Holmes on the Range (4 page)

“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.

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

C
owboys,” 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 some
one
. 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.

Though I caught Perkins by surprise that time, usually it was him who startled us. His bedroom and office were both on the first floor, and every so often he'd burst from one or the other calling for a McPherson. And there was generally one nearby, for either Uly or Spider was usually on hand to help us with the cleaning. Uly's “help” took the form of comments like “Pardon me, ladies, but you left a smudge on that window.” Spider did his part by killing flies—by snatching them out of the air and eating them.

When we'd finished sprucing up the castle, Uly put us to more patch-up work, this time on the bunkhouses and corrals. These new chores were draftier business—though the winter snows had melted to mud, the morning air could still frost a man's whiskers icicle-stiff. We wouldn't have minded if we'd been in our saddles doing as punchers ought, but the cow work was reserved for the VR's old hands.

Aside from Uly and Spider, five other men called the McPhersons' bunkhouse home. Boudreaux was the only one whose name we knew. The others made the albino seem chatty by comparison. They rode off in the morning, rode back in the evening, and wasted no time in between on palaver with us. So we had to come up with our own handles for them—a showy dresser we called the Peacock, a bald fellow was Curly, and so on.

Altogether, seven workingmen didn't seem like nearly enough for a spread the size of the VR, and we wondered how they'd got by before us
Hornet's Nesters came along. Old Red suspected they had help. We caught sight of Boudreaux rattling off to the south in a wagon one day, and my brother was of the opinion that he was driving supplies out to what we cowboys call a line camp—an outpost for hands looking after herds in distant pastures.

If the McPhersons did have line-camp hands, I knew one thing about them: They wouldn't be worth squat. Only once did we see Uly's boys do a lick of labor, and a sorry piece of work it was. The HQ out-house was as drafty as a pair of flap-assed underdrawers, so Boudreaux and the Peacock built a new one between their bunkhouse and the castle. It kept the wind off you a little better than the old privy, but you were twice as likely to come away with splinters in your unmentionables. On top of that, the door latch was loose, and it would fall into place and lock if anybody let the door slam. The first time that happened, we were making like bears in the bushes the whole day before Old Red figured out the new outhouse was empty.

So to boil it down, working under the McPhersons was equal parts humiliation and misery. But being a cowboy, I'd long ago resigned myself to both, and the mind-numbing routine of ranch life started to wear away the concerns I'd had about the VR. There came a day, however, when that routine was shattered, and the pieces never did fit together again.

It was getting on toward evening, and McPherson's men had already returned for the night. The Hornet's Nest boys were still working, of course, trying to get the smithy shop looking like something other than a tramp's lean-to. Old Red was slapping a coat of whitewash over rotted-out wood, and he stopped midbrush and looked over his shoulder.

“Well, well,” he said. “What's
he
doin' here?”

We all turned and saw a fellow on horseback headed toward us—Jack Martin, deputy U.S. marshal out of Miles City.

We gave him a big huzzah. Not that we liked him so much. He had
a reputation for puffing himself up around cowboys and wilting himself down around cattlemen. But it didn't matter just then. We were damned pleased to see a halfway friendly face after a month at the VR.

Our salute drew Boudreaux and the rest of the old hands from their bunkhouse, and Perkins, Spider, and Uly came out of the castle looking none too tickled to have unexpected company.

“That is surely the most duded-up ranch house I ever did see,” Martin said, nodding at the castle. He turned a bucktoothed smile on us Hornet's Nesters. “So—how're they treatin' you out here?”

“How does the Northern Pacific treat Chinks?” Anytime said.

Perkins jumped in before anyone else could get to bitching.

“What brings you to the Cantlemere?” he said. To us he'd been little more than a shadow in the castle's windows for weeks. If he ever stepped outside, we didn't see it, and his skin had seen such little sun he'd grown as pale as Boudreaux.

“Official business,” Martin answered, so full of self-importance it practically dribbled out his ears.

The lawman paused to look around the crowd, obviously savoring the opportunity to keep us hanging in suspense. The sight of Boudreaux's ghostly white hide put a flicker in Martin's grin, but he didn't let it linger. He had big news, and he wasn't going to let some distraction—no matter how freakish—muffle its thunder.

“Bob Tracy slipped out of the Colorado state nuthouse three weeks back.”

Nearly every hand murmured the same two words: “Hungry Bob?”

Martin nodded. “The same.”

The murmuring got louder, only now the question mark was gone and it was just “Hungry Bob!”

Out West, you'll find more folks who know of Hungry Bob Tracy than can name the president of the United States. Bob was a trapper, a guide, and, most notably, a bona fide cannibal. By his own account, he'd eaten five men when his party got snowed in during the winter of
'77. My mother used to tell me Hungry Bob would get me if I didn't keep up with my studies. I stopped believing her eventually, yet old Bob haunted my dreams for years after.

“He's been spotted twice—once around Fort Collins and again on the Little Bighorn near Lodge Grass.”

“Headed for Canada,” Gustav announced as if he were the one delivering the news.

“Could be,” Martin said. “Or he might be holed up in the hills south of here. If he does push north, that would take him straight through our country here. So we're askin' folks to keep their eyes open.”

“That won't be a problem. You know how we feel about folks wanderin' onto the VR,” Uly said. “In fact, you're lucky
you
were able to ride in without gettin'. . .stopped.”

“We'll be doubly careful from here on,” Spider threw in. “In fact, if anybody gets it in their head to track Hungry Bob thisaway, you warn ‘em to steer clear. With Bob prowlin' about, we'll be pretty quick on the trigger. Who's to say who might end up with a bullet in ‘em?”

Martin frowned and leaned back in his saddle.

“We know you have important work to do. We won't keep you from it,” Perkins said, turning and heading toward the castle before he was even done talking. “Good day.”

Martin's frown turned into an outright scowl. Dusk wasn't far off, and he'd probably been hoping for a hot meal and a bed for the night.

“It's gonna take you at least four hours to make the next ranch,” Uly said. “You best set out
now
.” He pointed at the trail Martin had rode in on. “That way.”

The lawman stared hard at McPherson a moment. Then he wheeled his horse and galloped off, taking with him any chance that we'd hear more news of the outside world that day.

“Alright, no more gawkin'!” Uly barked. “Back to work!”

Us Hornet's Nesters turned away slowly, unable to tear our eyes
from Martin as he rode off. The only exception was Old Red. He was staring in the opposite direction—toward the hills to the south.

I knew exactly what he was thinking. It was the same thought that would weigh heavy on me during the long nights ahead.

Somewhere out there was a monster straight out of my childhood nightmares. It was real. It was loose.

And it was probably hungry.

Or, A Storm Blows In, and a Life Snuffs Out

F
or the next few
weeks, every owl hooting and bunk board creaking was Hungry Bob on the hunt for a juicy cut of man steak. Tall John almost got himself shot on three different occasions creeping out to drown spiders in the middle of the night. We went to bed jumpy and woke up exhausted, and none of us had much energy for chores.

But then Uly gave us something new to think about—the very orders we'd been hoping for. We were to start breaking horses for the roundup.

We spent the next week getting thrown ass-over-hat busting broncs—and loving every minute of it. At night we dropped into our bunks scraped and sore, and the snores of soundly sleeping men once again rattled the walls.

When we finally rode out looking for cattle, we saw that McPherson's men had been up to something useful after all. They'd stocked a feeding camp with hay and cottonseed and moved a thousand head in
from the furthest pastures. We weren't to see those far grasslands ourselves—Uly ordered us to stay within five miles of the castle. Just in case we might drift over the limit, either Spider or Boudreaux was on our heels at all times.