The Mystery of the Death Trap Mine - M. V. Carey [18]
The light in the barn had flickered again. Now the barn went dark.
“Blast!” breathed Pete.
Bob sat on the ground rubbing his ankle and looking toward the barn. After a moment he got up and the three boys again crept toward the old building. Jupe put his hand out and touched the doorlatch, which rattled slightly.
Suddenly the barn door swung out, catching Jupe in the chest and knocking him into the dirt. Pete leaped to one side as a burly figure dashed into the open, pounded past them, and disappeared among the Christmas trees beside the drive.
“What’s that?” came a roar from the house. “Who’s out there?”
Jupe picked himself up. “There was a prowler in the barn,” he called.
“Oh, good night!” said Uncle Harry. “I’ll call the sheriff.”
Pete pointed toward Thurgood’s place. “He went that way.”
The boys listened, but there was no sound. The fields of trees were dark and still. “He can’t be far,” said Jupe.
Pete swallowed and slowly stepped in among the trees. He strained his ears, listening for some sound, alert for some movement in the fields. For a few minutes he was aware of Bob and Jupe coming along behind him. Then Jupe went off quietly to the left and Bob slipped away toward the right. Pete crept forward alone, one careful footstep after another, avoiding the tree branches that might catch at his legs.
Then Pete stopped. He could hear the blood rushing in his own ears, and he could hear something else — a gasping, rasping sound, the sound of laboured breathing. Someone was quite close to him, fighting for breath as if he had been running for a long distance.
Pete froze where he was, listening, and the
harsh breathing went on. The unknown person
seemed to be only a few feet from Pete, just beyond an evergreen that Pete could touch with his hands. Pete opened his mouth to call out for Jupe and Bob, then hesitated. His cry would only
send the prowler off again.
When Pete heard a car on the road from
town, he grinned. That would be the sheriff
coming in answer to Uncle Harry’s call — and Pete had the intruder pinned down.
But as the car turned in at the gate and the headlights swept across the fields, the prowler dashed from the shelter of a bushy tree. Pete leaped after him. But then he saw, against the night sky, an upraised arm — and something that
made him throw himself to the ground. As he
went down, a murderous blade flashed through
the air, slicing the top off a small tree! Then the stranger was gone again, gasping and stumbling as he crashed off across the fields.
Pete got to his knees, shaking.
Jupe was suddenly beside him.
“A machete!” said Pete. “He had a machete! And he almost took my head off!”
Chapter 9
The Earth Rumbles
SHERIFF TAIT HAD a deputy with him — a young man named Blythe. When the two men heard of the intruder in the barn, and of his slashing attack with the machete, they took powerful flashlights and started across the fields. They picked up the trail of the prowler next to the tree where Pete had been standing. Footprints went away from the tree, and the sheriff followed them until they were lost among a jumble of prints on the road near Thurgood’s place.
The boys and Allie watched from the upstairs windows of the ranch house. The sheriff and his deputy continued to search. They roused Thurgood and entered his cabin while his guard dog barked ferociously. They went into the mine. Mrs. Macomber was up and her lights were on. They went into her house and then into each of the abandoned houses she owned. More than an hour later they returned to the ranch house.
“Whoever it was,” the sheriff told Uncle Harry, “he must have gone up the mountainside. We’ll never trail him up there in the dark. Not much point, anyway. It’s probably one of those weirdos who came from Lordsburg or Silver City when they heard about the body in the mine. You get crackpots whenever anything unusual happens. But I wish he hadn’t panicked and taken that machete.”
Sheriff Tait and Deputy Blythe went back to town, and Uncle Harry locked the front