Castle Rouge Read Online Free PDF

on one.
    “You’re right. We can’t know that,” she said through tight lips. “Yet I cannot help but suspect that Nell was apprehended in much the same manner and for the same purpose that Godfrey was abducted at about the same time on the opposite side of Europe. What that purpose is, I don’t know, but I intend to find out. And since it is a purpose, I am hopeful that their lives, rather than their deaths, are the key to it.”
    After that, talk seemed as dangerous as dueling. Mutually silent, we made our way to the huge arena prepared for the Wild West Show.
    En route I found myself thinking of Sherlock Holmes again. He already had some repute as a wonder of deduction. Now I wondered where he wandered. In Whitechapel, obviously, returning to the scene of the Ripper crimes with fresh insight into which of dozens of suspects might be the actual killer. Did he track a rogue Red Indian from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show? The great scout and showman had admitted that some of his native warriors had parted company with the cast to remain in London. Long Wolf was the most famous instance, but another man had also jumped ship, so to speak, there.
    Irene, to give her credit, had first brought up the possibility that a Red Man, encountering European society and the thousands of women and girls who plied the prostitute’s trade in such great capitals as London and Paris, might succumb to a barbaric slaughtering. It was not so long ago that those of their tribe, or neighboring ones, had raped, burned, and mutilated settlers of the West. What would such a savage soul make of the poor white women who solicited pennies on the streets of Whitechapel in such numbers?
    Sherlock Holmes was the quintessential Englishman in my view: superior, opinionated, and desperately in need of showing up. It was rather amusing to watch his vaunted logic dither in the presence of the beauteous and bright Irene. He had even admitted within my hearing that she was the only woman ever to have outwitted him.
    I truly did not see what he saw in her, for she seemed sadly disorganized and dependent now, relying upon the kindness of friends, trusting to Indian scouts instead of her own pluck. And the men all kowtowed to her great losses like courtiers to a widowed Queen Victoria!
    This was not where the mystery would unwind. At least Sherlock Holmes had hied to London to reinvestigate the Ripper’s Reign of Terror there. Oh, to be in England now!
    I would so dearly love to beat him to the identity of the Ripper. AMERICAN GIRL BESTS EUROPE’S GREATEST SLEUTH . What headlines that would make on my side of the Atlantic!

    A plain lantern sat on the huge table in Buffalo Bill Cody’s tent, its vivid light painting his long wavy yellow locks into tongues of flame.
    He stood hunched over a map of England, not of the Wild West.
    Hunched beside him was the thrillingly authentic figure of Red Tomahawk, whose nose was as aquiline as any Spanish aristocrat’s, whose earth-colored skin shone like tanned leather, whose figure radiated the sheen of bone and feather and deerskin.
    The scene resembled a lithograph of the Indian Wars, save that we were plunked in the middle of a great fairgrounds in the world’s most civilized city. Once I was done with Paris, France, and London, England, and other points east of the great U.S. of A., I determined to go West some day soon to record the doings there, though the exciting conflicts of yesteryear were over and done with in this advanced year of 1889.
    So I envisioned again the savage scene that we four violently different people gathered here had witnessed on these very holiday grounds: the gathered madmen—and women—leaping and screaming and slinging weapons as if partaking in an Indian war dance, though they were surely the debased product of a half dozen European countries. No doubt the Europeans prided themselves at having evolved beyond savagery, but these demented Gypsies and lowlifes gave such snobbery the