“He’s gone down toward the lake?” Jupe asked. “I hope he doesn’t run into Dusty.”
“No. He didn’t go that way. There’s a village on the other side of the mountain. It only has a couple of stores and Dad won’t be able to find what we need there. The village doesn’t even have a vet. But the bus stops there, the bus to. ”
Brit stopped and looked at the guys as though trying to make up his mind if he could trust them or not.
“Why did you come up into the mountains?” Brit asked.
“It was Dusty’s idea. ”
The time had come to tell Brit the whole story. Jupe explained about the crossword contest with answers that had to be tape-recorded. How he and his friends had finally realized what it was all about — Pancho Villa’s silver pesos.
Brit had listened in silence until then, sitting with the Three Investigators, on the ground.
Now he suddenly stood up.
“Dusty told you about the silver?” he asked furiously. “What did he do? Promise you a share if you found it?”
“No,” Pete assured him. “Dusty never let on about that. His story was that we were going up into the mountains to file down Blondie’s hooves.”
“What!”
Pete went on, “Mercedes was the one who told us about Pancho Villa.”
“Mercedes?” Brit frowned in a puzzled way. “Who’s Mercedes?”
Bob described her. Her long black pigtails. Her dark eyes.
“She’s Mexican?” Brit was still frowning.
“Seems to be,” Jupe said. “I’ve never heard her speak anything but Spanish. And her skin’s brown.”
He was getting a little puzzled himself now.
“Mercedes told us to warn you about Dusty. She said she was a close friend of yours. You know her, right?” Pete asked.
Brit shook his head.
“I’ve never heard her name,” he said. “And as far as I know, I’ve never seen her in my life.”
12
A Shaky Situation
“These hills are full of caves,” Brit said. “Pancho Villa and his men probably used most of them as hideouts. But Dad’s sure we’ve found the one where he hid those silver pesos.”
The four guys were sitting on their rolled sleeping bags in Brit’s cave that evening. He had cooked up a big pot of their favorite — beans and rice — on the kerosene stove. Three candles were burning now and Brit had hung a blanket over the entrance to the tunnel so no light would show outside. Blondie was contentedly nibbling at her oats in a corner.
“How do you know you’ve found the right cave?” Pete asked. “If this place is so full of them.”
“Well, for one thing,” Brit explained, “the entrance was all blocked up with fallen rocks. And when we managed to shift some of them, we found Ignacio.”
“Ignacio?”
“One of Villa’s soldiers,” Brit explained. “Of course, he wasn’t in very good shape after being buried under tons of rocks since 1916. Just a skeleton with pieces of uniform sticking to him. And his skull — ”
“Do you mind?” Pete interrupted him. “I’m trying to eat.”
Bob smiled. “Dead bodies put Pete off his feed.”
“Oh, don’t worry, we gave him a decent funeral.” Brit laughed. “Dad put up a cross over his grave and carved the name Ignacio on it in memory of one of Mexico’s great military heroes. Ignacio Allende was, well, like their George Washington and — ”
“Did you get inside the cave yet?” Pete still wanted to change the subject.
Brit shook his head. “We shifted some of the rocks with picks and shovels. But we couldn’t get any farther. To where the silver is. That’s why Dad took off. To buy explosives.”
“When do you think he’ll be back?” Jupe asked.
“Not for three or four days. It’s only a few hours’ ride down to the village. Dad’ll leave the horses there to get a good feed and a rest. He’ll need them both to carry back all the supplies. And then he’ll take a long bus ride to Chihuahua. That’s the nearest town where he can buy the dynamite and other things we need.”
“So that leaves the four of us to handle Dusty. And maybe Mercedes,” Bob said. “I guess a quartet ought to be able to manage this gig. If we all play together.”
Brit looked at his new friends. “I’m glad I won’t have to do it solo,” he said. “I want to tell you it was great of you to come and warn me about Dusty. I mean, you didn’t even know me.”
“Well. ” Jupe realized he hadn’t told Brit who they were. “It wasn’t just you. We were on a case. So we wanted to follow through on it.”
“What do you mean?” Brit didn’t understand. “You sound like private eyes or something.”
“That’s what we are,” Jupe told him. “Private investigators.” He took a card from his pocket and handed it to Brit. It said:
Brit looked at the card for a long time. He frowned and then began to read aloud in a slow, groping way.
“The three investigators,” he said. “The three. ”
He handed the card back to Jupe. “I guess you’d better read it to me,” he said.
Jupiter didn’t need to look at the card. He recited what was on it aloud.
“Oh.” Brit looked shyly away at Blondie. “It isn’t that I don’t know how to read,” he explained. “It’s just that I have dyslexia. You know what that is?”
“Sure.” Bob nodded sympathetically. “It means you see letters or words in the wrong order. They’ve been doing a lot of experiments on it lately, using colored lenses.”
“Yeah. My mom wants me to see a specialist about that when I get home. But right now it’s kind of hard for me to read or write letters. What we usually do is tape messages and mail each other cassettes when I’m away from her.”
Jupe didn’t say anything. The computer in his head was scrolling back — fast.
Another piece in the puzzle had just fallen into place. That tape he had found in his mailbox. “Please don’t come to Mexico. You’ll be in terrible danger. ”
It must have been Brit’s voice on that tape. Maybe part of a longer message he had sent his mother. She or someone else had erased all but a few sentences, then placed the cassette in the Joneses’ mailbox. A warning to him. And a clue.
He smiled at Brit. “Is your mother in Los Angeles now?”
“Yeah. I sure hope so. But she’s awfully stubborn and. ” He looked away again as though he didn’t want to say any more.
Jupe hated to press him. But there was one other thing he had to find out.
“Do you look like your mother?” he asked. “Does she have blond hair like you?”
“Yeah, she does. She has blue eyes like me too. Why?”
“Just wondering.” Jupe yawned and stretched. “What do you say we all hit the sack?”
The others agreed. A few minutes later they had blown out the candles. The blanket over the entrance to the cave had been taken down and the four guys were in their sleeping bags.
When Jupe woke up early the next morning a faint light was seeping in through the tunnel from outside. He looked around for Blondie. She wasn’t in the cave.
He scrambled out of his sleeping bag and went to search for her. He saw her at once about twenty yards away at the foot of the path that led up to the cave. As Jupe watched, she raised her head and brayed. She didn’t sound wary, just friendly. A moment later he heard an answering bray from farther down the mountain.
Mercedes’ burro, he thought. He stepped quickly back out of sight behind a rock. A moment later Pete, Bob, and Brit joined him. They had heard the braying too.
The soft calls continued back and forth between Blondie and her invisible friend. Then the other burro appeared, climbing a steep gully. Blondie trotted forward and the two rubbed against each other.
Mercedes’ burro still wore its rope bridle, but the packs were missing from its back. The sky grew brighter as the sun rose. All four guys looked careful“ around in every direction.