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