The Phantom Town Mystery

CHAPTER IV

“DESPERATE DICK”

Skipping to the vine-covered back porch, the two girls peered through the deepening dusk at the approaching car. In it were two boys.

“One of them resembles Jerry,” Mary said, “but the other one is also a cowboy, so it can’t be Dick.”

“It is Dick!” Dora exclaimed gleefully. “Jerry must have loaned him some cowboy togs.”

“Oh, Happy Days!” Mary exulted. “Now we can ask Jerry about that Evil Eye Turquoise and all the rest of the story about poor Mr. Lucky Loon.”

“If there is any rest to it,” Dora remarked. “Look!” she interrupted herself to point laughingly at the little car that was rattling toward them. “Dick is waving his sombrero. He wants us to be sure and take notice of it!”

“Isn’t he proud though?” Mary chuckled. “His face fairly shines.”

Then, as the small car drew up near the porch, the girls clapped their hands gaily, and yet quietly, remembering that Mary’s invalid father might be asleep.

“Oh, Dick,” Dora exclaimed, not trying to hide her admiration, “your mother must see her to-be-physician son. You make a regular screen-star cowboy, doesn’t he, Mary?”

Before the other girl could reply, Dick, who had leaped to the ground, struck a ridiculous pose as he said in a deep, dramatic voice, “Dick, the Desperate Range Rider.”

Dora’s infectious laugh rang out. “Your big, dark eyes look so solemn through those shell-rimmed glasses, Mr. Desperate Dick, that somehow you fail to strike terror into our hearts,” she bantered.

Then Mary smiled up at Jerry, who was standing near her. Half teasingly she asked, “To what do we owe the honor of this visit? When we parted this afternoon, you called ‘we’ll see you tomorrow.’”

Jerry glanced at the other boy, mischievous twinkles in his gray eyes. “You might as well ’fess up, old man. Truth is, Dick couldn’t wait until tomorrow to let you girls admire him in his cowboy togs.”

“Villain!” Dick tried to glower at his betraying friend, but ended by beaming upon him with a most friendly grin. “I suppose I had to rope you and drag you over here quite against your will.”

Jerry’s smile at the curly-headed little girl at his side revealed, more than words, the real reason of his coming. What he said was, “Mom had a letter she wanted mailed and – er – as long as Dick wanted to show off, I reckoned – ”

“Oh, Jerry,” Mary caught his arm, “it really doesn’t matter in the least why you came. I was wild to see you – ” then, when the tall cowboy began to glow with pride, Mary quite spoiled her compliment by hurrying to add, “Oh, it wasn’t you that I wanted to see.” Jerry pretended to be greatly crestfallen, so she laughingly added, “Of course I’m always glad to see you, Big Brother, but – ”

“Goodness!” Dora rushed to her friend’s rescue. “You’re getting all tangled up.” Then to Jerry, “Mary and I are wild to know more about that awfully desolate stone house you showed us this afternoon and about the Evil Eye Turquoise – ”

“Yes, and about poor Mr. Lucky Loon – ” Mary put in.

“Rather a contradictory description, isn’t it?” Dick asked. “How can a man be poor and lucky all in one sentence?”

“I’ll tell you what.” Jerry had a plan to suggest. “Let’s go down to the store and get old Silas Harvey to tell us all that he knows about Lucky Loon. I reckon he’d loosen up for you girls, but he never would for me. He knows more than any other living person about that rock house and the mystery of Sven Pedersen’s life – ”

“Oh, good!” Mary’s animated face was lovely to look upon in the starlight. Jerry’s eyes would have told her so, had she read them aright, but her thoughts were not of herself.

“Let’s walk down,” she suggested. “It’s such a lovely night.” Then she added, “Wait here while Dora and I go up to our room and put on our sweater coats.”

“You’ll need them!” Dick commented. “Even in June these desert nights are nippy.”

The girls, hand in hand, fairly danced through the wide lower hall, but so softly that no sound could penetrate the closed door beyond which Mary’s father slept.

They did not need to light the kerosene lamp. The two long door-like windows in Mary’s room were letting in a flood of soft, silvery starlight. Dora found her flash and her jaunty green sweater coat. “It looks better with this cherry-colored dress than my pink one,” she chattered, “and your yellow coat looks too sweet for anything with that blue dress. Happy Days, but doesn’t Jerry think you’re too pretty to be real? His eyes almost eat you up – ”

“Silly!” Mary retorted. “It’s utterly impossible for Jerry and me to fall in love with each other. Goodness, didn’t we play together when we were babies?” Her tone seemed to imply that no more could possibly be said upon the subject.

“No one is so blind as he who will not see,” Dora sing-songed her trite quotation, then, fearing that Mary would not like so much teasing, she slipped a loving arm about her and gave her a little contrite hug. “I’ll promise to join the blind hereafter, if you think I’m seeing too much, Mary dear,” she promised.

“I think you’re imagining too much,” was the laughing rejoinder. “Now, let’s tiptoe downstairs, and oh, I must tap at the sitting-room door and tell nice Mrs. Farley where we are going.”

Just before Mary tapped, however, the door opened softly and Dick appeared, his mother closely following, her rather tired brown eyes adoring him. “Haven’t I the nicest cowboy son?” she asked the girls, glancing from one to the other impartially.

It was Dora who replied, “We think so, Mrs. Farley.”

“However,” the mother leaned forward to kiss the boy’s pale cheek, “I’ll not be entirely satisfied until you’re as brown as Jerry.”

“Has Dick told you that we girls are going? – ” Mary began.

Mrs. Farley nodded pleasantly. “Down to the post office? Yes, I hope you’ll find that ancient storekeeper in a garrulous mood. Good night!”

Jerry was seated on the top step of the back porch waiting for them. They caught a dreamy far-away expression in his gray eyes. He was looking across the shimmering distance to the Chiricahua Mountains, and thinking of the time when he would build, on his own five hundred acres, a home for someone. He glanced up almost guiltily when Mary’s finger tips gave him a light caress on his sun-tanned cheek.

“Brother Jerry,” she teased, “are you star-dreaming?”

He sprang to his feet. “I reckon I was dreaming, sure enough, Little Sister,” he confessed.

Mary slipped her slim, white hand under his khaki-covered arm, and, smiling up at him with frank friendship, she said, “The road down the hill is so rough and hobbly, I’m going to hang on to you, may I?”

Dora did not hear the cowboy’s low spoken reply, for Dick was speaking to her, but to herself she thought, “Some day a miracle will be performed and she who is now blind will see, and great will be the revelation.” Then, self-rebuking and aloud, “Oh, Dick, forgive me, what were you saying? I reckon, as Jerry says, that I was thinking of something else.”

“Not very complimentary to your present companion.” Dick pretended to be quite downcast about it. “I merely asked if I might aid you over the ruts – ”

Dora laughed gleefully. “Dick,” she said in a low voice, “I’m going to tell you what I was thinking. I was wondering why Mary doesn’t notice that Jerry likes her extra-special.” Dick’s eyes were wide in the starlight. “Does he? I hadn’t noticed it.”

Dora laughed and changed the subject. “Oh, Dick, isn’t this the shudderin’est, spookiest place there ever was?”

They had passed the three small adobe huts that were occupied by Mexican families and were among the old crumbling houses, which, in the dim light, looked more haunted than they had in the day.

“I suppose that each one holds memories of sudden riches won, and many of them have secrets of tragedies, —murders even, maybe.” Dora shuddered and drew closer to Dick.

“You are imaginative tonight,” he said, smiling at her startled, olive-tinted face. “It’s quite a leap, though, from romance to gunfights and – ”

Mary turned to call back to them, “Jerry and I have it all planned, just what we are to do. I’m to ask some innocent question and, Dora, you’re to help me out, but we mustn’t appear too interested or too prying, Jerry says, or for some reason, quite unknown, old Mr. Harvey will put on the clam act. Shh! Here we are! Good, there’s a light. Now Jerry is to speak his piece first and I am to chime in. Then, Dora, you take your cue from me.”

Dick whispered close to his companion’s ear, “I evidently haven’t a speaking part in the tragedy or comedy about to be enacted.”

Dora giggled. “You can be scenery,” she teased, recalling to Dick the forgotten fact that he was wearing a cowboy outfit for the first time and feeling rather awkward in it.

Jerry opened the door, a jangling bell rang; then he stepped aside and let Mary enter first.

CHAPTER V

POOR LITTLE BODIL

Old Mr. Harvey was dozing in a tilted armchair close to his stove. He sat up with a start when his discordant-toned bell rang, and blinked into the half-darkness near the door. The smoked chimney on his hanging kerosene lamp in the middle of the room and near the ceiling did little to illumine the place. When he saw who his visitors were, he gave his queer cackling laugh, “Wall, I’ll be dinged ef I wa’n’t a dreamin’ I was back in holdup days and that some of them thar bandits was bustin’ in to clean out my stock.” Then, as he rose, almost creakingly, he said, disparagingly, as he glanced about at the dust and cobweb-covered shelves, “Not as how they’d find onythin’ now worth the totin’ away.”

Having, by that time, gone around back of his long counter, he peered through misty spectacles at Mary. “Is thar suthin’ I could be gettin’ fer yo’, Little Miss?” he asked.

Jerry stepped forward and placed a half dollar on the counter. “Stamps, please, Mr. Harvey,” he said. “I reckon that’s all we’re wanting tonight, thanks.”

The cowboy put the stamps in his pocket, dropped his mother’s letter in a slot, and turned, as though he were about to leave, but Mary detained him with:

“Oh, Jerry, you don’t have to hurry away, do you? I thought,” her sweet appealing smile turned toward the old man, “that perhaps Mr. Harvey might be willing to tell us a story if we stayed awhile.”

“Sho’ as shootin’!” the unkempt old man seemed pleased indeed to walk into Mary’s trap. “Yo’ set here, Little Miss.” It was his own chair by the stove he was offering.

“No, indeed!” Mary protested. “That one just fits you. Jerry and Dick are bringing some in from the porch.”

The boys sat on the counter. The girls, trying to hide triumphant smiles, drew their chairs close to the stove. Old Mr. Harvey put in another stick. Then, chewing on an end of gray whisker, he peered over his glasses at Mary a moment, before asking, “Was thar anythin’ special yo’ wanted to hear tell about?”

Mary leaned forward, her pretty face animated: “Oh, yes, Mr. Harvey. This afternoon Dora and I saw that small stone house that’s built so it’s almost hidden on a cliff of the mountains. Can you tell us anything about the man who built it; why he did it and what became of him?”

The old man’s shaggy brows drew together thoughtfully. He seemed to hesitate. Mary glanced at Dora, who said with eager interest, “Oh, that would be a thrilling story, I’m sure. I’d just love to hear it.”

Wisely the boys, who were not in the line of the old man’s vision, said nothing. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten their presence.

The storekeeper was silent for so long, staring straight ahead of him at the stove, that the girls thought they, also, had been forgotten. Then suddenly he looked up and smiled toothlessly at Mary, nodding his grizzly head many times before he spoke.

“Wall,” he said at last, almost as though he were speaking to an unseen presence, “I reckon Sven Pedersen wouldn’t want to hold me to secrecy no longer – thirty year back ’tis, sence he – ” suddenly he paused and held up a bony, shaky hand. “You didn’t hear no gun shot, did you?”

The girls had heard nothing. They glanced almost fearfully up at the boys. Jerry shook his head and put a finger to his lips.

The girls understood that he thought it wise that the old man continue to forget their presence.

“Wall, I reckon the wind’s risin’ an’ suthin’ loose banged. Thar’s plenty loose, that’s sartin.” Then, turning rather blankly toward Mary, he asked in a child-like manner, “What was we talkin’ about?”

Mary drew her chair closer and smiled confidingly at him. “You were going to tell us, Mr. Harvey, why Mr. Pedersen built that rock house and – ”

“Sho’! Sho’! So I was. It was forty year last Christmas he come to Gleeson. A tall, skinny fellar he was, not so very old nor so young neither. It was an awful blizzardy night an’ thar wa’n’t nobody at all out in the streets. I was jest reckonin’ as how I’d turn in, when the door bust open an’ the wind tore things offen the shelves. I had to help get it shet. Then I looked at what had blown in. He looked like a fellar that was most starved an’ more’n half crazy. His palish blue eyes was wild. I sot him down in this here chair by the fire an’ staked him to some hot grub. I’d seen half-starved critters eat. He snapped at the grub jest that-a-way. When he’d et till I reckoned as how he’d bust, he sank down in that chair an’ dod blast it, ef he didn’t start snorin’, an’ he hadn’t sed nothin’, nohow. Wall, I seen as how he wa’n’t goin’ to wake, so I lay down on my bunk wi’ my clothes on, sort o’ sleepin’ wi’ one eye open, not knowin’ what sort of a loon I was givin’ shelter to.

“The blizzard kep’ on all the next day an’ the next. Not a gol-darned soul come to the store, so me’n’ and him had plenty o’ time to get to knowin’ each other.

“Arter he’d drunk some hot coffee, he unloosed his tongue, though what he sed was so half-forrin, I wa’n’t quick to cotch onto his meanin’s.

“The heft o’ his yarn was like this. He an’ his little sister, Bodil, he named her, had come from Denmark to New York. Thar he’d picked up some o’ Ameriky’s way o’ talking, an’ enuf money to git West. Some Danish fellar had tol’ him about these here rich-quick mines, so he’d took a stage an’ fetched Bodil.”

The old man paused, and Mary, leaning forward, put her hand on his arm. “Oh, Mr. Harvey, tell us about that little girl. How old was she and what happened to her?”

The old man’s head shook sadly. “Bad enuf things happened to her, I reckon. She must o’ been a purty little critter. Chiny blue eyes, Sven Pedersen sed she had, an’ hair like yellar cornsilk when it fust comes out. She was the apple o’ his eye. The only livin’ thing he keered for. I sho’ was plumb sorry fer him.”

“But do tell us what happened to her?” Mary urged, fearing that the old man’s thought was wandering.

“Wall, ’pears like the stage was held up on a mount’in road nigh here; the wust road in the country hereabouts. Thar wa’n’t no passengers but Sven Pedersen an’ Little Bodil; the long journey bein’ about to an end. That thar blizzard was a threatenin’ an’ the stage driver was hurryin’ his hosses, hopin’ to get over the mountain afore it struck, when up rode three men. One of ’em shot the driver, another of ’em dragged out a bag of gold ore; then they fired over the hosses’ heads. Skeered and rarin’, them hosses plunged over the cliff, an’ down that stage crashed into the wust gulch thar is in these here parts.

“Sven saw his little sister throwed out into the road. Then, as the stage keeled over, he jumped an’ cotched onto some scrub tree growin’ out o’ the cliff. It tuk him a long spell to climb back to the road. He was loony wild wi’ worryin’ about Little Bodil. He ran to whar he’d seen her throwed out. She wa’n’t thar. He hunted an’ called, but thar wa’n’t no answer. Then he reckoned as how that thar third bandit had whirled back an’ carried her off.”

“Oh, Mr. Harvey, how terrible!” There were tears in Mary’s eyes. “Wasn’t she ever found?”

The old man shook his head sadly. “Sven Pedersen follered them bandits afoot all night an’ nex’ day but they was a horseback an’ he couldn’t even get sight o’ them. Then the blizzard struck an’ he staggered in here, bein’ as he saw my light. Arter that he went prospectin’ all around these here mount’ins an’ he struck it rich. That cliff, whar he built him a rock house, was one of his claims.”

“I suppose he never stopped hunting for poor Little Bodil.” Mary’s voice was tender with sympathy.

“Yo’ reckon right, little gal. Whenever Sven Pedersen heerd tell of a holdup anywhar in the state, he’d join the posse that was huntin’ ’em but it warn’t no use, nohow. Bodil was plumb gone. Sven Pedersen never made no friend but me. His palish blue eyes allays kept that wild look, an’, as time went on an’ he piled up gold an’ turquoise, he got to be dubbed ‘Lucky Loon.’”

The old man paused and started to nod his shaggy gray head so many times that Dora, fearing he would nod himself to sleep, asked, “Mr. Harvey, what was his Evil Eye Turquoise?”

“Hey?” The old man glanced up suspiciously. “So yo’d heerd tell about that.” Then he cackled his queer, cracked laugh. “I heerd about it, but I’d allays reckoned thar wa’n’t no sech thing. I cal’lated Sven Pedersen made up that thar yarn to keep folks from climbin’ up ter his rock house an’ stealin’ his gold an’ turquoise, if be that’s whar he kept it. I reckon as how that’s the heft o’ that yarn an’ yet, I dunno, I dunno. Mabbe thar was suthin’ to it. Mabbe thar was.”

“Oh, Mr. Harvey, we’d like awfully well to hear the story whether it’s true or not, unless,” Mary said solicitously, “unless you’re too sleepy to tell it.”

The old man sat up and opened his eyes wide. “Sleepy, me sleepy? Never was waked up more! Wall, this here is the heft of that tale.”

CHAPTER VI

THE EVIL-EYE TURQUOISE

The old man continued:

“Sven Pedersen hisself never tol’ me nothin’ about that Evil Eye Turquoise o’ his’n. That’s why I cal’late it was a yarn he used to skeer off onweloome visitors to his rock house, bein’ as thar was spells when he was away fer days, huntin’ fer Bodil.

“I heerd it was a big eye-shaped rock with a round center that was more green than it was blue. Hangers-on in the store here used to spec’late ’bout it. Some reckoned, ef ’twas true that Sven had found a green-blue turquoise big as a coffee cup, it’d be wurth a lot o’ money, but I dunno, I dunno!”

Dora recalled Mr. Harvey’s wandering thoughts by asking, “It must have been very beautiful, but why was it called ‘Evil Eye?’”

The old man shook his head. “Thar was folks who’d believe onythin’ in them days,” he said. “I reckon thar still is. Superstitious, yo’d call it, so, when Sven Pedersen tol’ yarns ’bout that green-blue eye o’ his’n, thar was them as swallowed ’em whule.”

“Tell us one of the yarns,” Mary urged.

“Wall, Lucky Loon tol’ ’round at the camps, as how he’d put that thar turquoise eye into the inside wall o’ his house jest whar it could keep watchin’ the door, an’ ef onyone tried to climb in, that thar eye’d see ’em!”

“But what if it did,” Dora laughed. “Was there ever anyone superstitious enough to believe that the eye could hurt them?”

The old man nodded, looking at her solemnly. “Sven Pedersen tol’ ’round that ’twas a demon eye, an’ that whatever it looked at, ’ceptin’ hisself, ’d keel over paralyzed. Wall, mabbe it’s hard to believe, but them miners, bad as some of ’em was, warn’t takin’ no chances till ’long come a tenderfoot fellar from the East. He heern the yarn, an’ he laffed at the whule outfit of ’em. He opined as how he’d come West to get rich quick, an’ he reckoned cleanin’ out that rock house o’ its gold an’ turquoise’d be a sight easier than gettin’ it out o’ the earth wi’ pick an’ shovel. Yessir, that fellar did a power o’ a lot o’ boastin’, but yo’ kin better believe, ’twa’n’t when Lucky Loon was in hearin’.”