Now when you’re working a herd all day long, you don’t have time to work your gums at anybody who doesn’t have hooves, which is why I hadn’t had a chance to ask my brother why “The Red-Headed League” had him all google-eyed. So after listening to a few more whoppers from the boys, I got up and went looking for him. I found him out by the picket line, where we had our night horses hobbled. He was staring up at the black night sky like a coyote getting ready to let loose with a yodel. “They’re called stars,” I said. “Don’t worry — they ain’t going to fall on you.”
Of course, that didn’t even get a smile out of Old Red, though sometimes I can get him tickled if no one’s around.
“What are you out here pondering on, old-timer?”
He just shrugged, looking kind of embarrassed.
“Now, come on, brother. You know you can unshuck your lips with me. That magazine story has got a fierce grip on your head, hasn’t it?”
He nodded slowly, real thoughtful-like. “Yup, I s’pose it has,” he said, speaking just as slowly. “It’s that Holmes feller — his whole way of lookin’ at things.”
“What about it?”
“Well, you know I like a man can think straight. And he seems to be the straightest thinker I ever heard of.”
“So you admire the man.”
“More than that. Hearin’ about him makes me wonder. You know... well, you know about my schoolin’...”
Gustav got to looking all bashful again. He can be a mite prickly about his lack of letters. It’s always seemed to sting him that our dear old mama had him working the fields while the younger kids got to go to school.
“I know,” I said.
“Well, the thing about it is, he don’t need no book-learnin’ to do what he does. He didn’t catch them bank-robbin’ snakes with some trick he learned at a university. He caught ’em cuz he knows how to look at things — look and really see ’em.”
I shrugged. “I guess you’re right. So?”
“So, seems any man could do the same, he put his mind to it.”
Now I’m ashamed to admit I laughed when I saw what he was driving at.
“I know you’re sharper than you look, big brother, but I don’t think you could beat this Sherlock Holmes in any war of wits.”
Gustav gave me his best scowl — the one that makes a rabid badger look downright friendly by comparison.
“I don’t aim to beat him,” he said. “I just think he’s worth studyin’ on, that’s all. Seems like he don’t do nothin’ but sit around and cogitate and whammy — things happen. Whereas fellers like you and me and the boys back there, we never think at all, just do, and we don’t get no whammy at all.”
“Cowpunchin’ ain’t a thinker’s game.”
“Don’t I know it.”
The bitterness in his voice put a little cramp in my grin. I knew he longed for better things than riding herd on someone else’s cattle. And part of the reason he couldn’t get those things was because he’d always had younger brothers and sisters to look out for. Now most of them were dead or married off, and only one was left for him to nursemaid — the baby of the family, Yours Truly.
Looked at a certain way, I owed him everything I had, right down to the boots on my big feet. So who was I to poke fun?
“Tell you what, brother. Tomorrow night I’ll borrow the lantern off the chuck wagon and you and I can come out here and visit with Mr. Sherlock Holmes again.”
That got me a glimpse of that rarest of prairie critters, the Gustav Amlingmeyer Smile. I went back to the fire after that. He and I had second watch that night, which meant we’d be back up on our mounts by two o’clock in the morning. I wouldn’t have time for forty winks, but I could still catch me maybe eighteen if I turned in right quick. I left Gustav there by the horses, looking up at the sky like he’d never seen it before. I found him there still when I came back a few hours later.
Over the next three weeks, I read him “The Red-Headed League” a dozen more times. I finally stopped when I noticed his lips forming the words before I could speak them.
“You’ve got this thing memorized!” I said.
“Only the important bits.”
“Well, then, you don’t need to hear ’em anymore.”
After that, we took a little holiday from Dr. Watson’s story. Truth to tell, I’d become mighty sick of it myself, fine though it is. Reading it over and over was like having steak for dinner every night. Sooner or later, a man’s going to pine for a plate of beans. So for the next few weeks, there was no more talk of Sherlock Holmes — though every so often I would see Gustav’s mouth working as he rode along, and at times it seemed like he couldn’t keep his mind on his steers. That won my brother some jibes from the other fellows, who joshed him that he was going soft in the head in his old age. I knew what he was thinking on, of course, but I kept that to myself.
By this point we’d crossed the Red River and were deep into Indian territory. Now, no matter what you may read over there in England, we don’t have big Indian wars like we used to. That was all ironed out not too long after Custer and his boys got themselves turned into pincushions. But cowboys have still got to watch their backsides on Indian land — especially when there’s Comanches and Kiowas on the prowl. They might not steal many scalps these days, but they do surely love to steal cattle.
Charlie Higgebottom doubled up the night watch the day we got across the Red River, so there were four of us out under the moon at all times while the rest of the outfit slept. Now “the rest of the outfit” amounted to just eight men, not counting Charlie and our cook, Greasy Pete Tregaskis. We weren’t overstocked for hands, since delivering beeves to an Indian agency, as we were doing, is not the most profitable drive a fellow can undertake. So we were all of us a little droopy in the saddle, overworked and dying of thirst for a good night’s sleep. Sometimes a nightmare would make me jump, and I’d wake to find myself on my horse, on watch.
That’s just what happened this one particular night, except it wasn’t any nightmare that woke me up. It was gunshots. And if that hadn’t been enough to snap me out of the land of Nod, the stampede would have done just as well, for you can’t go firing off a six-shooter at night without spooking the herd something fierce. When they get spooked, they run. And when they run, we have to ride after them.
The chase took hours. I spent most of that time trying not to end up something sticky on the bottom of a thousand steers’ hooves. This was only my third drive, you see, so I didn’t have the stampede-breaking know-how of a Gustav or a Charlie Higgebottom. I spurred up toward the front just once, to make sure my brother wasn’t already worm bait a few miles back. There he and Charlie were, riding right alongside the lead steers, trying to convince them the world wouldn’t come to an end if they stopped running. That would be a difficult thing to do, I knew, since cows are second only to rocks as the dumbest things God ever created. So I left them to it, dropping back where it was safer and I could do more good, along the right flank with a couple of the other punchers trying to keep our big herd from turning into five hundred little herds.