Holmes on the Range Read Online Free Page A

and that’s it. Anyplace else may as well have barbed wire around it. I’d like a ‘Yes, boss’ on that.”
    We gave him what he wanted, and he smiled. “Well, we just might get along then. Now—you see that barn there?”
    We did indeed, and an uninspiring sight it was. McPherson must have agreed, for our first job as VR hands was pulling out rotted wood, patching up holes, and slapping on a fresh coat of paint. We were at it until the sun went down and then some after, with no one telling us to stop until a croaky voice called out, “Alright, boyce! You drope dose pentbrooshes end you coom here geeting soom veetles!”
    We turned to see a gray-whiskered old coot standing near our bunkhouse. We just blinked at him for a few seconds, none of us knowing what the hell he was yelling about. Old Red broke the code first.
    â€œYou say you got vittles?”
    â€œYa!” the old-timer shouted back. “Veetles!”
    That cleared things up—it was the Swede, the cook my brother had heard talk on back in Miles. Fortunately, his cooking was more to be admired than his talking. He’d filled his cookshack with a fine welcome for us—biscuits and beans and sonofabitch stew. But there was nary an oyster nor a drop of Scotch, of course.
    Once we had ourselves stuffed, the Swede wished us a good night—or, to be more exact, a “goot neat”—and we ambled on over to our bunkhouse. While the rest of the boys digested over dominoes, Old Red drifted to the front of the shack and leaned in the doorway sucking on his pipe. I got up and joined him.
    â€œWhat’re you stewin’ on?”
    Gustav answered with a shrug.
    Across the way, a light burned in the castle. It put a glow in a couple of the widows, giving them the look of fiery eyes staring at us from a huge, dark face.
    â€œWhat do you make of him?” I asked, nodding at the big house. “Perkins.”
    â€œYou 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.’ ”
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œI don’t need more evidence,” I said. “He’s a boiled-shirt son of a bitch.”
    â€œWell. . .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.
    â€œYou see what I see?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œSo that rule about guns—” I began.
    â€œâ€”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.

Four
A VISITOR
    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