William Arden - The Mystery of the Headless Horse

“What did he do, Bob?” Diego wondered.

“He lived in a cave right on his own land for almost eleven years!” Bob replied. “His whole clan helped to hide him. They gave him food and water and clothes, and the English never knew where he was until things were safe and he came out on his own!”

“You mean,” Pete exclaimed, “you think Condor Castle was a clue to where Don Sebastián himself was going to hide?”

Bob nodded. “You remember how Pico wondered why no one saw Don Sebastián again if he wasn’t shot and lost in the ocean? And where he went if he did escape? Well, I think he planned to hide right on his own ranch somewhere near Condor Castle!”

“And his friends would have had to feed him and help him!” Jupiter exclaimed. “You could be right, Records! I overlooked that possibility. If it’s true, it gives us something else to look for in old journals and diaries and letters — some mention of hiding food or clothing, of helping someone! But we’ll have to extend the period of our search then — say, through the rest of September 1846 for a start.”

“Oh, swell,” Pete moaned, “more work! Just what we need.”

“We need every clue we can find,” Jupiter said. “But most of the records will be in Spanish, so Diego and I will have to do the research.”

“What will Pete and I do, Jupe?” Bob asked.

“You and Pete will go to the jail and try to make Pico remember what happened to his hat!”

The Rocky Beach jail was on the top floor of Police Headquarters. It was reached by a special corridor and elevator on the first floor. The corridor, which opened to the left of the main entrance to the building, was blocked by a barred gate. A policeman sat at a desk in front of the bars. Bob and Pete stood at the desk nervously, and asked to visit Pico Alvaro.

“Sorry, boys,” the policeman at the desk said, “visiting hours are just after lunch — unless you’re his lawyers!”

The policeman grinned at them.

“Well,” Bob said, trying to look dignified, “he is our client.”

“We’re sort of something like his lawyers,” Pete added.

“All right, boys, I’m too busy to play — ”

“We’re private detectives, sir,” Bob said quickly. “Junior detectives, I mean, but Pico really is our client. We have to talk to him about the case. It’s really important. We — ”

The policeman scowled. “Okay, that’s it! Out, you two!”

Bob and Pete gulped and started to turn away. A voice spoke behind them:

“Show him your cards, boys.”

Chief Reynolds of the Rocky Beach Police stood behind Bob and Pete, smiling at them. Bob showed the policeman at the desk their two cards. The man read them slowly.

“What do you want here, boys?” Chief Reynolds asked.

They told him, and he nodded seriously.

“Well,” the chief said, “I think we might stretch a point in this case. Pico Alvaro isn’t exactly a dangerous criminal, Sergeant, and investigators do have a right to see their client.”

“Yes, sir,” the police sergeant at the desk said. “I didn’t know they were friends of yours.”

“Not friends, Sergeant, civilian helpers. You’d be surprised how many times the boys have really helped us.”

The chief smiled at Bob and Pete again, and walked away. The policeman at the desk pressed a buzzer. Behind the barred gate, another policeman came out of an office into the corridor and unlocked the gate from inside. The boys hurried through, jumping nervously as the gate clanged shut behind them.

“Wow,” Pete said, “I’m sure glad we’re just visitors!”

The boys went down the corridor to an elevator, rode up, and got out on the top floor. They emerged into a long, brightly lighted corridor lined with desks and open counters. The first counter to the left was where prisoners emptied their pockets and left all their personal possessions. The next counter was where they were fingerprinted, and at the third counter they were given jail clothes, which they changed into in a locker room at the far end of the corridor on the left. Across from the locker room was a barred door marked Visiting Room. Then, along the rest of the right-hand side of the corridor, were desks. Policemen sat at some of them interrogating prisoners about to be jailed.

“Over here, boys,” a policeman called from the first desk. “Andrews and Crenshaw? Private detectives?”

They nodded, swallowing. The officer typed their names and addresses on printed forms, then entered the name of the prisoner they were visiting and the nature of their business.

“Okay, stand over against that wall.”

Bob and Pete stood against the wall, and another officer searched them quickly and expertly for concealed weapons or anything else that might help a prisoner escape. Pete was glad that he wasn’t carrying his Swiss Army knife that day. Then the first policeman took the boys down to the barred visitors door, unlocked it, and sent them inside.

They saw a long, narrow room with a low, solid counter dividing the room lengthwise. On the counter was a double row of three-sided, desk-like cubicles. One set of cubicles opened towards the visitors’ door, and the second set opened towards the far wall, which contained a barred door that led into the jail itself. When seated at a cubicle, you looked over a chin-high barrier at the cubicle on the other side. A visitor and a prisoner could thus see and talk to each other in facing cubicles, but could not pass anything over the barrier between them without being spotted by the policeman who sat in the room.

Bob and Pete sat down in one of the cubicles. Soon the door on the prisoners’ side opened and a guard brought Pico in. Pico sat facing the boys across the chin-high barrier.

“It is good of you to visit,” he said quietly, “but there is nothing I need.”

“We know you didn’t make that campfire!” Pete exclaimed.

Pico smiled. “I, too, know that. Unfortunately, the sheriff does not.”

“But we think we can prove it,” Bob said.

“Prove it? How, boys?”

They told Pico all they had realized about the hat.

“So,” Bob explained, “at three p.m. you were still wearing the hat at the school in Rocky Beach. You couldn’t have left the hat near that campfire on the Norris ranch until after we all got to the hacienda. And by that time, the fire had already started — set by someone else!”

“Then,” Pico said, his eyes gleaming, “my hat must have got on to the Norris land after the fire started! Excellent, boys! You are very good detectives indeed. Yes, my hat must have found its way out there accidentally, or — ”

“Or,” Bob finished, “someone put it out there on purpose!”

“So that I would be falsely accused.” Pico nodded. “But you cannot prove that I was wearing my hat at the school. It is only your word.”

“Yes,” Bob agreed, “but we know the truth, and now we have to find out how the hat got out there near that camp fire.”

“So we have to know where you left it,” Pete said. “You were wearing it at the school, and I think I remember it at the salvage yard. Were you wearing it in the truck?”

“The truck?” Pico frowned. “We were all in the back, yes. I talked about our family. Perhaps… No, I can’t be sure. I don’t remember taking the hat off, or even wearing it!”

“You have to remember!” Pete said fiercely.

“Think!” Bob urged.

But Pico only looked at them helplessly.

Diego sighed wearily as he turned the microfilm reader to another page of the old newspaper he was skimming. He was in the Rocky Beach Public Library, where Jupe had sent him when they discovered that the Historical Society didn’t have a full collection of old newspapers. Diego had gone through two months’ worth of issues of the weekly newspaper published in Rocky Beach in 1846. He was now up to the fourth week in October. So far he had found very little. There was nothing about Don Sebastián at all except for a brief mention of his death. The account was clearly based on Sergeant Brewster’s report and said nothing new.