The Phantom Town Mystery

Carol Norton

The Phantom Town Mystery

CHAPTER I

LUCKY LOON

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.

Dora protested, “Mary ought to know how to ride a cow pony since she was born right here on the desert while I have always lived on the Hudson River until two weeks ago.”

“Even so,” Mary retaliated brightly, “but, as you know, I left here when I was eight to go East to school and since I have never been back, I haven’t much advantage over you.”

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.”

Dora, glancing at the pretty face of her best friend, saw the frank, friendly smile she gave the cowboy. To herself she thought, – “Jerry certainly thinks Mary is the sweetest thing he ever saw, but she only thinks of him as a nice boy who once, long ago, was her childhood playmate.”

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.

Mary shuddered and rode closer to the cowboy. “Jerry,” she said, “why have you brought us here? Is there something that you want to show us?”

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.

“Oh, Jerry,” Dora’s dark eyes glowed with anticipation, “is there really a mystery here – in this awfully bleak place? What? Where? I don’t see anything at all but those almost straight up and down cliffs and – ”

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.

Dick Farley rode about examining the spot from all angles. “Jerry,” he said at last, “if it isn’t an Indian dwelling, who did live there? Surely not a white family!”

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.”

Dora asked in amazement, “Doesn’t anybody know? Hasn’t anyone ever climbed up there to see?”

“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.”

“But, Jerry, what happened to him in the end? Does anybody know? Did he go away?” Dora and Dick were questioning when Mary cried in sudden alarm, “Oh, Jerry, he isn’t here now, is he?”

It was Dora who replied, “Of course not, Mary. You know Jerry wouldn’t bring us in here if there was any danger of our being shot.”

“I reckon Sven Pedersen’s been dead this long time back,” the cowboy told them. “Father was a kid when Lucky Loon was old. Dad says he and some other kids watched around the gate rocks, taking turns for almost a week. They reckoned if the old hermit had gone away, they’d like to climb up there and find the Evil Eye Turquoise Sven had boasted so much about before he shut himself up.”

“Did they climb up there?”

“What was the eye?”

“One question at a time, please,” Jerry told the eager girls. “No, they didn’t go. Dad said it was his turn to watch one night. There was a cutting wind and since it was very dark, he thought he’d just slip inside of the rock gate where the blowing sand wouldn’t hit him. Dad got sort of sleepy, after a time, crouched down on the sand, when suddenly he heard a gun bang. He leaped out of the gate, up on his horse and galloped for home. He laughs when he tells that story. He reckons now that he’d dreamed the shot since Sven Pedersen never was seen again and that was thirty years ago.” The cowboy had looked at his watch. “Jumping Steers!” he exclaimed. “Most milking time and here I’m fifteen miles from the ranch. Dick, will you ride home with the girls?”

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.

CHAPTER II

THE GHOST TOWN

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.

Mary lifted startled blue eyes. “Jerry, what do you make of that?” she asked. “We couldn’t have imagined that gun shot and surely the horses heard it also.”

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.”

Then, seeing that Mary still glanced anxiously back at the gate in the rock wall, Dick said sensibly, “Of course you girls know that Sven Pedersen couldn’t be in that high house. He must have been dead for years if he was old when Jerry’s father was a boy.”

“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.”

Aloud Dora replied, “I have noticed that sometimes he calls you ‘Little Sister.’” To herself she thought: “Oh, Mary, how blind you are!”

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.”

Dora laughed. “Twenty-five miles apart wouldn’t be called close neighbors in Sunnybank-on-the-Hudson where I come from,” she said.

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.”

“I know what it means to me to have you, Dodo, so I ’spect it means the same to you,” was the affectionate reply.

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 nodded. “So he said.” Then she hastened to add, “Oh, don’t think I’m inferring that Jerry told an untruth, but you know that some evenings he has stayed with us for supper and – ”

Mary glanced up startled. “Dora Bellman,” she said, “do you think maybe there was someone up in that rock house watching us all the time we were there; someone who fired the gun just as we were leaving to warn us to keep away?”

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?”

“Dora, do you know what I think?” Mary exclaimed as one who had made an important discovery. “I don’t believe he will tell us about that. I acted so like a scare-cat all the time we were there, he won’t ever take us there again and he probably won’t tell us the story either.”

“Then I’ll find it out some other way,” Dora declared. “I’m crazy about mysteries as you know, and, if there really is one about that rock house, I want to try to solve it.”

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.

“I do believe Mr. Harvey has a letter for us,” Dora said.

The old man had shuffled into the dark well of his store. A moment later he reappeared with several letters and a newspaper.

“Good!” Dora exclaimed as she rode close to the porch. “Thanks a lot,” she called brightly up to the old man who was handing the packet down over the sagging wooden rail.

His friendly, toothless smile was directed at the smaller girl. “Heerd tell as how yer pa’s sittin’ up agin, Miss Mary,” he said. “Mis’ Farley, yer nurse woman, came down ter mail some letters a spell back.” Then, before Mary could reply, he continued in his shrill, wavering voice, “That thar pale fellar wi’ specs on is her son, ain’t he?”

“Yes, Mr. Harvey. Dick is Mrs. Farley’s son.” Mary took time, in a friendly way, to satisfy the old man’s curiosity. “Dick has been going to the Arizona State University this winter to be near his mother. She’s a widow and he’s her only son. Her husband was a doctor and they lived back in Boston before he died.”

“Dew tell!” the old man wagged his head sympathetically. “I seen the young fellar ridin’ around wi’ Jerry Newcomb.”

“Dick’s working on the Newcomb ranch this summer,” Mary said, as she started to ride on.

“Ho! Ho!” the old man cackled. “Tenderfoot if ever thar was un. What’s Jerry reckonin’ that young fellar kin do? Bustin’ broncs?”

Mary smiled in appreciation of the old man’s joke. “No, Jerry won’t expect Dick to do that right at first. He’s official fence-mender just at present.”

Dora defended the absent boy. “Mr. Harvey, you wait until Dick has been on the desert long enough to get a coat of tan; he may surprise you.”

“Wall, mabbe! mabbe!” the old storekeeper chuckled to himself as the girls, waving back at him, galloped away up the road in the little dead town.

On either side there were deserted adobe houses in varying degrees of ruin, some with broken windows and doors, others with sagging roofs and crumbling walls.

The only sign of life was in three small adobes where poor Mexican families lived. Broken windows in two of the houses were stuffed with rags; the door yards were littered with rubbish. Unkempt children played in front of the middle house. The third adobe was neat and well kept. In it lived the Lopez family. Carmelita, the wife and mother, had long been cook for Mary Moore’s father.

A bright, black-eyed Mexican boy of about ten ran out to the road as the girls approached. “Come on, Emanuel,” Mary sang down to him. “You may put up our horses and earn a dime.”

The small boy’s white teeth flashed in a delighted grin. His brown feet raced so fast, that, by the time the girls were dismounting before the big square two-storied adobe near the mountains, Emanuel was there to lead their horses around back.

Mary glanced affectionately at the old place with its flower-edged walk, its broad porch and adobe pillars. Here her mother had come as a bride; here Mary had been born. Eight happy years they had spent together before her mother died. After Mary had been taken East to school, her father had returned, and here he had spent the winters, going back to Sunnybank each summer to be with his little girl.

Hurrying up the steps, Mary skipped into a pleasant living-room, where, near a wide window that was letting in a flood of light from the setting sun, sat her fine-looking father, pale after his long illness, but growing stronger every day.

“Oh, Daddy dear!” Mary’s voice was vibrant with love. “You’ve waited up for me, haven’t you?” She dropped to her knees beside the invalid chair and pressed her flushed face to his gray, drawn cheek.

Then, glancing up at the nurse who had appeared from her father’s bedroom, she asked eagerly, “May I tell Dad an adventure we’ve had?”

Mrs. Farley, middle-aged, kind-faced, shook her head, smiling down at the girl. “Not tonight, please. Won’t tomorrow do?”

Mary sprang up, saying brightly, “I reckon it will have to.” Then, stooping, she kissed her father as she whispered tenderly, “Rest well, darling. We’re hoping you know all about – ” then, little girl fashion, she clapped her hand on her mouth, mumbling, “Oh, I most disobeyed and told our adventure. See you tomorrow, Daddy.”

CHAPTER III

THE MISSING FRIENDS

Upstairs, in Mary’s room which was furnished as it had been when she had been there as a child, curly maple set with blue hangings, the two girls changed from riding habits to house dresses. Mary wore a softly clinging blue while Dora donned her favorite and most becoming cherry color.

“One might think that we are expecting company tonight.” Mary was peering into the oval glass as she spoke, arranging her fascinating golden curls above small shell-like ears.

“Which, of course, we are not.” Dora had brushed her black bob, boy-fashion, slick to her head. “There being no near neighbors to drop in.” Then suddenly she exclaimed, “Oh, for goodness sakes alive, I completely forgot that letter. It’s for both of us from Polly and Patsy. I’ve been wondering why they didn’t write and tell us where they had decided to spend their summer vacation.”

Dora sprang up to search for the letter in a pocket of her riding habit. Mary sat near a window in a curly maple rocker as she said dreamily: “If we hadn’t come West, we would have been with them – that is, if they went to Camp Winnichook up in the Adirondacks the way we had planned all winter.”

Dora, holding the letter unopened, sat near her friend and smiled at her reminiscently as she said, “We plan and plan and plan for the future, don’t we, and then we do something exactly different, and most unexpected, but I wouldn’t give up being out here on the desert and living in a ghost town for all the fun Patsy and Polly may be having – ”

Mary laughingly interrupted. “Do read the letter and let’s see if they really did go there. Perhaps – ”

“Yes, they did.” Dora had unfolded a large, boyish-looking sheet of paper. “Camp Winnichook,” she announced, then she read the rather indolent scrawl. “Dear Cowgirls,” – it began —

“Patsy has just come in from a swim. She’s drying her bathing suit by lying on the sand in front of the cabin in the sun. Her red hair, which she calls ‘a wind blown mop,’ looks, at present, like a mop that has just finished doing the kitchen floor. Last winter, you recall, she had a few red freckles on her saucy pug nose, but now she wears them all over her face and arms and even on her back. She’s a sight to behold!”

There were spatters on the paper that might have been water. The type of penmanship changed. A jerky, uneven handwriting seemed to ejaculate indignantly, “Don’t you kids believe a word of it. I’m a dazzling beauty – as ever! It’s Polly whose looks are ruined – if she ever had any. She won’t play tennis and she won’t swim and she will eat chocolate drops – you know the finish, and she wasn’t any too slim last year when she had to do gym.”

The first penmanship took up the tale. “I had to forcibly push Patsy away. She’s gone in to dress now, so I’ll hurry and get this letter into an envelope and sealed before she gets back because I want to tell on her.

“You know Pat has always said she was a boy hater, and the more the boys from Wales Military Academy rushed her, the more she would shrug her shoulders and ‘pouff!’ about them, but she’s met her Waterloo. There’s a flying field near our camp and a boy named Harry Hulbert is there studying to be a pilot. Pat and I strolled over to the field one day and ever since she caught sight of that tall, slim chap all done up in his flying togs, she’s been wild to meet him. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s even hoping that his machine will crash some day right in front of our cabin so that she can bind up his wounds and – ”

Once again the jerky, uneven writing seemed to exclaim, “Silly gilly! That’s what Polly is! It isn’t the flier, it’s the flying that I’m crazy about. I do wish I knew that Harry Hulbert, but not for any sentimental reasons, believe me. Pouff – for all of ’em! But fly I’m going to!! In truth, if you girls stay West until the end of vacation, you may see an airplane landing in your ghost town – me piloting!!!???”

Then came a wide space and when the writing began again, it was dated three days later and was Polly’s lazy scrawl. “It’s to laugh!” she began. “But, to explain. If you wish hard enough for anything, it’s bound to happen. Not that Harry Hulbert’s plane crashed in front of our cabin but it was forced down when Patsy and I were out in her little green car far from human habitation. Of course we hadn’t gone riding just because we saw that particular little silver plane practicing up in the air – oh, no – not at all!”