The Mystery of Wandering Caveman - M. V. Carey [11]
The boys moved closer. They saw built-in cupboards in the van, and a tiny butane stove and a very small refrigerator. There was a bed, neatly made up, and the boys wondered whether this seedy individual lived in the van.
The man scowled at them. “You wouldn’t like it if it was you!” he announced.
Just then someone began to shout.
“You’re a cretin!” It was James Brandon. He stood outside the little windowless redwood building that had been built against the hillside.
“You get away from here!” yelled Newt McAfee from the doorway of his museum.
He had a shotgun in his hands.
Brandon backed away from Newt, clenching his fists. “You should have been locked in a cage at birth!” he told McAfee. “Those bones aren’t yours, any more than the rain is yours, or the sun. How dare you surround that hominid with your cornball props!”
“You’re trespassing,” McAfee said. “You get away from here, and if you want to see that cave man again, you come back tomorrow and pay five dollars, just like anybody else!”
Brandon made a strangled noise and then spun around and stamped away.
McAfee grinned. “Just a little difference of opinion,” he told the boys.
“It ain’t right!” grumbled the man with the van.
“Well, nobody asked you whether it was right or not,” snapped McAfee. “It’s no business of yours. Say, boys, you want to come in and have a sneak preview? See my cave man and the museum I built for him?”
He turned back into the small building, and the Three Investigators followed him eagerly. Once they had stepped across the threshold, however, they stopped and gaped.
Newt McAfee had decorated his museum with photographs enlarged into murals
— photographs of bones and a skull. Between these rather grisly views were colour pictures of more attractive and familiar sights: steam coming from the ground at Lassen, waterfalls tumbling from the cliffs at Yosemite, waves breaking on the coast near Big Sur.
On tables in the centre of the room there were models of the California countryside at various stages in its geological history. In one display a glacier covered most of the state. In another the ice had retreated, leaving behind deep valleys and many lakes. There was a model of an Indian encampment with tiny statues of near-naked Indians crouching over fires and preparing ears of corn in various ways. There were also models of prehistoric men fighting a huge mammoth.
“Real classy, isn’t it?” said McAfee. “Course, this stuffs all window dressing. The real thing is over there.”
Opposite the entrance, four steps led up to a little platform. Beyond the platform there was the bare earth of the hillside and the opening to the cave. Lights shone inside the opening.
Jupiter, Pete and Bob crossed the museum and went up the steps. They looked into the cave and saw the fossil man.
Jupe drew a quick breath and Bob shuddered.
The cave man was a partial skeleton. Most of the skull was there, brown and hideous. The empty eye sockets stared, and the upper jaw grinned a ghastly grin.
There was no lower jaw. Several ribs remained, jutting from the floor of the cave, and below these were part of a pelvis and some leg bones. The small bones of a hand were quite near the mouth of the cave. They seemed to be reaching for something.
McAfee had had lights installed in the ceiling of the cave, and on the floor near the skull an artificial campfire glowed. Beyond the bones there was a folded Navajo blanket and a basket woven in an Indian design.
The boys instantly sympathized with Brandon’s rage. The silliness of the display was sad enough. But much worse, there were footprints all around the bones. The precious fossils had come close to being trampled while someone put in the lights and installed the sham fire.
“I was going to put a pair of moccasins down where his feet would be, if he had feet,” said McAfee. “It could look like he’d just kicked ’em off before he laid down to sleep. But then I figured maybe that would be too much.”
Bob made a choking sound.
“Probably didn’t wear moccasins back in those days — or nothing else, huh?