Holmes on the Range Read Online Free Page B

“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 discoveredjust 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 usHornet’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