He shook his head. “Most woof hunters just run into a place with their guns and start shooting at anything hairy. So that’s how I do. Yep.”
“But that’s not how we do,” Charlie said pointedly.
“Yeah, but it seems like we are not doing anything,” Jane replied.
“Oh, but we are,” Charlie argued. “I like to call this a ‘stakeout.’” (This, dear reader, was the very first use of the term stakeout, but our heroes did not properly appreciate its novelty.) “You lay low, watch and listen, and eventually something will turn up. You have to be patient, is all.”
“I like steak,” said Jack wistfully.
Frank sighed and glanced at his watch again. Bill made a wheezy sound suspiciously like a snore. Charlie rubbed at his eyes. Outside, the street was still uninhabited. The factory remained dark. And nothing happened.
“I also like your hat,” said Jack.
“That’s it,” Jane announced. “I gotta go.”
Bill’s eyes opened. “You have someplace better to be, Jane?”
“Yeah. I mean, no, but I gotta go, if you catch what I’m saying.”
They all caught what she was saying.
“I told you to go before we left,” Charlie admonished.
“I didn’t have to then, and besides, we were all so busy ‘gearing up for the garou hunt’ that I forgot.”
“Well, hold it,” Charlie advised.
“I’ve been holding it. I can’t hold it no more.” With that, Jane exited the carriage.
The air outside was better. She looked up and down the street. At first, she thought she heard a rustling noise from behind the carriage, but when she looked there was nothing there. (Don’t worry about Annie, reader. She had crawled underneath the carriage to avoid detection, and that was getting her dress dirty, which miffed her, but otherwise she was fine.)
Jane started walking toward the factory. Behind her, Bill, Charlie, Frank, and Jack popped out of the carriage like a bunch of circus clowns and followed her as she strode right up to the building. She tugged on the doors, but they were locked, so she headed around the side.
“Jane, stop!” Charlie hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Looking for a place to water my daisies.” She could see a smaller building in the background. Perhaps, with luck, an outhouse.
“Jane, I mean it!” Charlie whisper-yelled. “Get back here!”
She kept walking.
“Jane,” came the calm voice of Wild Bill. “Jane, please wait for the rest of us.”
She slowed. Stopped. Swore. “But I really have to go.”
Then she noticed something in the dirt at her feet.
A footprint.
Or, we should say, a paw print. A set of paw prints, in fact. Jane dropped into a squat to get a better look.
“Oh come on, Jane,” she heard from Frank. “No one wants to see that.”
She waved him over. “No, silly. Look here. A clue.”
The rest of the group hurried over and circled around.
“They’re wolf prints,” Jane said. “Big ones. Much bigger than your average wolf.” She stood and pushed Frank out of her way to follow the tracks for a few paces. “And they come from a beast that walks upright, on two feet, not four.”
“So it’s a garou,” Frank said flatly.
Jane, being the group’s official tracker, continued to follow the tracks, which led directly to the small building she’d spotted earlier behind the factory. Sadly, it was not an outhouse. It was some kind of guard shack or foreman’s hut, a boxy room with a table, a stool, and a window looking toward the main facility. But inside were some other interesting clues, like: a half-eaten leg of raw lamb. “Clearly torn at with sharp, pointed teeth,” observed Jane.
“So, a garou,” said Frank.
Charlie shushed him. “Let her work.”
Jane moved on to the next clue: A copy of Ned Buntline’s latest book, Fearsome Garou and Where to Find Them. “Look, a picture of a wolf on the cover,” observed Jane.
“So, an introspective garou,” said Frank.
Jane swept a hand over the little table and came away with— “Aha! Fur!” Jane rubbed her fingers together, sending the fur floating back onto the table.
Someone in the group sneezed lightly.
“Bless you,” said Jane.
“I don’t want to jump the gun, here, but I think we may be tracking a garou,” said Frank.
“I think you may be right,” agreed Bill.
“It’s a woof, sure enough,” said Jack McCall.
Frank sighed. “Where did this particular—I think we can all agree—garou go?”
Jane went back outside and picked up the tracks (which were quite clearly pressed into the dirt) leading straight from the shack to a back door to the factory. “It went this way,” she said, and everyone shuffled after her.
The second door was miraculously unlocked. The group slipped into the building. It was still light outside, the sun sinking behind the row of buildings, but inside it was dark. There wasn’t much to see anyway, except a bunch of wooden crates and boxes stacked up here and there, three enormous metal vats in the center of the room, and some complicated-looking machinery. At this point, Frank (seeing as he had the sharpest eyesight but mostly because he was in a hurry) took the lead. He navigated them smoothly through the maze of boxes and machines to two sets of stairs—one that went up, and one that descended into total darkness. Jane shivered. She’d never been too fond of the dark.
“Anybody think to bring—I don’t know—a lantern?” Frank asked.
In answer, Bill removed the lid from the nearest box and pulled out a candle.
This was a candle factory, it turned out.
“Well, that’s handy,” said Jane as Bill distributed a few candles among the group and lit them with the matches he kept for his pipe. Then they turned again to the stairs.
“I vote we go up,” said Frank. “They’ll have the business offices upstairs, I’m betting, and if this Mr. Badd fellow is the manager, that’s where we’re likely to find him.”
The stairs still looked spooky to Jane. “Yeah, let’s go up,” she agreed.
Bill turned his face toward the stairwell and frowned. “No,” he said. “We’re going down.”
FIVE
Frank
Downstairs they found a large metal cage in a back room, and in that cage were the missing factory workers. From the looks of it, they were all suffering from an infection. They each had a bandage somewhere that covered a nasty bite wound. Many of them were sweating and feverish, some even delirious, rambling on about the moon. Their eyes didn’t look right: the pupils were an odd shape. A few of the people were sprouting hair in places they shouldn’t.
At the sight of the whole gang coming downstairs, they cowered toward the back of the cage.
Frank swallowed hard. “Who would do this? I understand about accidental bites, but this . . .”
Someone in the group sneezed again.
“Bless you,” said Jane.
“We need to get them out of here,” said Bill.
Jane tugged at the door of the cage, but it didn’t open. “Where’s the key?”