“Oh!” Matthew gasped. “I think I feel the Red Ghost again! And… and he’s gone.”

“Don’t feel bad, Dr. Ernst.” Mr. Reeves said. “We have all day to hunt for him, and even if we don’t corner him, there’s the Zacare Operation.”

“It’s still so frustrating.” Matthew said. “Like trying to grab a fish with your bare hands, it just slips right out.”

The manesologists continued to fly up and down Eagle Creek in search of the Red Ghost. They fell into a familiar pattern. Matthew would get close to the Red Ghost, it would teleport, and then Joseph would use the noise box to turn Whistle in a new direction indicated by the Aldi Operation.

Little by little, Mr. Reeves grew restless. The Perkunos Operation was but a trifle for him to perform. Dirk Peters taught it to him years ago, and he was so familiar with it that he could perform it in his sleep. He started to rap his fingers on his ectoplasmic straps and listen to the strange chime-like sound it made. That satisfied him for a minute, then Mr. Reeves started to sing to accompany his strumming.

“I killed a man in Dallas, and another in Cheyenne, but when I killed a man in Tombstone, I overplayed my hand. I rode all night for Tucson, to rob the Robles mine, and I left old Arizona, with a posse right behind.”

“What are you singing?” Joseph asked.

“Does it bother you, Dr. Morton?” Mr. Reeves asked.

“Not at all. I just want to know what it is.” Joseph answered.

“It’s an old cowboy ballad. Arizona Killer.”

“It’s actually called that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Joseph chuckled. “Oh, I do so love this continent! Do you know a lot of these cowboy ballads, Mr. Reeves?”

“I know a lot of them, and for some of them, I even know the poor desperados that inspired them.”

“Poor?” Joseph asked.

“Yes. Even bad men can be poor men, when they have to run from me.” Mr. Reeves said.

“You have a remarkable singing voice.” Matthew said. “If you ever tire of chasing after men and ghosts, there’s this theater we know of in Essex called the Gnome, it used to just show Shakespeare plays, but it started showing operas a few years back.”

Mr. Reeves laughed. “You really think I can do Opera?”

“I think you’d be smashing.” Joseph answered.

“No, sir, I can’t agree. Can you imagine? Bass Reeves, lawman, manesologist, and now, baritone for an Essex opera! This world of ours is strange, Dr. Morton, but it’s not that strange!”

“Have you always been a singer?” Joseph asked.

“This singing of mine, it’s a habit I developed in my childhood. I’ve always liked to sing, especially on a trip. My mother swore up and down that one day I’d become an outlaw because I always sang about them. She was close, I suppose. Becoming a lawman meant my life became encompassed by outlaws.”

“And ghosts.” Joseph said.

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“True. But I find they’re very similar.” Mr. Reeves said. “They both cause disruptions to the lives of normal folk, they both take to hiding whenever someone’s after them, and they--”

Mr. Reeves stopped. Something outside the window caught his eye.

“Wait! Stop the carriage!” Mr. Reeves pointed at a spot on the ground. “There’s something down there! It looks like a body!”

Joseph squinted and strained to see what Mr. Reeves saw. “Damn it!” he hissed. “I can’t see a thing! It all looks like dirt to these old eyes of mine.”

Joseph pressed a button on the noise box. The sharp sound of a single whip crack made Whistle stop. The horse stood still in the middle of the air, not seeing anything out-of-the-ordinary with doing so.

Matthew then worked an Operation to make the horse and carriage descend to the ground.

A Dyeus king pointed at an ancestral warrior battling opponents on all sides, whirling and cutting with every rotation. The ghost was then transported through the air and deposited safely on a mountain. The battle would be lost, but this ancestral warrior had proven more valuable than the land, and could not be lost to enemy necromancers.

The Ozien Operation

As the ghost horse and carriage descended, what Mr. Reeves had spotted became clearer. Something had been torn to pieces next to the creek. Its blood was being washed downstream in fat globs.

When Whistle touched down, Matthew quickly performed another Operation to allow him to tear away their ectoplasmic straps with his hands.

The Dyeus prince touched the ghost’s face and rearranged the features until they bore a resemblance to his own. The trick would only work once, but it would only need to work once to bait out the assassin.

The Molvi Operation

The men bolted from the carriage as soon as Matthew had freed them.

“Oh Lord, please don’t let it be another person.” Matthew said.

Mr. Reeves was the first to reach the corpse. “It’s not a person, thank God, though this is a cause for concern.”

“What is it? A moose? A coyote?” Matthew asked as he got closer.

‘No.” Mr. Reeves answered. ‘Take a look. It’s a poor bear, and a grizzly at that. It looks like a butcher and a tanner had a fight over him and neither won.

It was hard to tell skin and fur from muscles and organs. Everything was a red mass. Most of the grizzly was scattered about in a smear across the shore, but parts were inside the shallow water. Strings of gore flowed in the current. Something white, which might have been a jaw or a rib or a bit of skull, had been washed clean by the water and clung to the side of a rock.

“It did this to a grizzly. My god.” Joseph exclaimed. “An entire grizzly!”

“When they say the living have no defense against the dead, it goes for animals as well.” Matthew said. “Poor creature was eviscerated like it was made out of paper.”

Mr. Reeves crouched down by the remains and regarded them as only a seasoned trailman could.

“God, all the red reminds me of Martin’s horrid bird pepper sauce.” Joseph said. ‘It’s making me feel sick.”

“That it’s blood doesn’t bother you none, but that it reminds you of pepper sauce does?” Mr. Reeves asked.

“Yes.” Joseph answered. “I know the taste of blood and it’s metallic, like mushrooms. But that abhorrent sauce is simply pain in liquid form.”

“Hm. Fair enough.” Mr. Reeves said. “I’ve had blood in my mouth enough times to know how it tastes. But I don’t think it’s worse than something people put on eggs.”

Mr. Reeves pulled a clump of hair from the wet mass. With his other hand, he activated the gaeite core of his lantern. The clump shone beetle-black in the olprt radiance.

“The Red Ghost did this, as if we needed any more proof.” Mr. Reeves said. “Still, more curios for the collecting .Maybe we’ll collect enough hair to make a whole blanket?”

“Leave a few strands for us.” Joseph said. “We’re a sentimental lot ourselves. I like to watch the shelves stock up in the basement.”

“You gentlemen see those piles?” Mr. Reeves pointed to several small piles of thoroughly ripped and smashed flesh. “They look like someone went over the meat with a hammer and knife many, many times, or in other words, they look like someone chewed them. I don’t think the Red Ghost just killed this grizzly. I think he tried to eat it, not fully understanding he was a ghost, and left these piles as the flesh fell through him.”

“Just like Whisper and carrots.” Matthew said.

“So, it tramples a woman to death, but it eats a whole grizzly bear, or rather tries to eat a grizzly bear. Why? Why does it kill a woman but eat a beast?” Joseph asked

“Human impulses.” Matthew said. “That’s my guess. This points to the Red Ghost being the manes of a man, just in the form of a strange and monstrous animal. A man would eat an animal, but a man won’t eat another human, not even one he hated.

“And he’s a very hungry man.” Mr. Reeves said. “Hungry enough to literally eat a bear. I’m starting to think that the hypothesis that this is the ghost of a jealous settler is true. I can see it--a man from back East goes West, but he’s not prepared for how it really is out here when your closest neighbor is a mile away, so he ends up starving. It’s not too uncommon a story. But then his ghost manifests, and he sees all these well-fed homesteaders cultivating the land he wanted, the land he died on, and decides to take his revenge.”

“A man becomes so jealous that he becomes a red-furred monster…” Matthew mused. “It almost sounds like a fairy story.”

“The animal form might be a way for him to disassociate from his crimes.” Joseph suggested. ‘Like how murderous shapeshifters like the Snallygaster only killed in bestial forms.”

“We need to take photographs.” Matthew said. “Mr. Reeves, please help Joseph retrieve the photography equipment from the trunk inside Whistle’s carriage.”

“Not a problem, Dr. Ernst.” Mr. Reeves replied. “I love photographing clues, be they for a manhunt or a ghost hunt.”

“Here’s a man that loves to solve a mystery!” Joseph said. “A man after my own heart! I am so happy we got to team-up with you for this case and not Etienne Bisclavret--but don’t tell him I said that. He’s liable to eat me if you do.”

Mr. Reeves smirked. “Oh, Etienne would do worse than that. He’d eat you after covering you in bird pepper sauce.”

“Truly, my Hell.”