The next morning he had a quick word with the other two Investigators before they left their room. He told them what had happened during the night and explained that he had an important phone call to make. He wanted them to get Dusty away from the house for a couple of hours.
Ascencion had made scrambled eggs with green peppers for breakfast. It was one of Jupe’s favorite dishes and contained no starch, but he politely refused any. He said he had a slight stomach ache.
That was Pete’s cue. He asked Dusty if he would take them fishing in the lake. The rancher agreed. Jupe announced he would stay at the ranch house because of his stomach. Half an hour later he was alone with Ascencion.
A plate of fresh rolls had been left on the table. Jupe fought a brief battle with himself. They smelled so good. Jupiter grabbed a few and stuffed them quickly into his mouth. After all, he had to have
He found it in Dusty’s small office off the living room. Closing the door behind him, Jupe sat down at the desk and looked through the phone book for the direct-dial numbers to California.
Hector Sebastian answered at once. Jupiter told him where he was and came straight to the point.
“Could you do me a favor and call my computer information service from your terminal?” he asked his old friend.
Hector Sebastian was a successful mystery writer. He had once been a private eye himself and enjoyed giving the Three Investigators an assist with their cases whenever they asked him.
“No problem,” the writer told him.
“Great,” Jupe said. “All you need to do is enter my password. It’s D-ET-E-C-T. Then flip through the menus till you access the encyclopedia.”
“Right,” Hector Sebastian said. “And the subject is.
“Uh, burros,” the Investigator told him.
“Come again?”
“You know, burros, the small donkeys used as beasts of burden.”
“Gotcha.”
Jupe read off the questions about burros he needed answered. Sebastian noted them down and promised to phone Jupiter as soon as he had the answers.
While he was waiting, Jupe looked around the small office. Ordinarily he would have thought twice before snooping on anyone. But he figured Dustin Rice had told the guys nothing but lies since he had first shown up at Jupe’s house. The Three Investigators had a right to find out as many hard facts as they could.
Jupe’s mind buzzed with questions. Why was his puzzle chosen out of the many perfect entries? Why was Rice so eager for him to get to the ranch fast? What made that Mexican woman want to stop him? And why did Blondie seem to know Jupe, though she’d never seen him before?
Jupe didn’t come across anything of interest on Dusty’s shelves except some large-scale maps of the Sierra Madre. Someone had penciled question marks all over them. Probably Dusty. In the top drawer of the desk were the deeds to the ranch. Jupe glanced through them until he came to the signature at the end.
ASCENCION BARBERA.
So Ascencion had sold the ranch to Dusty and become his field hand and cook. It seemed to explain the Mexican’s hostility to the rancher.
In the bottom drawer of the desk was a tape recorder. Jupe took it out, turned down the volume, and pressed the play button.
This time he recognized his own voice at once.
He heard himself saying the same words again and again.
“Come. Here. Blondie. Giddy. Up. Woe. Blondie. Come. Here. ”
After a while, he carefully rewound the tape and put the recorder back where he had found it.
A few minutes later the phone rang. “I’ve got that info for you,” Hector Sebastian told him. “Ready?”
“Yeah.” Jupe turned over his list of questions and scribbled the answers on the back.
“Thanks,” he said when the mystery writer had finished. “That’s super.”
“Any time, Jupe. Give me a call when you get back and I’ll treat you troublemakers to a meal. I’m curious about where these burros are going to take you.”
Jupe promised he’d call and thanked Sebastian again before he hung up. He had a lot to tell Pete and Bob and a pile of questions to chew over with them. But they wouldn’t be back for at least an hour. He left the office, closing the door carefully behind him.
He hadn’t seen Blondie that morning. Now that he had the answers to his questions about burros, he felt more interested in the little animal. He decided to pay her a visit.
Ascencion was in the field with her, refilling her water tub. The moment the burro saw Jupe she trotted eagerly toward him. He patted her neck.
The Mexican had taken off his shirt in the noonday sun. Jupe noticed that his chest and back were the same even brown color as his face. Jupe couldn’t tell if that was Ascencion’s own color or if a lot of work outdoors had deepened the man’s naturally brown skin. For sure the Mexican was darker than Jupe. Even with daily swims, Jupe was still a pale Anglo who spent too much time indoors in front of his computer screen.
Jupe gestured at the burro. “Blondie’s no longer. ” He didn’t know the Spanish word for “hobbled,” but Ascencion guessed what Jupe meant when he pointed to the burro’s front legs.
“No, that. ” Ascencion used the word that seemed to come naturally to him when he talked about Dusty. It was X-rated. “That took the rope off her yesterday evening.”
“Why?”
“He’s not afraid she’ll run away now that you’re here.”
“Me? Why me?”
“She’s grateful to you.”
“What for?”
“She thinks you saved her life. And they are good animals, burros. Very faithful. Very grateful.”
He picked up his bucket and walked away. Jupe went after him, followed by Blondie. But the Mexican refused to answer any more questions. He said he had work to do.
Pete and Bob had caught several trout. Ascencion grilled them for lunch. Jupe suddenly recovered from his stomach ache and ate two of them. After all, they were pure protein.
“Let’s walk off those calories,” Jupe said after the meal. “How about it, guys?”
Pete and Bob guessed at once that he wanted to talk to them alone. The three of them set out across the fields to a clump of woods near the lake.
As soon as they were settled in a clearing among the trees, Jupe told them about his call to Hector Sebastian. He pulled his sheet of notes out of his jeans pocket.
“Burros have a very good sense of hearing,” he reported. “Amazingly good. And they’re not like dogs. They don’t recognize people by their smell. Mostly by their voices. They’ll often attach themselves to one person and when they do, they’ll respond at once to that person’s voice.”
“You mean once they fall for you, they’re hooked for life,” Bob said. “Looks like Blondie’s all yours.”
“Knock it off,” Jupe growled. “I bet that’s what the whole moronic crossword contest was about. Dusty was looking for a voice that matched some other guy’s. Some young American who had been a friend to Blondie.”
He explained what Ascencion had said.
“Somebody who saved her life at some time. I don’t know how. And I don’t know who that guy was. But when Dusty heard my entry to the competition, he thought my voice was closest to that other person’s. So he edited my tape onto the machine I found in his desk this morning. He kept only the words he needed. Come here, Blondie, whoa, and so on. Then he tried those words out on the burro. But I guess the taped voice didn’t work. Not very well, anyway. So Dusty couldn’t be sure until we got here and Blondie could hear my natural voice. That’s why he was so nervous all through breakfast yesterday. He couldn’t wait to find out. And when it did work — remember how excited he got?”
Pete and Bob were silent for a moment, thinking over what Jupe had said.
“Makes sense so far,” Bob agreed. “But. ”
“Yeah,” Pete put in. “But what’s it all about? Why spend all that dough and waste all that time to find a voice a little Mexican burro thinks she recognizes?”
Jupe shook his head. “Beats me,” he admitted. “But something else bugs me even more than that.”
“What?” Bob asked.
“We know it’s possible,” Jupe explained, “to find two people whose voices sound alike. You thought that was my voice on the tape I found in my mailbox, Pete. But it’s less than one chance in several billion that those two people also look alike.”
He glanced at his page of notes. “And burros also have excellent eyesight,” he went on. “In many ways better than we have. They don’t recognize people only by their voices. They recognize them by sight as well.”
Bob nodded. “Yeah, that does seem to — ” His voice broke off.
The other two guys had heard it too. The sound of footsteps hurrying away, deeper into the woods. Moving as quietly as they could, the Three Investigators set off trying to follow the sound.
But the eavesdropper knew the woods better than they did. They soon lost the trail. They heard no more footsteps. Nothing but the flutter of birds.
They decided to split up and search the whole area separately.
Jupe was the first one back at the clearing. He hadn’t found anyone. A few minutes later Pete joined him. He shook his head when Jupe glanced at him. Then the tall guy sprawled on the grass.
They had to wait another ten minutes for Bob. He had his hands in his pockets and was smiling in the cool, casual way that often meant he knew something the others didn’t.
“You see someone?” Pete asked him. “Or is that classified info?”
“Not a living soul,” Bob told him. He leaned against a tree. “But I did find this.”
He took his right hand out of the pocket of his jeans. He was holding something between his fingers.
Jupe and Pete could see it was a piece of wool about three inches long. The kind of rough wool Mexicans made shawls out of.
The wool was bright purple.
I’m worried about Blondie,“ Dusty said at breakfast the next morning.
Pete looked up from his ham and eggs. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Got her mind on something? Is she moody? Staring into space?”
Jupe kicked him under the table.
Dusty continued as if he hadn’t heard. The rancher was in one of his nervous moods. He had eaten hardly any breakfast. “That burro will soon be in trouble if she stays in that field.”
Jupe had seen the burro for a moment that morning. It seemed to him she was doing fine in her field. Grazing on the long grass, she looked healthy. Her coat was smooth, her eyes bright. She had been outside her shed when Jupe appeared and had galloped to meet him. She could gallop surprisingly fast.
He decided to keep all this to himself. Maybe Dusty would reveal another clue to the puzzle.
“Isn’t Blondie getting enough to eat?” Jupe asked innocently.
“I’m worried about her hooves.” The rancher frowned over his coffee. “You see, burros originally came from North Africa. They’re used to hard, stony ground. Their hooves grow very fast, like toenails. Rocks and gravel keep them filed down. If burros stay too long in a soft, grassy place, their hooves keep growing until they double up under their feet.” He put his coffee down. “After a while it cripples them.”
“Can’t you trim them?” Pete asked.
He’d once watched a friend do just that with a straight-edged razor.
“Nah.” Dusty was still frowning. “A wild burro like that. She won’t let me near her. She’d kick out at once if I even tried to touch her legs.”
Jupe thought Blondie would probably let him trim her hooves. But he kept quiet. He could feel that Dusty was leading up to something. Something that had nothing to do with Blondie’s toenails.
“I think I really ought to turn her loose,” Dusty went on. “Let her go back into the mountains where she came from.” He looked at Jupe. “The trouble is, she won’t leave now. Now that you’re here.”
Jupe remembered what Ascencion had said. “He’s not afraid she’ll run away now that you’re here.” Jupe could have asked Dusty why he hadn’t turned Blondie loose weeks ago. He must have known about her hooves then. But he realized that the rancher was getting to the point now. The real point that would bring the Three Investigators one step closer to solving this case.
“Unless you went with her, Jupe,” Dusty said thoughtfully. “I mean, we could all go. Take a little camping trip up into the mountains.” He glanced at the three guys. “How does it sound to you?”
It sounded about as phony as a three-dollar bill to Jupe. He caught Bob’s eye and gave him a quick wink.
Bob understood Jupe’s signal at once. It meant, let’s stall until we’ve talked about this. “We’ll get back to you,” Bob said.
“When?” Dusty asked anxiously. “How soon — ”
“As soon as we’ve made up our minds,” Pete explained, heading for the door, followed by his two friends. The three guys walked across the lower field until they were well out of hearing of the house.
“I guess it’s almost time for the main event,” Bob said when they were settled on the grass. “That trip into the mountains is what this riff’s all about. That what you figure, Jupe?”
“Yeah.” Jupe nodded. “That’s what Dusty needed me for. My voice. So that Blondie wouldn’t just run away. She’d
“What’s way up there?” Pete wanted to know, glancing at the high range beyond the ranch. “Gold?”
“Sure.” Bob smiled. “The treasure of the Sierra Madre.” He picked a blade of grass and chewed it. “Well, how does it grab you guys? Want to hit the trail?”
“Okay with me,” Pete decided. He enjoyed camping out, cooking over a wood fire, lying in a sleeping bag under the night sky. “How about you two? It might get pretty rough up there.”
“No rougher than a road trip with a rock band,” Bob said. “And that can be plenty rough.” He looked at Jupe. “Whaddaya say?” he asked.
Jupe had never thought of himself as the outdoor type. He would rather think with his brains than his feet. But as an Investigator, he’d had to do a lot of hard legwork in the past. And they were going to solve this case no matter what it took.
“Sure,” he said. “Sierra Madre, here we come. Let’s go tell Rice the good news.”
Jupe was right. It was good news to Dusty. He grinned broadly when Pete told him.
“What say we start tomorrow?” Dusty suggested eagerly.
The Three Investigators agreed that the next day would be fine. Still grinning, the rancher drove off to Lareto to buy supplies for the trip. Pete gave him a big stack of “Miss you” and “Wish you were here” greeting cards to mail to Kelly. Then the three guys split up until lunchtime.
Pete went down to the lake to fish. Bob settled on the porch to clean and disinfect his contact lenses. It was a chore he had to do every week and it might be difficult on the trip. Jupe went to look for Ascencion. He had some questions he wanted to ask him.
He found the ranch hand in the kitchen trying to fix a walkie-talkie. He had taken it apart but didn’t seem to be able to put it back together again.
“It’s not my trade,” the Mexican grumbled in Spanish. “Radios. What do I know about radios? Cattle, horses — that’s what I know about.”
“Let me try,” Jupe offered. “I’m used to working with gadgets. Doesn’t it work at all?”
“No. Of course not. Do you think I pulled it apart to amuse myself? I couldn’t get a sound out of it.”
“What do you use it for?”
“To talk into.”
“Is there someone else around here who has one of these things?” Jupe was wondering whom Ascencion found to talk to. Except for that distant church tower on the other side of the lake, he hadn’t seen any buildings within miles of the ranch.
“Not as far as I know.”
“Then why do you want it fixed?”
“Because it’s broken.”
Jupe had to be satisfied with that. He soon discovered what was wrong with the walkie-talkie’s receiver — a faulty connection. He didn’t have the right kind of wire to mend it with. So he had to improvise, stripping a length of electrical cord and using the thin copper wire from that.