The End of the Trail (6 page)

Joe hurried down the hill after the others. McSavage was leading them toward an old barn. Outside the barn, in the paddock, was a large black stallion, a very impressive-looking horse.

“This is Formby,” Bill said. “Any of you boys like to ride him?”

“I would,” Chet said excitedly. “All I need is a saddle.”

“Got one right inside,” McSavage said. He walked into the barn and returned with a saddle, which he threw across Formby's back. Chet cinched it and climbed on. Formby seemed to take to Chet immediately.

“Here you go, young man,” McSavage said, pulling an apple from a barrel and handing it to Chet.

Chet took the apple and leaned forward to lower it toward Formby's mouth. “You love apples, don't you, boy?” Chet asked the horse.

Abruptly Formby reared up. Something about the apple seemed to bother him. He began bucking
wildly, then running around in circles. It was almost as though he was trying to throw Chet off.

Caught off balance, Chet struggled to stay in the saddle. He managed to straighten up and pull hard on the reins, but that only made the stallion buck more. Somehow, Joe knew, Chet had to regain control of the horse and soon. If not, he stood a good chance of being thrown—and trampled.

“Somebody do something!” Joe cried as Chet fought desperately to stay on the horse. “Mr. McSavage, you've got to stop Formby.”

McSavage held up his hands. “I don't know what's happening,” he said. “I've never seen Formby like this.”

As Joe and Phil watched, frantic to help their friend, Chet managed to get hold of the saddle pommel. Then he grabbed Formby's mane, one hand after the other, until he was stretched forward in the saddle, his arms wound tightly around the stallion's neck. To Joe's and Phil's astonishment, it looked as though Chet was now talking into the horse's ear.

Formby continued to buck but slowly started to calm down. Finally the wild thrashing ceased, and
once again he stood calmly with Chet still on his back.

“I knew we could work things out, Formby,” Chet said to the horse. “You're a good horse. I knew that all along.”

“What did you do, Chet?” Phil asked.

“Yeah, I've never seen anything like that,” Joe said.

“You're one lucky guy,” Bill McSavage said.

“It wasn't luck,” Chet said. “I've done a fair amount of riding. I've even been told I had a real talent with horses. Sometimes you just have to know how to talk to them.”

“Well, you'd better get down off there,” Mr. McSavage said. “Wouldn't want that to happen again.”

“It won't,” Chet said, staying in the saddle. “Formby and I are just getting to know each other. He's going to be fine now, aren't you, boy?”

He began to walk the horse in a circle around the barnyard. “You guys can look at the rest of the farm. Formby and I are going to spend some quality time together.”

Bill McSavage slapped a hand against the side of his head. “I just figured out what happened,” he said, a chagrined expression on his face. “Formby used to be a movie horse. He did stunt work and had big roles in a few westerns. His trainer taught him some tricks that he could do on cue. The apple was the signal for him to start bucking like that.”

“It was ... the apple?” Joe asked suspiciously.

“Yep,” McSavage said. “I'm really sorry about that. It was all my fault. If something had happened to your friend, I could never have forgiven myself.”

Joe whispered to Phil, “If the horse hates apples, how come Mr. McSavage keeps a barrel of apples in the barnyard?”

“That is really strange, all right,” Phil whispered.

McSavage didn't seem to notice their conversation. He waved a hand and said, “Come on up this way. I'll show you our tractor. It's got a lot of miles on it, but it can still do the job.”

“I'm sure not going to sit on the tractor,” Joe whispered to Phil. “Who knows what tricks it's been trained to do?”

•  •  •

Only a few hundred yards away, Frank was unaware of the commotion that had just occurred down the hill. He was walking around the mansion, examining the crumbling stonework and cracked windows. It must have been quite a place in its day, but its day was long past. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix it up, Frank estimated, and the inside was probably worse.

In fact, Frank was trying to figure a way to get a look inside the mansion. He hadn't noticed Bill locking the front door on the way out, so he walked up
the wide stone steps in front and pushed on the ornate wooden door. It opened easily.

“Anybody home?” he shouted, in case some of the farmhands were around. But the mansion seemed to be deserted.

The door opened into a wide but gloomy foyer. There were heavy wooden tables on both sides, with ornately carved legs. Frank had never seen tables like these outside of an antique store or a museum. One had a dusty vase on it, with no flowers in it. The other looked as if it had probably had a vase on it at one time. Frank thought he noticed small pieces of shattered porcelain on the floor around it, probably the remains of that vase. On the left-hand wall hung a large portrait of a distinguished-looking man with muttonchop sideburns and a high, stiff white collar. At the bottom of the portrait was a name on a bronze plaque: Angus McSavage.

Probably the guy who built this place, Frank thought.

Beyond the foyer was a huge parlor, with overstuffed, maroon velvet-covered sofas all around it. Because of the amount of dust and cobwebs, Frank deduced that nobody spent much time in this room anymore.

There was a bookshelf on one wall, with quite a few books on it. Most were covered with dust, but one appeared to be quite clean and looked as if
somebody might actually read it from time to time. It was titled
The Roaring Twenties: End of an Era.
When Frank pulled it down and glanced through it, the book fell open to one particularly well-thumbed page. On it was a picture of the mansion he was now standing inside. The photo had been taken in 1928, and the house had clearly been in better shape than it was now. Women in knee-length flapper dresses with long ropes of pearls and men in well-tailored suits and bowler hats were standing in the front yard and on the steps. A man who looked like the portrait of Angus McSavage was in the middle of the crowd. He was probably about seventy years old.

On the opposite page the house was mentioned by name as the McSavage Mansion. Frank began reading.

According to the book, Angus McSavage had bought the granite quarry for which the town was named sometime in the late nineteenth century, from a man named Joshua Morgan. Frank remembered that this was what Loraleigh had told them, which meant her family had been here even longer than the McSavages. The quarry made the McSavages wealthy and allowed them to build this mansion, but the granite ran out in the 1920s. By then, however, Angus McSavage had gotten into another line of business. After Prohibition became law in 1920, he turned the mansion into a speakeasy. It had been quite notorious during the 1920s and early 1930s. It
had also been an inn, so rich people would come to spend their weekends there—and sometimes the whole week. Angus McSavage had some political influence, and the police never shut his operation down. But the end of Prohibition in 1933 had ruined his business. Nobody went to speakeasies anymore. The book didn't mention what had happened to the mansion after that.

Frank looked around again at the ancient furniture and unvacuumed carpet. The place was a mess, but it looked as if it had been taken care of more recently than 1933. Maybe the McSavage granite quarry had still brought in a little money, though nothing in the book indicated that to be so. Or maybe the McSavage farm had provided enough income, though from what Frank had seen it didn't look like much of a farm. But obviously the family had continued making money—and at some point, judging from the poor condition of the house, the flow of money had stopped. Since the mansion was probably the economic center of the entire town, the local prosperity must have dried up at the same time.

A room off to one side of the parlor caught Frank's eye. It appeared to be an office of some kind. In it was a large desk and rows of ledgers on shelves. This must be where the McSavage family took care of the quarry and the speakeasy business, Frank reasoned. He opened one of the ledgers. Inside was a list of
names with a dollar amount next to each one; some had plus signs next to them and some minus signs. The names were those of individuals and the dates next to the transactions were relatively recent, from the 1960s and 1970s.

“Can I help you?” said an extremely deep voice from behind Frank.

Frank dropped the book, startled. He turned to see a tall man about sixty years old. He was stiff and imperious looking, like a butler in an old movie. He looked as if he should be wearing a tuxedo instead of the jeans and flannel shirt he did wear. Frank guessed that he probably was a McSavage household employee, though how Bill could afford household help when he couldn't afford to keep up the house, Frank couldn't imagine.

“I was, um, lost,” Frank said, fumbling for an explanation as to why he was prying through the books. “Mr. McSavage said I could look around the house while he and my friends toured the farm. I was trying to find the way out.”

“Are you sure,” the butler asked, “that Mr. McSavage gave you permission to look around the
inside
of the house? Perhaps he was referring to the grounds.”

“Oh,” Frank said, trying to look convincingly puzzled. “I'm not sure. Maybe I misunderstood him. Well, if you'll show me where the exit is ...”

“Right through there,” the man said, pointing to a
door Frank hadn't noticed before. “Why don't you step on through?”

Frank hesitated. He wasn't really lost and knew that the door couldn't possibly lead to the front entrance. But maybe the man wanted him to go out through some kind of side entrance. Frank pulled the door open and walked through.

There was a grinding noise behind him, as though the man were operating some kind of machine. Frank started to turn, but instantly began to lose his balance.

The floor slid open beneath him. All at once Frank was falling through the blackness of empty space!

Frank landed on a hard surface. The force of the fall left him stunned for a moment. He had fallen through a trapdoor, he realized. And the trapdoor that he had fallen through, which was about eight feet above where he was now standing, slid neatly closed. All at once Frank was in total darkness.

He shook his head, trying to get his senses back. Obviously, the man didn't want Frank to leave the house. But why? What had Frank seen that he wasn't supposed to see? The stuff about the house having been a speakeasy during Prohibition? That was apparently well known, since it had been written up in a history book. The old ledgers? Frank had no idea what the ledgers meant.

Whatever the problem, it was clear that the first
order of business was to find his way out of here. Frank reached in his pocket and pulled out a small box of kitchen matches that he had used for lighting campfires on the trail. He lit a match and looked around. He seemed to be in a very large room, and the faint light from the match didn't reach all the way to the walls. He could make out strange dark objects, some about the size and shape of a small man, some more like large tables. All were covered with drop cloths.

The match guttered out, but not before Frank spotted an oil lamp on top of one of the drop cloths. He groped for it in the dark and sniffed at it. It smelled as if it still had some oil in it. He fumbled with a second match and managed to light the lamp.

He could see better now, but he still had no idea what the strange dark objects were. He lifted the drop cloth off one. Underneath was a slot machine. Was this something the McSavage family kept around the house for fun? Frank walked to one of the large covered objects and removed the cloth. Underneath was a roulette table. He pulled off several more cloths and found a blackjack table and two more slot machines. There were more large cloth-covered objects as far as he could see in the darkness. No way was this the McSavage family recreation room.