Castle Rouge Read Online Free PDF Page B

lie.
    And the three other witnesses to this murderous scene were an odd blend of New World and Old: the courtly Wild West scout better known by the colorful name of Buffalo Bill instead of William F. Cody. The colorfully garbed Red Man, a sharp shadow of the fierce plains warriors his dead brothers had been, his name and tracking abilities testifying to his proud and violent heritage, Red Tomahawk. The American-born dethroned European diva turned very private detective, Irene Adler.
    They consulted like old warriors, despite their disparity, despite my presence, which they ignored. I began to see that “taking notes,” as Nell had so often done, effectively rendered one invisible.
    I didn’t mind. I was most effective when invisible. Until I chose to be very visible indeed.

    “So you found the horse with the misshapen shoe?” Irene asked Red Tomahawk.
    Her tone was no different than if she had addressed the Baron de Rothschild. Indeed, it was perhaps more respectful, for Red Tomahawk’s native abilities bordered on the magical in the eyes of whites and Europeans, much as did Sherlock Holmes’s vaunted reading of the smallest signs of evidence.
    He grunted, displaying the admirable taciturn nature of his race. His finger stabbed the map. “From here. To here. To here. The horse with the damaged shoe only took them to the edge of the settlement. Then the wagon went on.”
    “The Gypsy wagon you followed through the exposition grounds earlier?” Buffalo Bill asked.
    Red Tomahawk nodded, setting his feathers atremble. “I followed the trail, east where the sun awakens, to a city they call Verdun.”
    “Verdun! On foot all that way?”
    Red Tomahawk eyed Irene. “All our horses were shot out from under the Red Man. So we walk.”
    She understood that he spoke of not-so-ancient wrongs. “Did no one comment on your appearance?”
    “I wore hat and coat, like Long Wolf in London. Most strange garb. When tracking bear it is well to wear bear hide.”
    “Why only as far as Verdun?” Buffalo Bill asked. He not only had no trouble believing in Red Tomahawk’s startlingly long foot journey; he wondered why it was not wholly epic! Why not Frankfurt or Prague or Vienna or any of the great cities beyond Verdun?
    Red Tomahawk tapped the point on the map again. “No more wagon. Iron Horse.”
    I loved that expression. So apt. The railway engine had indeed been a Trojan horse, an Iron Horse snorting and steaming its way across Indian lands like a giant plow, domesticating the land, making the flesh-and-blood horse obsolete. And the buffalo. And the Red Man.
    “They drove the wagon to a railway station?” Irene asked.
    “Hoofprints lost in boot tracks, in Iron Horse tracks.”
    “Have you no idea where they went from there, Red Tomahawk?” she asked, her voice throbbing with naked hope as only a performer’s can.
    “East, where White Man come from. Everywhere I go east, there are more and more White Men. No Red Men.”
    “Ah, but go far enough east,” Buffalo Bill put in, “and there are Yellow Men, millions of them.”
    “I have gone far enough east to know that I will not like the end of it.” Red Tomahawk’s forefinger stabbed the map again. “That is where wagon went, and all who were on it. The horse came back the same way Red Tomahawk did. I crossed its path more than once, but when I found the wagon it pulled, there were only these dark tribes you call Gypsies aboard. They may know something of these war dances in the caves, but I was not one they would answer to.”
    “They answered to you in the cavern, when you threw your war tomahawk,” Irene pointed out.
    The Indian said nothing.
    “It was bravely done,” Buffalo Bill noted. “Only a war whoop would stop those Devil’s imps from their obscene business. Pistol shots were like snapping lapdogs in that hellish scene.”
    “It’s true,” Irene said, “that the Rothschild agents were horrified into inaction. It took us Americans to stop the