Артур Порджес: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 121, No. 2. Whole No. 738, February 2003

Kicking off our yearly celebration of the birthday of Sherlock Holmes is a cowboy whodunit featuring some early fans of the great sleuth. “It was a real hoot to write, and I’m sure Big Red and Old Red haven’t ridden off into the sunset for good,” says author Steve Hockensmith.

    The Strand Magazine

   George Newnes Ltd.

   3 to 13 Southampton Street

   Strand, London, England

Dear Mr. Holmes,

This is my third crack at writing this letter, and by God I’m going to get through it this time come Hell or high water. If Gabriel himself were to come down and blow on his bugle before I’m done, I’d just turn around and tell him, “Hold your horn, Gabe, I’m writing a letter to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

Part of my difficulty with this chore is that my book learning amounts to five years in a country school and two years clerking for a granary in Peabody, Kansas. And my brother Gustav’s got four years less on the schooling and not a day wielding a clerk’s pencil, yet he’s trying to tell me how to write this letter.

Somehow I doubt if you’re looking over that Watson fellow’s shoulder when he’s trying to write about you. But my brother is not a refined gentleman like yourself. So if you notice any bloodstains on the paper as you read this, you’ll know he stuck his big nose in one time too many and I had to give it a good punch.

Now I’ve read about your way with “deductions,” so perhaps I don’t need to introduce myself before I get to the nub of the matter. I can just see you taking one good whiff of this letter and saying to yourself, “This was sent by a cowboy — one who needed a good bath!” And you would be right. My name is Otto Amlingmeyer, I am what they call a “cowboy” working the Old Western Trail from Texas to Montana, and yes, I suppose I could use a good dunking — but not until I’ve written “And that’s how it all happened, I swear on my dust-covered soul. Sincerely, O.A. Amlingmeyer.”

You being an uncommonly educated fellow and all, you surely don’t put any stock in those dime novels about cowboy life. The way they tell it, your average drover spends his days fighting off fifty Comanche braves with one hand and untying a beautiful gal from the railroad tracks with the other, all the while with a lit stick of dynamite clenched in his teeth, pearl-handled six-guns in his holster, and a horse that dances the Texas two-step every time he whistles “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.” Sure, we have plenty of adventures when we’re on the trail, as long as your idea of an “adventure” is pulling a steer out of a sinkhole or throwing rocks at coyotes so they won’t sneak into camp at night and eat your boots.

But on our latest cattle drive, my brother and I finally have had a genuine dime novel-type adventure. And we only lived to tell about it because of you.

“Ahhh!” I can hear you say. “At last! The point!”

You’ll have to excuse me. I’m used to yarning around a campfire, where the idea is to keep your lips flapping as long as possible so as to better distract your pals from how cold, tired, and miserable they are. If I try to write this letter that way, they’ll have to cut down all the trees in Kansas just to make enough paper for me to get the job done. So I’d better just get to it.

Gustav and I first became acquainted with you and your reputation as a puzzle-breaker about three months ago. He and I had just made the trip down to Brownsville, Texas, to meet up with an old compadre of ours by the name of Charlie Higgebottom. Charlie was fixed to be caporal of a big drive — three thousand Mexican longhorns headed up through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming to the Blackfeet Agency up around Billings, Montana. That’s as long as the Big Trail ever gets, so Charlie needed the best cow- and horsemen he could lay hands on. Charlie’s been on enough drives with us to know that we can both handle cattle, so naturally he sent word that we should come along.

Now to Charlie and most of the other bull nurses we know, Gustav and I aren’t “the Amlingmeyer brothers.” I guess that just doesn’t slide off the tongue easy as it should. So instead we’re “Big Red” and “Old Red,” or just “the Reds,” on account of our strawberry-red heads of hair. I’m Big Red for reasons a deep thinker such as yourself can surely work out. But my brother’s Old Red not so much for his age (though at twenty-six he is a bit long in the tooth for a cowpuncher) as much as for his personality. Gustav’s never cottoned much to japes or tomfoolery. He’s a quiet fellow, always looking serious and a little down in the mouth — what you might call morose, like a dog you just kicked off the foot of your bed.

So to move along in the direction of that point I should be steering towards, maybe three days into this latest drive, when most of the hands were circled up around the fire after getting the herd bedded down for the night, Charlie pulled something out of his saddlebag and gave it to me. It was one of those story magazines, though not one I’d ever laid eyes on before.

“I’ve been holding on to this for eight weeks,” Charlie said. “Found it on a bench at the railroad station in San Antonio and figured it was the hand of fate. I had to hold on to it till I saw the Reds again.”

I didn’t know what he was working his jaw about until I opened it up and started flipping through the pages. About halfway through the magazine, I came across a story you know well — “The Red-Headed League.”

The title alone got a chuckle out of me. I read it out loud for Gustav (who can’t tell his As from his Zs or anything in between), but he just grunted. The boys around the fire got a fine laugh from it, though, and they called out for me to read the whole story. Now along the trail I’ve got a reputation for oratory and poetry reciting and song singing and such, being under-blessed on modesty and powerful over-blessed on lung power. So I grabbed a lantern off the commissary and cleared my throat and gave the fellows a regular night at the theater.

Well, you’ll have to tell that Dr. Watson he’s a top-rail yarn spinner. The boys ate it up like it was hot donuts on Christmas morning. They were hooting and joshing me and Gustav fierce when they heard that burro milk about the locoed American tycoon giving away money to redheads. Not a one of them figured out it was just a bad man’s scheme, and when you caught the rascal red-handed (so to speak) trying to dig his way into a bank, they cheered and clapped like you were right there with us doing back-flips.

Now usually the flannelmouthed whopper-swapping you’ll hear around a cowboy campfire puts my brother straight to sleep. And for a minute or two I thought “The Red-Headed League” would be just another lullaby as far as he was concerned. But when I got to the part where you told that pawnbroker everything there was to know about himself — where he’d been and what he’d done and who he was, just from looking at him — Gustav perked up right smart. His eyes got all wide in a way I’d never seen, picking up the light from the fire and glowing like the big eyes of a hoot owl. But though he was staring straight at me, I knew he didn’t see me or the campfire or the boys gathered around it. What he saw was you and Dr. Watson and that pawnbroker and everything else in the story. When I finished, he even applauded along with the rest of the boys, which was peculiar indeed since a show of enthusiasm from Gustav is about as common as a six-legged mule or an honest bartender.