Frederick Adams Proctor

Detective slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Lone Reeve. Craft: Cross-Examination.

Frederick Adams Proctor was born in 1873 in the Westside of San Antonio, Texas, and lived fifty-five years as a cattle drover and a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Lone Reeve, and it classes him as a Detective, a hunter who works by questions, records and patient comparison, and who would rather be told a thing than find it out the hard way. His craft was Cross-Examination, the art of putting the same question to a witness in three different dresses until the truth comes out in one of them, and his gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. He was the elder son of the newspaper compositor and slayer Frederick Kimbrough Proctor, The Fallow Seal, who was also his mentor, and of the boarding-house keeper Emma Adams. In 1899 he married the seamstress Effie Bowie, and they raised two daughters, Lorraine Proctor and Evelyn Bowie Proctor, both of whom became slayers in their turn. He died in 1928 in a car accident, aged fifty-five, having survived twenty-nine years of night work, four stampedes and a great many people who did not want to be asked. He was born on the Westside because his mother's house was full. It was the spring of 1873, the herds were coming up from the brush country and every bed in Emma Adams's boarding house on Alamo Street was taken by a trail outfit that had paid in advance and would not be moved. Emma, who did not intend to lose a week's takings over a baby, walked across the river when her time came and was delivered in the front room of a Tejano midwife's cottage, where she had once taken in the midwife's nephew when he had nowhere to sleep. The midwife, who had seen a great many babies, looked at this one and said that he had the face of a man about to ask a question. He was carried home to the boarding house the next day in a flour sack lined with flannel, and the trail outfit, who had been told that the landlady was confined, lined up in the passage to look at him with their hats in their hands. He grew up in a house of strangers, which was the making of him. The lodgers were drovers, clerks, teamsters and travelling men, and a child who sits at the foot of a long table learns to tell who is lying by the time he is nine. He listened to the drovers talk of the trail and to his father, who had the trick of asking a question and then saying nothing, talk of the people who had seen things. At twelve he was breaking horses for a livery on Commerce Street, and at fifteen he signed on with a ranch on the Cibolo to gather and drive cattle to the pens and, in the last years before the stock laws, along the old roads north. He was not a spectacular rider. He was a good hand with a herd, patient, observant and unhurried, and what he did best was settle a dispute at a campfire. A trail boss said of him that he could ask a man where he had been last night so gently that the man began to apologise before he had done anything. His father took note. Frederick Kimbrough Proctor never asked his elder son to join the work and never pretended that the question was not in the house. He taught him at the kitchen table instead, through the long winters of the nineties, in the evening hours after the compositor came home, the things that he knew. He showed him how to take a statement: how to let a witness tell the tale in his own order first, then ask the same thing backwards, then ask the thing that the witness has not said, and then say nothing at all. He made the boy practise on the boarders. He made him practise on his mother, who said that she had been examined by better men. By twenty he could take a full account from a drover who had seen nothing and get from it the shape of the thing that had been looking at him. He married in the spring of 1899. Effie Bowie was a seamstress from Gonzales County, five years his elder, a spare, sharp, red-handed woman who made shirts and riding skirts in a rented room off Houston Street and had, by the time he met her, three drovers' outfits as steady customers. He came in to ask for a button, and she told him that she did not sew on buttons for strangers, only for people she had seen sober. He went away and was sober for six weeks. She sewed on the button. They married at the Methodist church on the first Sunday in May, in a dress she had made herself, with his mother at the front in a hat the size of a dinner plate, and they took two rooms above her workroom, which was also the place, for the next twenty years, where the family's hunting coats were mended without a question. The calling came in the autumn of that year, in the fields after a hunt. He was taking a small herd to a ranch near Boerne, and the owner, a German cattleman named Anselm Voigt, who kept a pack of hounds and a taste for the wolf, had asked the drovers to stay for the Saturday hunt. It was a cold, bright afternoon, and the hounds went away across the stubble after something that none of them had seen. They came back at dusk, all twelve, flat-eared and trembling, without the huntsman. His father had told him of a night like it, sixteen years before, and he had always supposed that it was the sort of thing that a man remembered rather than lived. He stood at the edge of the field and was surprised to find that he was already counting. He counted the hounds, the riders and the direction of the wind. Then he went to the farmhouse and began to ask questions. He took twenty-three statements before midnight, in the kitchen, in the order he thought best, and he put each man's account beside the next. Three said that the hounds had gone after a fox. Two said that they had heard a horn. One, a young hand, said without being asked that the huntsman had taken his hat off before he walked into the trees. That was the detail. Men do not remove their hats for foxes. He wrote it down and went out again with a lantern, and by morning he had found, at the end of the stubble, the marks of two sets of boots that went in side by side and one that came out. His father drove out from town at dawn, looked at the paper, and said only that he had not got it as neat at thirty-three. Frederick Adams Proctor was twenty-six, and from that day he worked as a hunter of the White Ledger. The Lone Reeve was a name that he earned on the roads. He was a stranger at a great many campfires and ranch kitchens, a man who rode alone and kept a small, tidy book, and a reeve in the old English sense is a steward, the one who keeps the accounts of another man's land. He kept the accounts of the dark. Where a drover had lost a cow that no wolf had taken, or a hand had come in white, or a well had been found fouled, he would come through with the next herd, sit down with the men and ask them what they had seen. He worked out a method of three rounds, in which the same story was asked for by the day, by the hour and by the smell, and he said that a true account survived all three while a false one had usually lost its hat by the second. He took about thirty vampires in twenty-five years, most of them on the road between San Antonio and the Nueces, and he did not take one without a witness who had signed his name. The great storm that struck Galveston in September 1900 found him on a ranch near Pearsall, where the wind blew for two days and the telegraph went down, and he came home to find that his mother had taken nineteen survivors into the boarding house and that his wife had sewn a hundred and forty nightshirts out of the last of her stock. The Great War took the younger cattlemen into the army and left the old ones shorthanded, and he drove beef to Camp Travis and Kelly Field for two years with a crew of boys and pensioners. The influenza of 1918 was worse. He buried two of his drovers and nursed a third, and he noticed, with the grim exactness of his trade, that one of the dead had been asked for by name at the door by someone who was not on any list. It was the only year in which he did not sleep for a week. His daughters, who were seventeen and sixteen, carried the water. Lorraine Proctor was born in 1901 and lived until 1935. Evelyn Bowie Proctor was born in 1902 and lived until 1980. He taught both of them Cross-Examination, at the kitchen table in the same way that it had been taught to him, and they were called to the work in their own time and in their own manner, which their own biographies set down. He said that the trick was to teach a child to ask, and then teach her to wait for the answer, which was much harder. His father had died in 1909, his mother three years before that, and his brother William Adams Proctor, the gentle one, in 1925 of a cancer, and by the end of the twenties he was the last of the Proctors of his generation who had been taught by the Fallow Seal himself. He died on a wet evening in October 1928, when his Dodge touring car left the gravel road near Helotes and went into a low-water crossing that had risen faster than he had judged. He was driving home from a ranch where he had spent the day taking statements from three hands and a cook. He was fifty-five. It was remarked by everyone at the funeral that a man who had been thrown by nothing on four thousand miles of trail had been killed by a motor car, and Effie, who lived another eight years and sewed his shirts into quilts, said that the horse would have seen the water. The notebook in his coat was dry. It held, in a steady hand, the questions that he had meant to ask in the morning. Frederick Adams Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the drover who asked the question three times, the Lone Reeve who kept the accounts of the dark on the cattle roads. In the Slayerverse he stands for the examiners of the White Ledger, the hunters who found out what the night had done by sitting down at a fire with the people it had frightened, and who proved that a patient question, honestly repeated, can do what a rifle cannot.