An Ear for Danger - Brandel Marc (серии книг читать онлайн бесплатно полностью TXT) 📗

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.

6

A Sudden Hang-up

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 lead us somewhere. Somewhere up in the mountains where she came from.”

“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.