Holmes on the Range

by Steve Hockensmith

  Yet the man in the doorway did no such thing. We were too far away now to hear any talk, but from the way his shadow went thin then wide, thin then wide, it was plain he was conversing with his companions inside, swiveling back and forth between them and the darkness in which we cowered. My brother cut loose with another yip-yip-yip, and the shadow disappeared entirely. The man had stepped back inside.

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered. “Why don’t they—?”

  “First things first. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I didn’t bother with a salute this time, as I was too busy running. The tetchy bull-creature that had fanned up all the fuss was moving toward us yet again.

  As Old Red and I retreated back to where we’d left the horses, I was still wondering just what kind of beast this was—and hoping I would never see its like again.

  Thirty-one

  THE CAMP

  Or, Old Red Lights a Fire for Me, and I Light a Fire Under Old Red

  For safety’s sake, we withdrew a good mile from the cabin before settling down to make camp. A feather bed and silk sheets being unavailable, we had to make do with a small clearing amongst the thicket and bramble nestled against an outcropping of ice-cold rock. The night had turned nippy, and after weathering my grousing about the cold for five minutes straight, Gustav built a miserly little flame out of brush and twigs and a single dried cow pie.

  “Careful with that bonfire,” I said once he had it leveled off to a dull smolder. “If it gets any bigger, it might actually warm somethin’.”

  The fire gave off such a puny glow I couldn’t quite make out the expression on Old Red’s face, but the snap in his voice filled in the picture well enough.

  “We got two choices—cold or dead. You want a bigger fire, you head off a mile or two before you build it. I’ll follow the smoke to your body in the mornin’ and give you a decent burial.”

  “Well, fine! We’ll deprive the McPhersons of the pleasure of shootin’ us by freezin’ ourselves to death. Or maybe we’ll die of starvation first. Damn it, Gustav! If you knew we weren’t goin’ to Miles, why didn’t you grab—?”

  Old Red reached into his war bag and produced a small, white brick, which he threw across the fire into my chest. By the time I’d figured out it was a biscuit, a leather pouch filled with pemmican came flying behind it. I set to gnawing at the strips of dried meat while my brother pulled out a couple of airtights, drove his knife into one, and started sawing. A minute later he handed over the tin can, and I took a satisfying slurp of briny water. Big chunks of stewed tomato were afloat in the thick liquid, and I fished one out and popped it into my mouth.

  “Alright then,” I said as Gustav began cutting open the other can. “We’ve got a campfire—or a few camp-embers, anyway. We’ve got food, for which I do thank you. There ain’t nobody around to eavesdrop. And for the next few hours, we ain’t goin’ nowhere. So how about if you did a little more talkin’?”

  Old Red speared a hunk of tomato and took a bite out of it. In the dim orange light of the fire, he was little more than a shadow chomping into some dark, pulpy mass, and if I hadn’t been half-starved, thoughts of Hungry Bob Tracy would surely have put me off my feed.

  “What would you have me talk about?” Gustav asked.

  Now we had plenty of mysteries to talk over still, that’s for sure. And yet the more I’d thought about them that day, the more one stood out from the others like an elephant running with a pack of coyotes. It was something I’d made my own deductions on, but I had yet to hear Gustav offer a single explanation of his own.

  “Brother,” I said, “why’d you stick us in the middle of this mess?”

  Old Red answered the question with a shrug. “You’re free to leave, you know. You could just ride. You don’t have to see this through.”

  “But you aim to.”

  He shrugged again.

  “Even though it might get you killed.”

  He shrugged again.

  Of the two of us, my brother usually serves up the long-suffering sighs. Now it was my turn to heave a big one.

  “Gustav, would you please just answer the damn question?”

  Old Red threw more brush on the fire. When it flickered up into flame, I could see that his lips had a little curl to them—almost as if he was smiling.

  “You remember the time I asked Uncle Franz why we weren’t Calvinists?” he said.

  This was a mighty strange time to be reminiscing over family history. But I knew what Gustav was speaking of, and it almost had me unpacking a sad smile myself.

  The Germans populating the little corner of Kansas from which we hailed came in two varieties: Calvinist and Lutheran. The Amling-meyers and our Mutter’s family, the Ortmanns, were Lutherans without exception, and my brother had once wondered aloud why this should be so.

  “Becauze vhen you are burnink in hell, Gustav, it vill be becauze you zent yourzelf dere, not Gott,” our uncle had told him.

  Even with no more light to go by than a lightning bug produces from his butt, Old Red knew exactly what I was thinking just from the wistful way I shook my head at the memory.

  “Yeah, ol’ Franz could sure talk crazy,” he said. “But he had a solid enough point that day. The Calvinists, they talk about ‘predestination.’ You don’t work your way to heaven—you’re either born wearin’ golden slippers or you’re not. That idea wouldn’t sit too well with the likes of Franz. It sure don’t sit too well with me, and you know I don’t even believe in heaven.”

  I did know that, actually, though I’d gathered it more from inference than deep conversation, as Gustav brings up religion about as often as a Zulu chief brings up baseball.

  “But I don’t know,” Old Red went on. “Maybe there is such a thing as destiny. If there is, I’ll tell you what a feller like me’s supposed to be—dirt-poor and dumb. A farmer, a cowboy, it don’t matter which. We’re born to use our hands, not our brains. And God damn it, Brother, I just don’t accept it.”

  My brother got to poking at the fire absentmindedly, and as the silence that followed stretched on, I got the feeling he didn’t know what to say next—or he knew and he didn’t like it.

  “You’re afraid, ain’t you?” I said, talking at the tiny, flickering flames between us. “Not of the McPhersons or the Duke or whoever killed Boo. You’re afraid you won’t crack the mystery—afraid of what that says about you.”

  “You’re right, Otto.”

  My gaze shot up from the fire, seeking out my brother’s face in the gloom. I could see little more than an outline, but his eyes pierced the darkness, sparkling at me like twin stars. He was staring at me, un-blinking, and I knew that my ears had not deceived me. For the first time, my brother was giving me an honest look into his heart.

  Don’t get me wrong: I knew my brother—knew him damn well. But not because he’d ever done much talking about what he felt or what he believed. I’d just sort of soaked up a knowledge of the man by spending all my time in his company, almost like the way a drover gets to know his best cow pony. You don’t expect to have a heart-to-heart with your horse, and I’d never really expected to have one with Gustav. Until now.

  “I’m tryin’ to be something I’m not, and I’m more scared of failin’ than dyin’,” Old Red said, his words heavy with as much raw feeling, as much raw fear, as I’d ever heard in his voice before. “Does that make me crazy? Does that make me Uncle Franz?”

  “Uncle Franz thought he could walk on water,” I said.

  “You know what I’m sayin’.”

  Now I’ve often fallen into a lazy sort of call-and-response with Old Red. He’ll snip at me, I’ll snap at him, and so on, achieving little beyond mutual irritation. But I was setting that aside now. After our years on the trail, Gustav was finally seeking my counsel as a man, and I had to live up to the honor by offering whatever degree of wisdom I could muster.

  “You ain’t crazy, Gustav. You’re just. . .”

  I took a deep breath befo
re moving on. Filling the air with words is usually no challenge for me, but picking out the right ones now was proving tricky indeed.

  “It’s like this. Most cowboys stick to droverin’ cuz they ain’t got a better idea what to do with themselves. For you it ain’t like that. You been lookin’ for somethin’ different—somethin’ more. And I think those Holmes tales showed you what it was. You ain’t just a hand. You’re a mind. And whether that mind’s filled with book-learnin’ or not, it’s damn sharp. That ain’t no accident. Maybe it’s your destiny to be a detective. The only way to know for sure is to wrap up all the riddles around here in as neat a knot as Mr. Holmes could’ve thrown. So that’s what you gotta do.”

  “And what about you?” Gustav asked. “What is it you gotta do?”

  I’d been sailing along alright there, but now my words lost their wind, and I drifted to a standstill.

  As for me. . . what? Even if Old Red was fated to be a detective, that didn’t tell me what I was supposed to do.

  My brother and I locked eyes on each other. It might have been a trick of the fluttering firelight, but Old Red’s seemed to be glistening especially bright and moist.

  That gave me my wind back. For a long while, I’d been tagging along behind Gustav out of pure habit. It was different now. My brother wasn’t just tolerating me. He needed me—and he respected me enough to show me.

  For the first time, I didn’t feel like Old Red Amlingmeyer’s kid brother. I was just his brother.

  “I guess I’m like most punchers,” I said. “I don’t hear any particular call for myself—except to stick close to the only family I got left. So you just do what you got to, and I’ll be there to back you up. . .no matter what.”

  Old Red nodded, and for a moment the only sound was the quiet crinkling of the burning brush in our campfire. Then my brother stuck his hand out. I grasped it, and we shook.

  “You’re a good man, Otto.”

  “I’ve had a good teacher.”

  Gustav nodded again, then let go of my hand. We shared a few silent minutes, basking more in the lingering warmth of our conversation than the scanty heat that little fire put out. Then Old Red slapped his knee, drew himself to his feet, and announced, “I feel me a piss comin’ on.” And with those decidedly unsentimental words he tramped off, wrapping himself in the thick shroud of darkness that enveloped our campsite.

  I tried to pass the time by reviewing the “clues” and “suspects” we’d collected, but my mind stuck firm to one and wouldn’t budge free. It was Lady Clara, of course. Hearing from Brackwell that she and Edwards might be making a love match had been unsettling. On the other hand, learning that she shared her family’s taste for romantic entanglements with the lower classes was fodder for fantasies of an admittedly ludicrous (but altogether satisfying) sort.

  After several minutes, this distracting line of thought was interrupted by the rustling of bushes nearby.

  “Well, it’s about time!” I called out. “You said you had to water the grass, not fertilize an acre or two with a big load of—shit!”

  The rustling I’d heard had materialized into a large, whirling, panting shape that suddenly burst from the shadows. I had just enough time to recognize my brother in a life-or-death grapple with another man when the two of them crashed to the earth, kicking and cursing. Their spinning bodies rolled over the fire, smothering its meager flame and casting us all into utter blackness.

  Thirty-two

  HUNGRY BOB

  Or, A Fight in the Dark Sheds New Light on Our Case

  Under normal circumstances, a man of my considerable size doesn’t need much time to end a fight. These weren’t normal circumstances, however, since it’s pretty hard to end a fight you can’t see. For nearly a minute, Gustav and our surprise caller rolled this way and that while I followed by the sound of their grunts and muffled blows, unsure which head to hit or back to kick when I managed to catch a glimpse of them.

  The men’s tangled forms finally came to a stop pressed against the rocky outcropping beside which we’d bedded ourselves. One of them ended up beneath the other, and from the familiar sound of the yelps coming from the ground, I knew it was Old Red who’d been pinned.

  But being on top proved to be no advantage to Gustav’s attacker, for it gave me the opportunity to determine the exact location of his face and send a punch flying smack-dab into it. A loud groan was followed quickly by the dropped-potato-sack sound of a man collapsing to the earth.

  “Thanks, Brother,” Gustav said, sounding winded and shaken as he pulled himself up.

  “My pleasure. So who’d I just whack the bejesus out of, anyway?”

  Old Red began dusting himself off and picking bramble from his hair. “I have no idea. I heard someone creepin’ around, so I made like I had to let off a sprinkle and circled round behind him. He’s got some good ears on him, though, cuz he heard me comin’ and jumped me first.”

  “Maybe it’s one of the McPhersons,” I said, hoping I’d just belted Uly or Spider.

  “Let’s find out.”

  Old Red pulled out a lucifer, fired it up, and moved the small flame down toward our prisoner. The light of it shimmered off a black, broad, and strangely familiar face.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have guessed that one,” Gustav said. “What the hell is he doin’ here?”

  “What the hell is who doin’ here?”

  I leaned in to give the Negro sprawled beneath us a closer look just as his eyes snapped open and his hands shot up to clamp around my neck. Gustav dropped his match and began struggling to break the powerful grip that was suddenly cutting off my breath.

  “Jim!” Old Red said. “Stop! It’s Old Red and Big Red! The Amlingmeyers! Stop it, Jim! Stop!”

  The pressure around my windpipe eased.

  “Old Red?”

  The voice had a touch of Kentucky drawl, and I recognized it straight off: It was Jim Weller, the Negro puncher Uly had refused to hire in the Hornet’s Nest more than two months before.

  “Yup, it’s me,” Gustav said. “And that’s my brother you’re stranglin’.”

  “Hey. . .there. . .Jim,” I wheezed.

  The hands at my throat disappeared, and shortly thereafter the three of us were gathered around the rekindled campfire like a bunch of old chums. Weller had brought with him fresh, strong Arbuckle grounds and flavorful Durham tobacco, and by way of apology for trying to throttle Old Red and me, he treated us to the best java and smokes we’d had in months. From the enthusiastic reception this received, Weller guessed that life on the Bar VR had not been silk and velvet, and I was about to launch into our tale when Gustav got his lips working first.

  “Oh, it ain’t as bad as you might think,” he said. “The work’s hard, the food stinks, and the foreman’s a son of a bitch, but you could say the same of most outfits. So what brings you out our way?”

  Weller stared into the fire. “I’m ridin’ the grub line. Miles has been bone-dry job-wise, so I thought I’d try my luck over in Wibaux.”

  If you’re headin’ to Wibaux, what’re you doin’ this far south? I could’ve said. Or I would’ve thought the grub line went around the VR these days, not through it. But I held my tongue and let Old Red do the talking, for he seemed to be digging around for answers in his own way.

  “Travelin’ alone, are you?”

  “Just me and my horse.”

  “Oh?” Old Red replied. “Ain’t that a bit risky—a man on the drift alone in these parts? It’s not enough you got the McPhersons to worry about, but there’s Hungry Bob on the prowl, as well.”

  Weller chuckled. “Awww, Old Red—I thought you were a level-headed man. Yet here you are spreadin’ around the heebie-jeebies like them gossipy hens back in Miles. All this talk about Bob Tracy’s just a big bucket of nothin’. He’s either up in Saskatchewan or down in hell by now.”

  “I ain’t so sure. I got a feelin’ he’s a lot closer than that.”

  “Oh?” Weller’s dismissive smile went weak a
t the knee. “And how’d you come by this feelin’?”

  “For one thing, I picked up some tracks a week or so back. Looked like one feller on his own, afoot, livin’ rough and lyin’ low.”

  Weller laughed with a little too much gusto. “Is that all? Hell, if I got spooked every time I came across bear sign, I’d sell my saddle and take up knittin’.”

  “Gustav knows bear sign when he sees it—and this wasn’t it,” I said, leaping in to defend my brother’s honor. He thanked me for the support by ignoring me, as did Weller, who just kept right on laughing.

  “For another thing,” Old Red continued, “there’s you.”

  Weller’s laugh choked to a halt. “What do you mean?”

  It was Gustav’s turn to smile now, and he favored Weller with one of his sly little smirks. “I’ve been sittin’ here tryin’ to figure why you’d be skulkin’ around the Bar VR given its less-than-hospitable reputation, and it occurred to me that all the bad talk about the VR might actually attract a certain kind of person. Or two kinds of persons, actually—a man on the run and a man on his heels. Tell me, Jim—what’s the bounty on ol’ Bob up to these days? I sure bet you could use the money.”

  The expression on Weller’s face seesawed between dismay and disgust before finally settling on the latter. He sighed and threw his cigarette in the fire, looking like a fellow who’d just had his bluff called on a fifty-dollar bet.

  “One thousand dollars,” he said with sulky irritation. “And yeah—I could use the money.”

  “Well, don’t worry—we don’t aim to horn in on you,” Old Red assured him. “We got our own business to attend to, and I just had to be sure you weren’t mixed up in it.”

  Weller was plainly relieved to hear this, though it didn’t cheer me up any. I’d already done the arithmetic necessary to divide a thousand dollars into three shares, and the resulting figures had been tempting indeed.