William Arden - The Mystery of the Headless Horse

Diego sighed again, and stretched. The reading room was silent except for the steady sound of the falling rain outside. He turned to the small stack of books on the table beside him. They were all printed memoirs and diaries of local residents in the nineteenth century.

Diego opened the first memoir and began to look for entries from mid-September 1846.

Jupiter closed the fifth journal he had read and listened to the rain outside the Historical Society. The old handwritten journals of the Spanish settlers were fascinating, and he had to keep reminding himself to read only entries for the dates near the escape of Don Sebastián. But so far even the entries for those violent days of September, 1846, had given him no clues.

Dispirited, he opened the sixth journal without much hope. At least he wouldn’t have to work so hard to read this one. The sixth journal was in English, one kept by a second lieutenant of cavalry in Frémont’s small force of American invaders.

Jupiter located the pages for mid-September and began to read fast.

Some ten minutes later he suddenly leaned forward, his eyes bright and excited, and carefully re-read a page in the journal of the long-forgotten second lieutenant.

Then he jumped up, made a copy of the page, returned the old journals to the historian, and hurried out into the rain.

Pico shook his head again in the visitor’s room of the Rocky Beach jail.

“I cannot remember, boys. I’m sorry.”

“All right,” Bob said calmly. “Let’s go over it step by step. Now, you were wearing the hat at the school. Jupiter remembers that clearly, and I think I do. Now — ”

“I’ll bet Skinny and even that Cody remember Pico wearing the hat at the school, if they’d admit it,” Pete said bitterly.

“But they won’t,” Bob said. “Pete’s pretty sure you were still wearing the hat at the salvage yard. In the truck you told us about the Alvaro land grant. I remember you pointed to things, so you weren’t holding the hat in your hand. It was windy and chilly in the truck, so you were probably wearing the hat to keep your head warm.”

“Then we got to the hacienda,” Pete went on. “We all got out of the truck, and you talked to Uncle Titus about the statue of Cortés. Then what, Pico? Did you go into the hacienda and maybe take off your hat?”

“Well, I… ” Pico thought hard. “No, I did not go into the house. I… we all… Wait! Yes, I think I remember!”

“What?” Pete cried.

“Go on,” Bob urged.

Pico’s eyes gleamed. “We all went straight into the barn to look at the things I was to sell to Mr. Jones. It was dim in the barn and my hat brim shaded my eyes. So I took off the hat to see better, and… ” The tall Alvaro brother looked at the boys. “And I hung it on a peg just inside the barn door! Yes, I am sure. I hung it in the barn, and then when Huerta and Guerra called ’Fire!’ I ran out with all of you and left the hat in the barn!”

“Then that’s where it should have been, not at the campfire on the Norris ranch,” Bob said.

“So someone swiped it from the barn before the barn caught fire,” Pete said, “and put it out at the campfire to frame Pico!”

“But,” Pico said slowly, “we still do not have proof.”

“Maybe we can find some evidence at the barn, if everything wasn’t all burned!” Bob said. “Let’s go and tell Jupe, Pete.”

The boys said goodbye to Pico, and hurried out as the guard took Pico back to his cell in the jail.

Out in the rain, they rode straight to the Historical Society and ran inside. Jupiter wasn’t there!

“Where’d he go, Records?” Pete wondered.

“I don’t know,” Bob said, biting his lip. “But we’ve got a couple of hours before dark, Second. There’s time to go look for some evidence in the Alvaro barn that someone stole Pico’s hat.”

“Let’s go then,” Pete decided. “Maybe Jupe went out there with Diego anyway.”

They ran back to their bikes, and peddled swiftly through the steady rain out towards the burned Alvaro hacienda.

The rain stopped as Bob and Pete rode into the hacienda yard. The blackened ruins were silent and deserted, looking like the jagged skeletons of buildings on some battlefield. On the ridge behind the hacienda, the statue of the headless horse loomed eerie and menacing against the low, scudding clouds. Jupiter and Diego weren’t anywhere around.

“Maybe we should wait, Records,” Pete suggested.

“Well,” Bob said, “we’re here now. I guess we could look around and see if we can find any clues.”

Pete stared at the broken walls and fallen beams of the old barn. “Gosh, it’s some mess. Where do we start?”

“I think,” Bob replied slowly, “Jupe would say first things first. We should look outside the barn for anything that might have been dropped, or maybe for some footprints.”

Pete nodded, and they spread out on either side of the corral in front of the barn. Bent low, and peering at every inch of the soggy ground, they worked their way slowly across the corral towards the entrance to the barn. The days of rain had turned the whole yard into a slick and sticky clay mud. It covered their shoes and made uneasy sucking sounds as they moved.

They met in front of what had once been the barn door. All that remained of it was a charred door frame, twisted and leaning crazily.

“Not even a twig on the ground,” Pete groaned. “The mud’s so deep it’d probably cover anything smaller than a boulder anyway.”

“And I don’t think there would have been any footprints even before the rain. Adobe soil is hard as a rock when it’s dry,” Bob said. “Let’s try inside.”

Inside, the burned barn was a terrible mess of fallen roof timbers, collapsed walls, the remnants of rooms and stalls, and the blackened jumble of the hundreds of valuable items the Alvaros had been going to sell to Uncle Titus. Two of the outer walls had fallen in completely, and the other two were only skeletons. The windows in the standing walls looked like gaping wounds. After days of rain, the stench of the burned debris was terrible. Almost nothing in the barn was recognizable. The boys stood and looked at the confusion.

“How do we find anything in here?” Pete moaned. “I mean, we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

“We’re looking for anything that could give us a clue to who was here and took Pico’s hat,” Bob said, refusing to be so easily daunted. “And you know what Jupe would say — we’ll know it when we see it!”

“Swell,” Pete said, “but just how do we find anything in this wreck, and where do we start to look?”

“We start where the hat was last known to be,” Bob declared, and pointed to the side of the door frame. The front wall was one of the two walls still standing. “Look, the peg Pico hung his hat on is still there on what’s left of that wall.”

“What’s left of the peg,” Pete muttered, but followed Bob to the wall.

A row of three pegs just inside the door had been burned to stubs, but they were still visible on a blackened wall stud. Bob and Pete began to search the ground beneath the pegs.

The floor was a jumbled litter of wood ashes and burned debris. Aside from roof tiles, it was hard to be sure of what anything was. The boys found hundreds of small, broken, and blackened pieces as they moved away from the wall in a widening circle, but nothing that seemed to mean anything, or belong to anyone except the Alvaros.

Pete finally sat down on a fallen roof beam. “If there’s a clue, it needs a sign on it,” he said.

“I guess you’re right, Second,” Bob admitted reluctantly. “There are so many pieces of broken — ”