The Wolf Hunt.

A Derrick Miles Mystery

NOW AVAILABLE from Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company Excerpted with permission of the publisher

CHAPTER 4

The Last Wolverton

{In which the heir to the Wolverton estate comes to lunch in Fort Worth.}

AFTER AN HOUR’S DEBRIEFING I LEFT MILES, whose own spirits seem to have been raised by the temperate morning and bright sky, to his bow and fiddle—an instrument he’d taken up, he once told me, when he learned that David Crockett himself had played the violin. Miles tended toward melancholy tunes in minor keys, but had on occasion been known to attempt the lively Bach partitas or the romantic airs of Herr Brahms, and when the mood struck him would break out into a folk tune worthy of a square dance. I did not remain long enough to discern which was the case today.

I instead eschewed the comforts of the Commercial Club and its hearty menu and betook myself to the library of our city’s newly opened university. There I read voraciously for several hours on topics ranging from the geology of the Croton Breaks to the military expeditions against the Indians, from the listings in Burke’s Peerage to the physiology of canis lupus. By the time our appointed hour arrived and I stepped out of the cab in front of the White Elephant, I felt sufficiently enlightened to acquit myself without embarrassment during luncheon conversation.

Our clients turned the corner on foot and I, quickly recognizing Mr. Barlow and Mr. Wolverton from the previous evening, greeted them. Barlow appeared at once relieved to have arrived safely at our appointment and yet fretful, for he glanced about anxiously.

His companion shook my hand vigorously. Trey Wolverton, I could now see more clearly, was an alert, dark-eyed young man, sturdily built and of average height, with thick black eyebrows and a strong, pugnacious face. The lighter tone of skin on his chin testified to a clean shave after some period of wearing a beard. In contrast to the stained duster in which he’d alighted from the train the previous night, he wore a neat and stylish brown tweed suit—albeit accessoried with the same scuffed and ragged Western boots I’d noted before. He bore the weather-beaten appearance of one who spends most of his time in the open air, and struck me as a man continually on the lookout for the next opponent.

I greeted them and opened the door for both men, then guided them to the corner where Miles was already seated at his customary table, reading the Gazette. He folded the paper and stood to acknowledge last night’s acquaintance and today’s newcomer.

“Welcome to Fort Worth, Mr. Wolverton,” he said to the Earl’s young nephew as he extended his hand.

“I go by Trey. I’m the third to bear the name of Basil Wolverton, though I never met the old geezer.” He seemed then to recall his manners. “Begging your pardon, gentlemen. My dear, departed uncle.”

“Pray take a seat, then, Trey. You look fit and rested for one who’s made such a long journey—though I am very sorry for the circumstances that have made it necessary.”

“Out in the territory, you learn to catch sleep when you can,” our client responded as we all slid our upholstered chairs up to the mahogany table. “And as for the condolences, save ’em. My pop never wanted another thing to do with his older brother after he skipped out with all the money.”

This was as interesting a revelation to Mr. Barlow as it was to Miles and me, I could readily discern.

Miles deftly turned the conversation, as the waiter arrived to ladle out an aromatic beef stew. “We shall all be interested to learn more on that account, Trey. For now, tell us—you’ve begun to make your career in mining?”

“Silver on a good day,” he said as he tucked his napkin into his collar and spooned a heaping dose of the stew between his lips. “Salt on the other three hundred sixty-four.”

I found such world-weary sentiment unusual in one of his apparent youth, but I left further questioning to my partner.

“Well, welcome to Texas,” said Miles, “where we’ve been known to go to war on occasion over such things as salt.”

Mr. Barlow explained, as mineral water and menus were brought, that Trey Wolverton had in fact spent some time in El Paso, where the infamous Salt War had taken place in seventy-seven. “Trey’s father, Nigel Wolverton, suffered from tuberculosis and was sent there in the eighties to recover, I understand. Sadly, his health did not improve.”

I nodded my head in some sympathy with the grief this young man must already have experienced during his brief span of years.

“But we will save more of the past for the future,” continued Barlow. “For the present, young Trey has experienced a more minor, yet inexplicable, loss in the few hours since his arrival in Fort Worth, of which he wants to inform you.”

Miles and I looked at the young man from each side, seizing him in our gaze as though in a pair of pincers.

“An inconvenience and a sore irritation, Captain Miles.”

“Do tell,” said Miles.

“Well, I don’t know much of Fort Worth yet, since I’ve spent nearly all my time farther west. But I hope that to have one of your boots go missing is not part of the ordinary routine of life up here.”

Miles expelled an indulgent sigh. “You have lost one of your boots, you say? Might you have simply mislaid it, after your late-night arrival?”

“Not a chance. You see, I knew I’d need new duds before coming to meet the esteemed Derrick Miles and Frank Hooper, and as soon as the mercantile opened this morning I dashed over to buy a new suit and boots. I returned to the hotel and set the boots outside the door for the steward. Even as cheap as they were, those Texas boots took a bite out of my purse, and you can imagine how irked I was to open the door again and find only one of them there. I never even had ’em on my feet!”

“If you have never worn them, why did you put them out to be cleaned?”

“They were made of rough tan rawhide and had never been varnished. I thought a quick polish might improve their looks.”

“My dear sir,” cried Mr. Barlow, “it must be only misplaced. You will find it when you return to the hotel, I am sure. What is the use of troubling Captain Miles with trifles of this kind?”

“Well, I figure the famous detective might want to know about anything out of the ordinary.”

“Right you are,” said Miles. “Let us keep the incident in mind as we acquaint ourselves with other aspects of the situation. But it does seem a singularly useless thing to steal. I confess that I share Mr. Barlow’s belief that it will not be long before the missing boot is found. In the meantime, shall we order our entrées?”

No sooner had we done so than the mercurial Wolverton descendant called our attention to another odd matter—one that proved more disturbing, however, than the former.

“I apologize if my concern over a scrap of footwear seems out of line, gentlemen,” he said. “But I want to show you a letter—more of a message, I suppose you’d call it—that I found slipped under the door this morning as I left. Maybe you’ll understand, now, if I seem a bit out of sorts.” He laid an envelope upon the table, and we all bent over it. It was made of common, unbleached paper. The address, “Basil Wolverton III, Pickwick Hotel,” was inked in rough characters; the envelope bore no stamp or postmark. The apparent surprise on Mr. Barlow’s face showed that like Miles and me, he was looking upon the item for the first time.

“Who knew that you were arriving in Fort Worth? And going to the Pickwick Hotel?” asked Miles, glancing keenly across at our visitor.

“No one but Mr. Barlow, as far as I know. Of course he was already lodged there.”

“Someone seems to be deeply interested in your movements.” Out of the squarish envelope Wolverton took a half sheet of foolscap folded into four. This he opened and spread flat upon the table. Across the middle of it a single sentence had been formed by the expedient of pasting scraps of printed paper upon it. I leaned over to read the words, which ran “keep away from Croton Breaks, as you value your life and reason.” The word “Breaks” alone had been inserted in ink.

“Now, Captain Miles,” said Trey Wolverton, jabbing his finger at the page, “perhaps you can figure out what in tarnation is the meaning of this, and who’s taking such pains for my welfare?”

The ominous tone of the letter, and the clandestine means of its arrival, did put the matter of the boot in a different light.

“What do you make of it, Mr. Barlow?” said Miles instead. “You must allow that there is nothing supernatural about this, at any rate?” “No, sir, but it might very well come from someone who was convinced that the business is supernatural.”

“What business?” asked Trey Wolverton sharply. “It seems you guys know a great deal more than I do about my own affairs.”

“You shall share our knowledge before you leave this room, Trey. I promise you that,” said Miles. “With your permission we will confine ourselves for the moment to this very interesting document, which must have been put together and delivered early this morning.” He lifted his newspaper from the table, folded it again to the front page, and ran his eye swiftly down the columns of type.

“Intriguing article here, on free trade. Permit me to give you an extract from it. ‘You may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade or your own industry will be encouraged by a protective tariff, but it stands to reason that such legislation must in the long run keep away wealth from the country, diminish the value of our imports, and lower the general conditions of life in this nation.’ What do you think of that, Hooper?” cried Miles in high glee, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. “Don’t you find that is an admirable sentiment?”

Mr. Barlow looked at Miles with an air of professional interest, and Trey Wolverton turned a pair of puzzled dark eyes upon me.

“I don’t know much about the tariff and things of that kind,” said Wolverton, “but it seems to me we’ve wandered a ways off the trail so far as that damned note is concerned.”

“On the contrary, I think we are particularly hot upon the trail, Mr. Wolverton. Hooper here knows more about my methods than you do, but I fear that even he has not quite grasped the significance of this sentence.”

“No,” said I, “I confess that I see no connection.”

“And yet, my dear Hooper, there is so very close a connection that the one is extracted out of the other. ‘You,’ ‘your,’ ‘your,’ ‘life,’ ‘value,’ ‘reason,’ ‘keep away,’ ‘from the.’ Don’t you see now the source of these words?”

Wolverton snapped it up. “By damn, you’re right! Well, if that isn’t smart!” he cried.

“If any possible doubt remained it is settled by the fact that ‘keep away’ and ‘from the’ are each found together in one piece.”

“Well, now—so it is,” mused Barlow. “Really, Captain Miles, this exceeds anything which I could have imagined,” he said, gazing at my friend in amazement. “I could understand anyone saying that the words were from a newspaper; but that you’ve identified the right issue, and recognize that it came from the leading article, is really one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever witnessed.”

“Maybe you haven’t witnessed much,” said Wolverton uncharitably to Barlow. “What’s your secret, Miles?”

Miles responded, “I presume, sir, that you could tell iron pyrites from true gold-bearing ore?”

“Absolutely.”

“And how?”

“Because that’s the field in which I spend most of my days. The differences are obvious. Pyrites have hard, angular edges; gold is softer and rounder. Pyrite scratches copper, while gold—”

“So you see that detection is my special hobby, and the differences are equally obvious. There is as much difference to my eyes between the leaded bourgeois type of a Gazette article and the slovenly print of a tabloid as there could be between your fool’s gold and the real thing. The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime, though I confess that once when I was very young I confused the Austin American with the Athens Herald. But a lead article in the Gazette is entirely distinctive, and these words could have been taken from nowhere else. As it was delivered to you this morning, the strong probability was that we should find the words in either today’s or yesterday’s issue.”

“So far as I can follow you, then, Captain Miles,” said Wolverton, “someone cut out this message with scissors—”

“Penknife,” said Miles. “You can see that it had a very short blade, since the cutter had to take two snips over ‘keep away.’”

“That is so. Someone, then, cut out the message with a penknife, pasted it with paste—” “Gum,” said Miles.

“Gum,” said Miles.

“With gum on to the paper. But I want to know why the word ‘Breaks’ was written in ink?”

“Because the sender could not find it in print. Most of the other words were all simple and might be found in any issue, but ‘Breaks’ would be less common.”

“Why, of course, that would explain it,” said Barlow, ever the peacemaker. “Have you read anything else in this message, Captain Miles?”

“A couple of other important indications leap from the page—though pains have been taken to remove all clues. Do you observe the address, printed in rough capitals rather than script? But unlike afternoon papers, the morning paper is most often found in the hands of the industrious and ambitious. We may take it, therefore, that the letter was composed by an educated man who wished to pose as an unsophisticated one, and his effort to conceal his own writing suggests that that writing might be known, or come to be known, by you. Again, you will observe that the words are not gummed on in an accurate line, but that some are much higher than others. ‘Life,’ for example is quite out of its proper place. All this may point to carelessness or it may point to agitation and hurry upon the part of the cutter. On the whole I incline to the latter view, since the matter was evidently important, and it is unlikely that the composer of such a letter would be careless. If he were in a hurry it opens up the interesting question why he should be. Did the composer fear an interruption—and from whom?”

“We are coming now rather into the region of guesswork,” said Mr. Barlow.

“Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation. Now, you would call it a guess, no doubt, but I am almost certain that this address has been written in a hotel.”

“How in the world can you say that?”

“If you examine it carefully you will see that both the pen and the ink have given the writer trouble. The pen has spluttered twice in a single word and has run dry three times in a short address, showing that there was very little ink in the bottle. Now, a private pen or ink bottle is seldom allowed to be in such a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare. But you know the hotel ink and the hotel pen, where it is rare to get anything else. Yes, I have very little hesitation in saying that could we examine the wastebaskets of the hotels around the courthouse square until we found the remains of the mutilated Gazette editorial we could lay our hands straight upon the person who sent this singular message.”

“Why are we sitting around waiting for lunch, then?” said Wolverton. “Let’s go around and search!”

TO BE CONTINUED IN THE TEXAS SPUR

CONTINUED from The Texas Spur, July 1, 2021. The publisher of The Wolf Hunt has supported a promotion reminiscent of 19th-century popular novels—that is, serialization as “parts” in periodicals. The first installment ran April 22, and we hope we may continue to whet your appetite a bit longer.

IN THE RUGGED, DESOLATE CROTON BREAKS OF WEST TEXAS a spectral creature with a six-inch pawprint has spooked livestock of late. When British-born cattle baron Basil Wolverton is found dead outside his own ranch gate, cowhands and nesters alike whisper of an ancestral curse, the dire wolf of legend.

Sir Basil’s executor Wesley Barlow knows what he must do: catch the next train for Fort Worth, where consulting detective Derrick Miles and his assistant Dr. Frank Hooper are his best bet to figure out whether there’s been a crime committed . . . or some diabolical force at work.

If the story sounds familiar, it should. Transporting the Sherlock Holmes classic The Hound of the Baskervilles to Dickens County, circa 1891, author Will Brandon reimagines Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s thrilling tale with a Texas twist on a murderous beast, a fugitive outlaw, greed and grit, affairs of the heart, and a landscape yet untamed.

In the heyday of Charles Goodnight and Quanah Parker—and one of the craftiest stalkers on the frontier—The Wolf Hunt traces Hooper’s solemn pledge to solve the vexing case with which Miles has entrusted him and protect the Wolverton heir in his charge. But will bullets and iron bars bear out against the embodiment of evil? In this high Victorian adventure, the answer is anything but elementary. _•

“AN AMAZING BLEND OF MYSTERY mixed with Western culture. Drama and action compel the reader to turn the pages until the final satisfying end.” —Historical Novels Review