The Phantom Town Mystery

“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.