Never had food tasted so good. There were mounds of barbecued ribs dripping with a delicious sauce. Beans, both the traditional, baked kind and the Mexican, refried variety, were offered. There were taco chips and a green mound of guacamole dip made from avocados and onions and cottage cheese. Fresh fruits and vegetables were set out in cold water, and there was plenty of icy soda to drink.
“Don’t you love our fancy china?” Heather teased, passing out battered, tin pie plates and sturdy eating utensils as well as bandana-sized napkins.
“Everything is just perfect,” George assured her as she began heaping food on her plate. “The high sides on the pie plates keep the food where it is supposed to be.”
Bess sampled the refried beans, which were delicately spiced with bits of hot peppers and onions. “Oh, this is heavenly,” she told Maria. “But if you’re going to feed your guests like this, I don’t think they’ll be losing any weight.”
Chuck looked up with innocent eyes. “Oh, didn’t Heather tell you, we have a new method of dieting. We feed you like this, but then you have to hike back to the ranch.”
Mock groans were followed by loud protest, and everyone relaxed on the grass to eat, talking contentedly of past and future rides, picnics, and barbecues. Only when the plates had been scraped clean did Bess sigh and say, “I know I shouldn’t ask after all that food, but is there dessert?”
There was general laughter, but when Maria nodded, everyone turned toward her. “Indian Fry Bread,” she announced. “I’ve brought the dough out and I’ll fry it here, then you put either powdered sugar or honey inside. It makes a perfect dessert. ”
“Fried bread?” Bess looked dubious, but when she received the first piece and dutifully poured on the honey, her expression changed. “Why, it’s wonderful!” she exclaimed. “I must find out how to make it. Everyone at home will be fascinated.”
Once the food was gone, Chuck and the other young men gathered more of the nearby dead wood—fallen limbs, trees, and bushes that hadn’t come back to life with spring’s magic. The campfire blazed as the sun suddenly slipped beneath the horizon, plunging them quickly into night.
Ward produced a guitar from the jeep and Chuck began to play while Bess looked at him dreamily. The familiar melody soon had everyone singing along. Nancy leaned her head back, staring up at the stars, thinking how lovely and peaceful everything seemed.
“Once the moon is up, we’ll have to start back,” Chuck told them between songs.
“Not the way we came, I hope,” Bess murmured. “I’d be afraid of missing that trail in the dark.”
“No, we’ll take an easier route,” Heather promised. “We don’t want any trouble.”
While they sang, Nancy noticed that Ward and Maria had packed up all the supplies, and once the jeep was loaded, they left the canyon. Ngyun vanished, too, not waiting to ride back with them through the cooling, night air.
“I’m glad you told us to tie our jackets behind our saddles, Heather,” Nancy said, pulling hers on before she mounted Dancer. “It feels good now.”
“The desert can be quite cold at night,” Heather agreed. “Even in the summer, it cools off once the sun goes down.”
They were quiet as they rode back, following the edge of a wash that led through the rough hills. Nancy was so deep in thought, trying to decide what to do about the Kachina spirit, that she didn’t notice when the mare slowed a little. Dancer dropped behind the other horses to nibble at a tuft of grass growing on the rough hillside the trail was skirting.
Suddenly, the silence of the desert night was broken by a rattling, and Dancer whinnied, nearly unseating the young sleuth. Though she’d lost a stirrup, Nancy clenched her knees to the mare’s sides, trying to keep her moving forward on the trail. But the horse was too terrified. In a moment, they were slipping and sliding down the rocky slope toward the bottom of the wash.
Frightened, Nancy grabbed the saddle horn and did her best to stay still in the saddle so as not to throw the mare off-balance as she skidded toward the hard-baked earth below. Rocks and other debris fell with them, and she could hear the shouts of the others, but at the moment everything depended on the mare’s surefootedness.
Dancer’s plunging ended as she stumbled to her knees, nearly throwing Nancy over her head. Still the terrified mare didn’t stop. She scrambled back to her feet and leaped forward, with Nancy hanging on for dear life!
8
The Rattler
The mare stumbled again in the roughness of the wash.
Nancy regained her balance and immediately tightened her hold on the reins, trying to steady the mare. She talked to the animal as calmly as she could while her own heart was still racing from the terror of their wild descent. “Steady, girl. It’s all right, Dancer,” she soothed, finally succeeding in stopping the trembling creature.
“Nancy, Nancy, are you all right?” Heather called.
“I’m fine,” Nancy answered, getting off the horse. “But I think we should check Dancer. She went down on het knees when we hit bottom and may have injured her legs.”
In a moment, Heather, Bess, George, and the others rode back along the wash, having come down a more gradual slope further along the trail. “I have a flashlight,” Heather said, taking it out of her saddlebag and dismounting to join Nancy on the ground. “What happened?” she asked as they examined the mare’s slim front legs.
“It was a rattlesnake,” Nancy explained. “I was riding along and all of a sudden it seemed to come down the cliff after us. I tried to keep Dancer on the trail, but she was terrified, of course. It must have been right under her hooves. Do you think she could have been bitten?”
Heather ran a hand over the mare’s legs, examining them a second time. “I don’t see anything,” she answered. “Her knees are skinned and she’s probably pretty badly bruised, but she’ll make it back to the ranch all right. We’ll just have to go slow. If she starts to limp, you can always ride double with someone.”
“You say a rattlesnake came down the cliff after you?” Chuck asked, breaking into their examination.
Nancy nodded. “I could hear it rattling as it came.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Chuck said. “Rattlesnakes are shy of people. Are you sure it wasn’t alongside the trail?”
“You’d already ridden by,” Nancy reminded him. “If it had been along the trail, it would have been disturbed and rattling long before I got there, wouldn’t it?”
“Let me have the flashlight,” Chuck ordered. “And somebody hold my horse. I’ll go up and see if I can find the snake.”
“You be careful, Chuck,” Heather warned, surrendering the flashlight to her brother.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Nancy?” George asked, moving to Nancy’s side now that Heather had finished examining the horse. “You weren’t hurt at all?”
“Just frightened half to death,” Nancy assured her. “It all happened so fast. ”
The others gathered around making suggestions about the snake and telling tales of their own brushes with rattlers. It was several minutes before Chuck slid back down the side of the wash.
“What did you find?” Nancy asked.
“Your rattlesnake,” Chuck answered, holding out his hand so that she could see the odd-looking thing that lay in his palm. It rattled slightly from the movement, and Dancer snorted and pulled back against Nancy’s steady hold on her reins.
“What is it?” Bess squeaked, stepping back just as the horse had.
“It’s the rattle from a big snake,” Chuck explained. “Some people cut them off dead rattlers and make them into tourist souvenirs. I found it lying on the trail.”
“But how...?” Heather began, then turned to face Nancy, her eyes wide with fright. “Did you say it came down the cliff after you?” she asked.
Nancy nodded.
“Then someone must have thrown it from up there.” Chuck uttered the words that had already begun to fill Nancy’s mind with pictures of the possible consequences.
Heather gasped. “Nancy could have been injured!” she cried out. “If Dancer had lost her footing in that rock slide coming down, she could have been seriously hurt!”
“Well, nothing like that happened,” Nancy said soothingly. “I’m fine and Dancer’s all right, so I think we should just put this behind us and get back to the ranch.” She did not want to mention their unknown enemy to Heather’s friends, but she asked herself the same question Bess, George, and the McGuires did. Was this another deliberate attempt to get her off the Kachina Doll case?
The young people remounted and rode their horses along the wash. Once they reached the resort, Nancy, Bess, and George escorted the guests to their cars, but their good nights were subdued and everyone left rather quickly. Not knowing what else to do, the girls settled in the lobby, waiting for Chuck and Heather to come up from the stable.
“You think it was deliberate, don’t you, Nancy?” George asked breaking the silence.
Nancy sighed. “Someone had to drop that rattlesnake down the cliff, and I was the only one riding by at the time.”
“I agree,” George said. “And it wasn’t the Kachina spirit, either.”
Nancy chuckled, “I’m sure it wasn’t. As a matter of fact, the spirit seemed almost friendly last night. Whoever threw that rattler wasn’t friendly at all.”
“That’s for sure,” Heather agreed from the archway that led to the hall of the Kachina paintings. “We were just talking about that.”
“And what did you decide?” Nancy asked as Chuck joined his sister in the doorway.
“That you’d better stop your investigation,” Chuck replied.
“What?” Nancy looked from one to the other. “But I’ve just begun.”
“That awful letter you showed us was bad enough,” Heather said. “And the accident and finding the scorpion in your suitcase and the toppled cactus. But this.... If it means things like this are going to happen, we can’t let you go on, Nancy. When I wrote to you and asked you to come here, I had no idea that you would be in any kind of danger.”
Chuck nodded. “The letter and the scorpion, maybe, were warnings. But you could have been killed tonight! That’s more than a warning.”
“I’ll just have to be more careful in the future,” Nancy replied firmly. “If someone is trying this hard to frighten me away, that must mean I’m making real progress, don’t you think?”
Heather and Chuck seemed unconvinced, but after cups of thick, sweet, hot chocolate and cream prepared by Maria, they all went to their rooms without further discussion. A long, relaxing bath gave Nancy plenty of time to think, but she still hadn’t a clue about the person who’d thrown the rattler down on her. She slipped between the cool sheets and pulled the bright quilt over her shoulders with a sigh.
She’d been asleep for several hours when the strange sounds woke her again. This time, she lay still and listened, identifying them as chanting, though she couldn’t distinguish any words. After several minutes, she got up and padded to the door, quite sure what she’d find on the other side.
The Kachina she saw was much closer this time, and the moment she opened the door, it seemed to beckon to her, then moved on along the hall. Nancy followed without hesitation. As before, it floated along the hall till it reached the same painting. Then, with what appeared to be a signal of some sort, it disappeared into the painted wall, leaving Nancy alone in the hall.
Nancy stared at the painting for a long time, studying each individual section. It wasn’t till her eyes reached the left hand that she realized something. The Kachina was holding what looked very much like a pencil or pen—something no Indian Kachina could possibly be concerned with!
Frowning, she went back to her room to get the powerful flashlight and the magnifying glass she kept there. Since Jake Harris had been a friend and admirer of the Indians and their Kachinas, she was sure that he wouldn’t have put the writing instrument into the picture by mistake—which had to mean that it was a clue. But to what?
Using the flashlight and magnifying glass, she began to make an even closer inspection of the painting. She studied each individual brick, tracing it carefully, trying not to let her eye be confused by the complex design that Jake Harris had painted so long ago.
Eventually, she found what she was looking for. The pencil or pen was pointing to a brick that wasn’t mortared into place like the others. Nancy slipped a fingernail into the tiny seam, trying to work the brick loose. It didn’t move. She went back to her room for a metal nail file and used it to pry at the seam. The brick squealed and grated in protest as she dragged it out of the patterned design of the Kachina.
“Nancy?” George’s head appeared around the door of the room she shared with Bess. “What in the world is going on?”
“I saw the Kachina again and it seemed to want me to investigate this painting, so...” Nancy lowered the brick to the floor. “Now we’ll see what it wanted me to find!”
9
A Wonderful Discovery
Bess and George quickly joined Nancy as she directed the beam of the flashlight into the hole left by the brick she’d removed. The light reflected dully off what appeared to be an old, tin box.
“Have you found the Kachina’s treasure?” Bess asked breathlessly. “Do you suppose the box could be full of gold?”
“I don’t think so,” Nancy said as she pulled the tin box out. “It isn’t heavy enough.”
“Maybe it has the treasure map in it,” George suggested.
Nancy blew the dust off the box and lifted the lid with trembling fingers, then jumped nervously as another door opened down the hall and Heather emerged. “What’s going on?” their hostess inquired as she approached the three girls.
“Nancy has found something,” George explained. “The Kachina led her to it.”
“What is it?” Heather asked, joining them in front of the painting.
“It looks like a diary or journal,” Nancy answered, lifting an old, leather-bound book out of the tin box. She opened it with care.