The Mystery of the Galloping Ghost (6 page)

“We
were both born here!”

“Does
that mean we both have to die here?” There was a long pause as the other
speaker refrained from answering the unanswerable question. Finally, the
questioner continued in a softer, less angry voice. “Look, I’m not talking
about drawing up final papers tomorrow. I just want to see how much money Burke
has to offer. If it isn’t plenty, I’ll turn him down.”

“Talk
to him, then. It’s your place. Nobody can stop you.” There was a sound of boots
stomping up stairs and a door slammed. Pat Murrow had obviously concluded the
conversation with his father.

The
girls suddenly realized that they’d been eavesdropping. And now, they were in
danger of having Bill Murrow catch them at it. With one accord, they roused
themselves, rounded the corner of the stable—and almost collided with Gus, who
was rounding the same corner from the opposite direction.

The
old man looked sad, his cheeks sunken and his mouth turned down. Without a word
to the girls, he hurried off.

“Gus
must have overheard the fight, too,” Trixie said.

“How
sad,” Honey said. “Bill and Pat must be almost like a son and grandson to him.”

“It
must be painful for him to hear Bill talk about selling,” Trixie said. “He’s
been working on this ranch for over fifty years.”

“It’s
Pat who’s upset. Yet Bill’s been here a lot longer than Pat,” Honey pointed
out. “True, but Bill doesn’t have to worry about

being
left behind if the ranch gets moved,” Trixie said.

“Oh!”
Honey exclaimed, suddenly seeing her friend’s point.
“Poor
Gus!”

“We’d
better hurry up and get inside before anybody catches us out here, or it will
be poor
us
,
”
Trixie said grimly.
The
two
girls
walked
quickly
to
the
house
.

“How can Bill
even consider selling the ranch
to that creepy Burke?” Honey asked.

The
girls were in their room, ready for bed. Until now, they’d both avoided talking
about the conversation they’d overheard.

“With
a big housing development right next door, things won’t be the same anyway,”
Trixie pointed out. “Maybe this is the time to sell.”

Honey
stared at her as if she’d just sprouted horns. “That’s a perfectly terrible
thing to say!” she exclaimed.

Honey’s going to be on Pat’s side in this, no matter
what,
Trixie thought.
For the sake of friendship, we’d better make this topic off-limits.
Aloud she said, “None of the
Murrows
have asked our
help in making the decision, anyway. I think we should concentrate on trying to
spot the Galloping Ghost. At least that’s a problem we’ve been invited to help
solve.”

“Okay,”
Honey agreed readily. “But we can’t concentrate too hard. Remember, Wilhelmina
James told us that ghosts seldom appear on command.”

“Well,
if we can’t think about the
Murrows
’ plans to sell,
or about the Galloping Ghost, what
can
we think about?” Trixie demanded.

“The
Murrows
’ horse-training
techniques,
and how we could adapt them to our own horses back home,” Honey suggested.

Trixie
nodded glumly. Three days ago that prospect had seemed fascinating. Now it
seemed pretty boring. “That’s about all that’s left,” she told Honey.

The
next morning after breakfast, the girls trooped resolutely to the stable.

“Are
you here to watch or work?” Bill Murrow asked.

“Work,”
Trixie said firmly. She wanted to keep her hands and mind fully occupied.

“Well,
then, get the combs and brushes. You know where they are,” Bill said.

Trixie
and Honey went to the cabinet in the tack room and opened the door. The cabinet
was empty. Trixie blinked hard, as if expecting the grooming tools to appear.
When they didn’t, she looked around the room, wondering if she’d gotten the
wrong cabinet. But it was the only cabinet in the room. Honey was baffled, too,
and the girls went back into the stable.

“We
can’t find the brushes,” Trixie told Bill.

“Sure,”
he said, obviously not believing her.

“We
can’t. They aren’t in the cabinet,” Honey said.

“It’s
the old bucket-of-water trick, isn’t it?” Bill said.

“Huh?”
Trixie was in the dark.

“What?”
Honey was just as confused.

“You
set a bucket of water on top of the cabinet,” Bill said. “Then you get me to
open the door and I get drenched. My own kids used to play that prank.”

“I’ll
open the door if you want,” Trixie assured him.

Bill
decided to play along. “Okay,” he said. “You show me.”

When
Trixie opened the door, Bill joined the ranks of the befuddled. “What the—” He
looked from Trixie to Honey and back again, alert for the faintest glimmer of a
grin. Seeing none, he turned and looked back over his shoulder. “Is Regan a
joker?” he asked softly. Trixie and Honey both shook their heads.

“Didn’t
think so,” Bill admitted.
“
Neither’s
Pat.”
His face clouded only for a moment. Then he said cheerfully,
“Well, things don’t just disappear. If we go about our business, whoever did
this will get disappointed and put the stuff back. I know how to handle
pranksters.” Bill gave the girls a broad wink.

“I
wonder why,” Trixie said with a grin.

Bill
reached into a corner of the tack room and grabbed a pitchfork. He held it out
to Trixie and said, “How serious are you about working?”

“Pretty
serious, I guess,” Trixie said reluctantly, taking the fork from him. Cleaning
stalls was her least favorite task.

“Somehow
it figures that the pitchforks wouldn’t disappear,” Honey joked as Bill handed
her one.

Bill
and Gus led all the horses out into the corral, and Trixie and Honey went to
work. Trixie had already noticed that Regan and Pat, along with two of the
horses, were gone.
A nice long trail
ride is just what Pat needs this morning,
Trixie thought.
If he’s smart, he’ll confide in Regan along
the way. Regan is an understanding guy.

Trixie
dug the pitchfork into the dirty straw in the first stall, eager for the
calming effect that hard work always had on her. When the stall was empty, she
went to the pile of clean straw in a corner of the stable. Ordinarily, she’d
clean out all the stalls before refilling any of them. Today, however, she wanted
to see some progress.

As
she drove the pitchfork into the pile, she was startled to feel it hit
something that wasn’t hay. She knelt and moved the hay from around the tines.
“It’s a brush!” she exclaimed. She tossed it into the lane behind her and started
digging through the hay with her hands.

“Did
you say something?” Honey asked, following the sound of Trixie’s voice. “What
are you doing?”

Trixie
held up a currycomb. “Look!” she said excitedly. “All the grooming stuff is
buried in this haystack!”

Honey
joined in the search, and soon the girls had found all the brushes and combs
they remembered seeing in the cabinet, as well as two bottles of liniment.

“Who
could have done this?” Honey asked.

“It
must have been Bill. You know what a joker he is,” Trixie said.

“He
acted as though
we
were
playing a trick on
him,”
Honey said.

“That’s
all part of the joke,” Trixie said. “We can still get the last laugh. Let’s put
the stuff back in the cabinet and pretend we don’t know anything about it.”

The
girls had returned the tools and almost finished cleaning out the stalls when
they heard Bill Murrow enter the stable.

“I’m
telling you, Gus,” Bill was saying, “I don’t know where the tools went. The
last time I saw them, they were right here in—” He broke off in mid-sentence.

Trixie
stifled a giggle, imagining Bill’s expression as he’d thrown open the cabinet
door and seen a full array of brushes and combs.

Bill’s
face soon appeared over the edge of the stall. He was waggling a brush under Trixie’s
nose. “Very funny,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. “You did it wrong,
though. You should have replaced the stuff before you had to clean out the
stalls.”

“We
wouldn’t have had to clean them if you hadn’t hidden the tools,” Trixie
countered.

Bill
frowned. “You mean you really didn’t hide the tools in the first place?”

“No!”
Trixie and Honey said together.

Bill
looked first at one, then the other. He waved their earnest looks away with one
hand. “Oh, go on—you did, too.
Pretty funny.
I’ll have
to start keeping an eye on you two!”

“He
doesn’t believe us,” Honey said as Bill left. She sounded hurt.

“Of
course, he does,” Trixie told her. “He’s just milking the joke for all it’s
worth. Anyway, now we can groom the horses. That’s a definite step up from
this!” She jabbed the pitchfork into some dirty hay that remained in the final
stall.

Bill
Murrow certainly loved a good prank. At lunch, he gleefully retold the story to
Charlene, Pat, Regan, and Gus. He even got up from the table to act out the
final scene, opening the door of a kitchen cabinet and letting a look of
dumbfounded shock spread over his face.

Charlene
laughed, Regan and Pat smiled, Gus chuckled, and Trixie and Honey giggled until
the tears streamed down their faces.

“
Th
-there’s just one problem,” Trixie spluttered. “We never
hid the stuff in the first place.”

“We
didn’t. Honest!” Honey chimed in. But the girls knew that their giggles made
their story far from convincing.

“Oh,
sure,” Bill said.

Any
further discussion was interrupted by a loud crash from the living room. Charlene
leaped up from the table and went to see what it was. She came back wearing a
bemused look and carrying a large picture frame. “The picture of Jupiter—it
fell right off the wall!” she said. “The glass cracked, but the
picture’s
all right.” She held out the picture to show Bill.

He
studied it carefully. “Jupiter always was spirited,” he said quietly. He handed
the picture to Regan. “That was the first Murrow Arabian. My father brought him
all the way from
New York
State
.”

Trixie
and Honey both looked at Pat, who nodded, confirming the guess that this was
the horse he’d told them about during their picnic.

“That’s
a spirited-looking horse, all right,” Regan said. “I imagine it’s kind of hard
to keep him mounted on a wall.”

Charlene
reached out and took the picture from Regan. “It’s never been hard before. Why,
I’ll bet this picture was hanging in the same place for twenty years. I wonder
what made it fall down now.”

Bill
rose from the table, leaving half his food on his plate. He kissed his wife on
the top of the head. “We’re all getting older,” he said. “It’s getting harder
for all of us to hang on.” He left the house without looking back.

Charlene
Murrow looked at her son. “It isn’t easy for him, you know,” she said.

Pat
looked back at his mother and nodded. “I know it now,” he said. He got up and
followed his father to the stable.

Trixie
felt tears welling up in her eyes, but this time they weren’t tears of
laughter.
They’re such good people,
she thought.
Everything’s got to
work out for them. It’s just got to.

The
crack in the picture of Jupiter seemed almost magically to mend the
relationship between Pat and Bill Murrow. That afternoon, the girls saw father
and son working side by side, each giving instruction and encouragement to the
other.

Regan,
who had been actively working with the
Murrows
for
the past two days,
withdrew,
content to stand by and
watch. Trixie and Honey took up places on either side of him. “I won’t even ask
how you did it,” Regan said.

“Did
what?” Trixie asked.

“Made
the picture fall off the wall,” Regan replied. “All I can say is
,
the boy I rode with this morning was hurting and angry.
Now he isn’t. Although,” Regan added, “you couldn’t have predicted this result.
That’s what makes practical jokes so dangerous.”

Trixie
groaned. “We didn’t have anything to do with that picture. Honest! We didn’t
make the combs and brushes disappear, either. Our only practical joke was
replacing the stuff and waiting for Bill to find it.”

“Honest,”
Honey echoed.

Regan
stared at them, a bemused frown on his face. “It doesn’t seem much like your
style,” he admitted. “Not without brother

Mart around to put ideas in your heads, anyway.”

“We
didn’t do it,” Trixie repeated.

“Well,
maybe it was just an accident,” Regan conceded.

“A
lucky accident,” Honey added, looking out at Pat and his father.

That
night after dinner, Pat didn’t make his hasty retreat to his room. He stayed at
the table even after Regan excused himself and left the house. Sensing that the
Murrows
had things to talk over, Trixie and Honey excused
themselves, too, and went to their room. They read, chatted, and stared out the
window at the lovely green landscape. All the time they were aware of a low
murmur of voices. They couldn’t make out what was being said, but at least
there were no angry sounds, and the length of the conversation itself seemed
like a good sign.

The
girls were both sprawled on their beds writing letters home, when a sudden gust
of wind tore through the open window. The curtains billowed out, and the first
page of Trixie’s letter went sailing across the room.

“There
must be a storm coming up!” Trixie said, hurrying to close the window. She
froze with her hands on the frame. There wasn’t a sign of a cloud in the
evening sky. Nor was there any trace of a breeze. “Honey, look!” she said.

Her
friend joined her at the window. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

“That’s
just it,” Trixie told her. “Those aspen leaves aren’t even quaking. So where
did that big gust of wind come from?”

Honey
shrugged. “I guess it was just one of those freakish things,” she said.

“There
have been a lot of freakish things around here today,” Trixie said.

Honey
sat down on her bed and capped her pen. “There sure have. Trixie, do you think
this is all part of a phenomenon?”