Read Ebook: The Phantom Town Mystery by Norton Carol

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Ebook has 1044 lines and 55947 words, and 21 pages

THE PHANTOM TOWN MYSTERY

A whirl of gleaming sand and dust on a cross desert road in Arizona. The four galloping objects turned off the road, horses rearing, riders laughing; the two Eastern girls flushed, excited; the pale college student exultant; the cowboy guide enjoying their pleasure. A warm, sage-scented wind carried the cloud of dust away from them down into the valley.

"That was glorious sport, wasn't it, Mary?" Dora Bellman's olive-tinted face was glowing joyfully. "Wouldn't our equestrian teacher back in Sunnybank Seminary be properly proud of us?"

Lovely Mary Moore, delicately fashioned, fair as her friend was dark, nodded beamingly, too out of breath for the moment to speak.

Jerry Newcomb in his picturesque cowboy garb, blue handkerchief knotted about his neck, looked admiringly at the smaller girl.

"I reckon you two'll want to ride in the rodeo. I never saw Easterners get saddle-broke on cow ponies as quick as you have." Then his gray eyes smiled at the other boy, tall, thin, pale, who was wiping dust from his shell-rimmed glasses. "Dick Farley, I reckon you've ridden before."

Dick flashed a radiant smile which made his rather plain face momentarily good-looking. "Some," he said, "when I was a kid on Granddad's farm just out of Boston."

Jerry, a little ahead, was leading them slowly across soft shimmering sand toward a narrow entrance in cliff-like rocks.

The cowboy turned in his saddle and there was a tender light in his eyes as he looked at the younger girl. "I'm sure glad something fetched you back, Mary, though I'm mighty sorry it was your dad's illness that did it."

They had reached the narrow entrance in the wall of rocks. It was a mysterious looking spot; a giant gateway leading, the girls knew not where. On the gleaming sand near the entrance lay a half-buried skeleton. It looked as though it might have been that of a man rather than a beast. The girls exchanged startled glances, but, as Jerry was riding unconcernedly through the gateway, they silently followed.

"What a dramatic sort of place!" Dora exclaimed in an awed voice as she gazed about her.

They were on a floor of sand that was circled about by low mountains, grim, gray, uninviting. Here and there in crevices a twisted dwarf tree clung, its roots exposed. There was a death-like silence in the place. Even the soft rush of wind over the desert outside could not be heard.

The cowboy nodded. "You recollect that Dora was saying how she wished there was a mystery she could solve--" he began, when he was interrupted.

There was an exultant exclamation from Dick Farley. Perhaps his strong spectacles gave him clearer sight.

"I see a house, honest Injun, I do, or something that looks powerfully like one." He turned questioning eyes toward the cowboy.

"Righto! You're clever, old man!" Jerry Newcomb told him. "Don't tell where it is. See if the girls can find it."

For a long silent moment Mary and Dora sat in their saddles turning their gaze slowly about the low circling mountains.

Dora's excited cry told the others that she saw it, and Mary, noting the direction of her friend's gaze, saw, high on a narrow ledge, what looked like a wall made of small rocks with openings that might have been meant for two windows and a door. The flat roof could not be seen from the floor of the desert.

"How perfectly thrilling!" Dora cried. "What was it, Jerry, an Indian cliff dwelling?"

The cowboy shook his head. "Let's ride up closer," he said. He led the way to the very base of the low mountain. The ledge, which had one time been the front yard of the house, had been cracked by the elements and leaned outward, leaving a crevice of about twenty feet. There were no steps leading up to the house. It was, as far as the three Easterners could see, without a way of approach.

The cowboy shook his head. "Not a family. Only a man, Danish, but he was white all right. Sven Pedersen was his name but everyone called him 'Lucky Loon.' The name fitted him on two counts. Lucky because he struck it rich so often, and he certainly was 'loony' if that means crazy."

"What did he do?" Mary asked, her blue eyes wide and a little terrified.

"Sven Pedersen had a secret--Dad said--and that was why he took to hoarding all the wealth he got out of his gold and turquoise mines. My father was a boy then. He says he hasn't any doubt but that old rock house up yonder is plastered with gold and turquoise."

"No one that I've heard tell about," Jerry said. "No one cared to risk his life doing it, I reckon." Then, seeming to feel that he had sufficiently aroused his listeners' curiosity, the cowboy went on to explain. "As Sven Pedersen grew old, he got queerer and queerer. He took a notion that he was going to be killed for his money, so after he'd built that rock house, he shut himself up in it, and if any intruder so much as rode through that gateway in the rocks over there, bang would go his gun and the horse would drop dead. He was sure-shot all right, Sven Pedersen was."

Dick Farley's large eyes glanced from the high house out to the gate in the wall of rock. "I bet the rider of the dead horse scuttled away mighty quick," he said.

"I reckon he did," Jerry agreed when Dora exclaimed in a tone of horror: "He must have shot a man once anyway. Mary and I saw the half-buried skeleton of one out by the gate. We were sure we did."

"Maybe so," Jerry went on explaining. "You see no one could tell whether the Lucky Loon was in his house or out of it; no one ever saw him in the door or on the ledge, but they found out soon enough when they heard his gun bang."

"How did he get his food and water?" Dick asked.

"Maybe there's a spring on the mountain," Dora suggested.

"Nary a spring," the cowboy told them. "These mountains and the desert around here are bone dry. That's why there's so many skeletons of cows hereabout. Some reckoned that he rode away nights to a town where he wasn't known. He might have stayed away for days and got back in the night without anyone knowing."

Jerry had whirled his horse's head and had started for the gateway, the others quickly following. Dick, at the end, was just passing through the gate when they distinctly heard the report of a gun.

Safely outside of the wall of rocks, the four young people drew their restless horses to a standstill. Mary's nettlesome brown pony was hard to quiet until Jerry reached out a strong brown hand and patted its head.

Jerry's smile was reassuring. "'Twas the story that frightened you girls, I reckon," he said, glancing about and up and down the road as he spoke. "It's hunters out after quail or rabbits, more'n like."

"Of course," Dora, less inclined to be imaginative, replied. Then to the cowboy she said in her practical matter-of-fact way, "Hurry along home to your milking, Jerry, and Dick, don't you bother to come with us. Now that you're working on the Newcomb ranch you ought to be there. It's only a few miles up over this sunshiny road to Gleeson. We aren't the least bit afraid to ride home alone, are we?" She smiled at her friend.

Mary, not wishing to appear foolishly timid, said, in as courageous a voice as she could muster, "Of course we're not afraid. Goodbye, boys, we'll see you tomorrow."

Turning the heads of their horses up a gently ascending mountain road, the girls cantered away. At a bend, Mary glanced back. The boys were sitting just where they had left them. Jerry's sombrero and Dick's cap waved, then, feeling assured that the girls were all right, the boys went at a gallop down the road and across the desert valley to the Newcomb ranch which nestled at the base of the Chiricahua range.

"They're nice boys, aren't they?" Mary said. "I've always wished I had a brother and I do believe Jerry is going to be just like one."

Dreamily the younger girl was saying--"That's because we were playmates when we were little so very long ago."

"Oh my, how ancient we are!" Dora said teasingly. "Please remember that you are only one year younger than I am and I refuse to be called elderly."

Mary smiled faintly but it was evident that she was still thinking of the past, when she had been a little girl with golden curls that hung to her waist; a wonderfully pretty, wistful little girl. When she spoke, she said, "It's only natural that Jerry should call me 'Little Sister.' Our mothers were like sisters when they were girl brides. I've told you how they both came from the East just as we have. My mother met Dad in Bisbee where he was a mining engineer, and Jerry's mother taught a little desert school over near the Newcomb ranch. She didn't teach long though, for that very first vacation she married Jerry's cowboy father. After that Mother and Mrs. Newcomb were good friends, naturally, being brides and neighbors."

Mary, not heeding the interruption, kept on. "When Jerry and I were little, we were playmates. I spent days at the ranch sometimes," her sweet face was very sad as she ended with, "until Mother died when I was eight."

"Then you came East to boarding-school and became like a sister to me," Dora said tenderly. "Oh, Mary, when you came West to be with your dear sick dad, I wonder if you know what it meant to me to be allowed to come with you."

For a time the girls cantered along in thoughtful silence. The rutty road was leading up toward the tableland on which stood the now nearly deserted old mining-town of Gleeson.

Far below them the desert valley stretched many miles southward to the Mexican border. The girls could see a distant blue haze that was the smoke from the Douglas copper smelters.

The late afternoon sun lay in floods of silver light on the sandy road ahead of them. It was very still. Not a sound was to be heard. Now and then a rabbit darted past silently.

"How peaceful this hour is on the desert," Mary began, glancing at her friend who was riding so close at her side. Noticing that Dora was deep in thought, she asked lightly, "Won't you say it out loud?"

"Why, of course. I was just wondering why Jerry hurried us away so fast from Lucky Loon's rock house."

"Because he had to do the milking," Mary replied simply.

Dora, seeing her friend's pale face, was sorry that she had wondered aloud. "Of course not!" she said brightly. "That's impossible!" Then to change the subject, she started another. "Jerry didn't have time to tell us about the Evil Eye Turquoise, did he?"

She said no more about it just then, as they had reached the old ghost town of Gleeson. They turned up a side street toward mountain peaks that were about a mile away. On their right was the corner general store and post office. A crumbling old adobe building it was, with a rotting wooden porch, on which stood a row of armchairs. In the long ago days when the town had been teeming with life, picturesque looking miners and ranchers had sat there tilted back, smoking pipes and swapping yarns. Today the chairs were empty.

An old man, shriveled, gray-bearded, unkempt, but with kind gray eyes, deep-sunken under shaggy brows, stood in the open door. He smiled out at them in a friendly way, then beckoned with a bony finger.

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