Holmes on the Range (7 page)

Or, Old Red Finds That Ink and Alcohol Don't Mix

I
figured we were
a safe distance from the bunkhouses when we reached the back of the castle, so I gave voice to the question that was foremost in my mind.

“What the hell are you up to?”

My brother shushed me again, then turned and set to work on the back door with a short length of wire he'd pulled from his pocket.

Normally Gustav doesn't have any use for American magazine detectives—”all muscle, no method,” he calls them. But this lockpicking trick came straight from the pages of a Nick Carter dime novel. That Nick's ever busting into dark mansions or escaping from steel vaults filling with water just by whipping out a toothpick and giving it a twiddle. Frankly, I never believed any of it—and apparently Old Red had doubts himself.

“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?”

“Somebody 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.

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

T
he 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.