Holmes on the Range

HOLMES ON THE RANGE

 

 

 

HOLMES ON THE RANGE
. Copyright © 2006 by Steve Hockensmith. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hockensmith, Steve.

Holmes on the range / Steve Hockensmih.—1st ed.

       p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-34780-4

EAN 978-0-312-34780-2

1. Cowboys—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Ranch life—Fiction.4. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859–1930—Appreciation—Fiction. 5. Montana—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3608.O29H65 2006

813'.6—dc22

2005050406

First Edition: February 2006

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

FOR MAR, OF COURSE

HOLMES ON THE RANGE

Or, The Calm Between the Storms

T
here are two things
you can't escape out here in the West: dust and death. They sort of swirl together in the wind, and a fellow never knows when a fresh gust is going to blow one or the other right in his face. So while I'm yet a young man, I've already laid eyes on every manner of demise you could put a name to. I've seen folks drowned, shot, stabbed, starved, frozen, poisoned, hung, crushed, gored by steers, dragged by horses, bitten by snakes, and carried off by an assortment of illnesses with which I could fill the rest of this book and another besides.

So it's quite a compliment I bestow when I say that the remains we came across the day after the big storm were the most frightful I'd ever seen. Not only had a few hundred cows gone for a waltz over the body, prairie wolves had snacked on whatever hadn't stuck to the hooves. The remaining dribs and drabs of gristle were mixed in with the mud like strips of undercooked beef in a bowl of Texas chili.

“I'll get to gatherin' up the bits,” my brother said as he swung down off his saddle. “You head back and grab us a couple shovels.”

Usually when Old Red gets bossy with me—which is only about a hundred times a day—I repay his piss with vinegar. But my brother got no sass from me now, as fetching tools sounded a hell of a lot more appetizing than separating innards from earth.

It was a morning as lovely as a Montana spring can produce, so cool and calm and sunny-bright you'd hardly think the blue sky above was the same one that had roiled with black clouds and lightning just hours before. I enjoyed a leisurely ride to headquarters and back, making the most of a rare moment of solitude in the sunshine. Old Red and I had been working the Bar VR ranch nearly two months now, and this was my first opportunity to be alone that didn't involve an outhouse and the attendant odors thereof. True, a man I knew had just died in as messy a manner as one can imagine, but you can't fault me for appreciating a beautiful day while I could. I'd get my fill of ugliness soon enough.

I found Old Red knee-deep in ugly when I returned. Whereas before the “body” had been little more than a colorful circle in the mud, my brother was now shaping the raggedy chunks of flesh and bone into the approximate shape of a man.

“He ain't Humpty Dumpty,” I said, tossing a shovel at Old Red's boots. “You can't put him back together again.”

My brother made no move to pick up the shovel. Instead, he wiped his hands on his Levi's, pulled off his Stetson, and ran his fingers through his close-cropped, cherry-red hair. He usually wears upon his face an expression of vaguely irritated disappointment, as if he can't stop stewing on what
he
would've done with those six days God took to make a botch of the world. But he didn't look vexed or even disgusted now. He merely looked puzzled.

“It ain't
him
I'm tryin' to piece together,” he said, rubbing the back of his head like it was a magic lamp and he was Aladdin trying to coax out the genie.

“What's that supposed to mean?” I asked as I unhorsed myself.

“I'm tryin' to put together how he got like this.”

“Well, I reckon some
cows
might've had somethin' to do with it,” I said, quickly plunging my shovel into the soppy muck. If I had to bury a body that looked like an explosion in a butcher's shop, I wanted to get it over with fast. “That's the only way I can figure it . . . unless you spotted some
elephants
out this way yesterday.”

One day maybe I'll get a laugh out of my elder brother. This was not that day.

“I'm just wonderin' if those cows had ‘em some help,” he said.

I froze mid-dig. Without quite knowing it, I'd been waiting for this moment for months. It was like waking up at the sound of a train whistle—and remembering you'd fallen asleep on the tracks.

“Damn it, Brother,” I said. “You're a cowboy, not a detective.”

Old Red didn't answer with words. He just turned and showed me that little wisp of a grin he slips under his mustache when he thinks he's being clever.

Oh?
his smile said.
A feller can't be both?

Or, My Brother “Deduces” His True Calling

Y
ou can follow a
trail without even knowing you're on it. You start out just ambling, maybe get to thinking you're lost—but you're headed somewhere all the same. You just don't know it till you get there.

That's how it was with me and Old Red. We'd got ourselves pointed at that flapjack-flat body a full year earlier, in the spring of 1892. All it took to get us moving toward it was a magazine story.

We were working a cattle drive at the time, and one night by the campfire one of the other drovers pulled out a detective yarn called “The Red-Headed League.” It was meant as a jape, as my brother and I form a sort of “red-headed league” ourselves. We've got hair red enough to light a fire, and though our tombstones will read “Otto Amling-meyer” and “Gustav Amlingmeyer,” up and down the cow trails we're known as Big Red and Old Red. (I was branded Big Red for the obvious reason—size-wise I'm just a shade smaller than your average house—while Gustav won his handle more for attitude than decrepitude,
having as he does a crotchety side more befitting a man of seventy-two than twenty-seven.)

Old Red not being on speaking terms with the alphabet, it was up to me to read “The Red-Headed League” out loud. And I enjoyed doing so, for I found it to be a dandy little tale. But my brother took it to be a lot more than that. To him it was a new gospel.

Some folks get religion. Gustav got Sherlock Holmes.

As you most likely know, this Holmes fellow's an English detective who's world famous for his great “deductions.” Only we'd never heard of him, being out here in Montana where we'll probably only find out about the Second Coming by telegraph a week after it happens.