints. In fact, he had little to say on anything at all, acting so distracted in the days that followed that the other hands began ragging him for his “sleepwalking.”

  Unlike Gustav, the rest of the Hornet’s Nesters were in uncommonly high spirits just then. We were almost done branding the calves McPherson’s men had brought up from the distant pastures that had so far been barred to us, and the boys hoped we’d soon be out on horseback pushing cattle ourselves.

  No sooner was the last calf running back to mama than Uly came to the pen to lay out exactly what our new chores would be. I almost didn’t recognize him at first, for he’d finally scraped off his dark thicket of beard and given his face and hands a splash of water. If he ever decided to change his raggedy britches and put on a clean shirt, he’d practically look respectable.

  But one thing about Uly hadn’t changed: He wasn’t a man to waste time on niceties.

  “McCoy, Dury, Amlingmeyer,” he barked, pointing at
Anytime, Crazymouth, and Old Red. “Take the fence wagon south and mend the wire wherever it needs it till you get five miles out. The rest of you I want ridin’ bog north along the creek. That gully washer a few days back might’ve left some new sinkholes. You see any cattle in ‘em, you get ‘em right out. No dawdlin’ now—hop to it.”

  I was so pleased to be getting out of the corral and horsing myself, the full meaning of Uly’s words didn’t hit me straight off. I turned to fetch my riding gear and then stopped dead in my tracks, my mouth slowly falling open and just dangling there, slack with surprise.

  For the first time since we’d been at the VR, I realized, Old Red and I were being busted apart.

  Eleven

  THE BOG RIDE

  Or, I Encounter Some Very Small Sinkholes and One Whopper of a Shock

  As peevish as I’d been feeling toward my brother, I didn’t like having him out of my sight for long. He might’ve steered us into some kind of shitstorm, but that didn’t mean I’d ride off and leave him to face it alone. In fact, striking out on my own was an option I rarely even remembered I had. I’d become accustomed to thinking of Gustav and myself as a team, like two old mules ever hitched up together. I might squawk about it from time to time, but in the end whatever Old Red did, I did.

  The trail bosses and foremen we’d worked for had always taken the same view. Even at the VR, which was hardly typical in many a matter, we were generally set to the same task.

  So Uly’s sudden break with tradition had an unsettling odor about it. When I swiveled around to look at Gustav, I saw that he’d caught a whiff of it, too. He cocked an eyebrow at me that said we needed to talk—alone. We got our chance half an hour later.

  “Be careful,” Gustav said as we heaved a spool of barbed wire up onto the back of the wagon. “We don’t know who’s to be trusted.”

  “I’ll be alright. I’m headin’ out with two fellers. If one of ‘em’s the spy, well, he won’t try anything when he’s outnumbered, will he?”