Читать книгу The Sandy Steele Mystery MEGAPACK®: 6 Young Adult Novels (Complete Series) - Roger Barlow - Страница 22

CHAPTER ONE

The Big Cats

“Why don’t you call them tonight? We’ve got to know pretty soon.”

The speaker was Arthur Cook, a deeply tanned giant of a man with close-cropped graying hair, whose piercing blue eyes told of a lifetime spent in open spaces. He was talking to a boy of sixteen who had wrapped himself around a dining-room chair and was staring thoughtfully down at a map on the table.

“What do you say, Sandy?” Mr. Cook urged. “Want me to ring the operator?”

Sandy Steele looked up with sudden decision. “All right,” he said. “We’ll get it settled right now.”

“That’s the ticket!” chimed in Mr. Cook’s son, Michael, as he shouldered his way through the swinging kitchen door, a glass of milk in one hand and an enormous slice of layer cake in the other. “Then we can start making plans right away.”

“If you think you can spare us the time from your hobby,” his father said dryly.

“Hobby?” Mike’s jaws closed down over the cake. “What hobby?”

“Eating. Or has it become a full-time job with you?” Mr. Cook turned to Sandy. “Ever see anybody eat so much?”

Sandy shook his head in mock amazement. “That son of yours sure can stash it away!”

Mike drained half the glass of milk in one gulp and grinned over at them. “A long time ago,” he told them, “I made up my mind never to eat on an empty stomach. That’s why I always have a snack before dinner.” He finished the rest of the milk hastily. “That reminds me. Mom said to clear all these maps out of the dining room. Soup’s almost on.”

Mr. Cook got up and headed for the door to the hallway. “I’ll just have time to place the call. What’s your number, Sandy?”

“Valley 5-3649.”

“Thanks. Mike, you take care of things in here for your mother.”

“Sure ... and hey, Dad!” Mike looked earnestly at his father.

“What?”

“You can sound awfully convincing if you want, so make it good, huh? It’d really be great if Sandy could come along.”

Mr. Cook laughed and disappeared through the door. A moment later the boys heard him dialing the long-distance operator.

“Well?” Mike demanded as he gathered in the scattered maps. “What do you think?”

Sandy shrugged. “It’s hard to say. I don’t see why not, though. School’s out for the summer and we haven’t made any plans of our own.”

“Guess we’ll just have to hold our breath,” Mike said and started for his father’s den with the papers he had collected. “Tell Mom the decks are clear.”

“Okay, but let me see that map again.” Sandy reached out and took a large-scale National Geographic map of Idaho from the pile Mike was carrying. A rough red crayon circle had been drawn around the Snake River country in the southern part of the state. An X was placed further north near the town of Salmon and a thin line followed the Lost River down through a blue-gray area known as the Lost River Range. Judging from the color of the map, the altitude there varied between 8,000 and 11,000 feet. There wasn’t a sign of a town or a road for miles. It was real Rocky Mountain country, unspoiled, wild and beautiful, exactly as Sandy had always hoped one day to see it.

And now, at last, he had a chance. Mr. Cook and Mike were planning a pack trip along the Lost River and they wanted to take him along. In his mind’s eye he already saw the rugged splendor of the mountains, smelled the pungent smoke of a crackling campfire after a full day’s hunting or fishing.

“Hey, wake up! You look as if you’re dreaming.” It was Mike, back from his father’s den.

Sandy looked over at him, shook his head and sighed. “I was, Mike, I really was.”

Mike clapped a sympathetic hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Worrying won’t help. Why don’t you hunt up Dad and see how he made out? I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

Sandy smiled back and nodded. He had known Mike and his parents for only a little over ten days, but already they were like a second family to him. He had heard about the Cooks for about as long as he could remember. Mr. Cook was his father’s oldest friend. The two men had met early in their careers and had worked on a number of projects together. John Steele was a government geologist, while Arthur Cook was a mining engineer—one of the best in the business, according to Sandy’s father.

Their work took both men away from home a great deal of the time, and for years they had been trying, without success, to bring their families together.

Finally, about three weeks ago, a letter arrived from Mr. Cook, inviting all three Steeles to spend the first two weeks of the summer vacation in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco.

“Throw some camping gear into your car,” Mr. Cook had advised. “We might all take a run up to Lake Tahoe for some fishing. Sandy and Mike have never met, but I can’t think of a better way for the two boys to get acquainted than in the middle of a trout pool.”

To Sandy’s intense disappointment they had to turn down the offer. His father was snowed under with paper work at the office and he couldn’t spare the time.

But by return mail a second letter arrived. Why not send Sandy alone? There didn’t seem to be any objections, and so it was arranged.

Mike was a chunky, junior-sized version of his father, with dancing blue eyes and a tendency to leap into things without thinking. Sandy was on the slender side, with a strong, good-humored mouth and a shock of unruly blond hair that never seemed to stay down properly. Despite their differences in appearance and personality, the two boys hit it off right from the start. And when Mr. Cook announced his plan for a month’s trip through Idaho, it was assumed that Sandy would come along, provided, of course, that he got his parents’ approval.

Mr. Cook appeared at the dining-room door. “Your father’s on the wire,” he said. “Want me to talk to him first?”

Sandy nodded briefly and followed Mr. Cook out into the hallway. Mike, who had overheard the exchange from the kitchen, slipped out and joined them.

Mr. Cook picked up the receiver, winked at Sandy and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Hello, John; how have you been?... Good. John, I have a favor to ask. Mike and I are planning a camping trip up to the Rockies and we’d like Sandy’s company.... Where? North of the Snake River country, in the Lost River Range. It’s for a month, but I think it would be four weeks the boys will never forget.... What?... Oh, don’t worry about that. We have plenty of equipment.... Yes, we’d leave in three days and be back about the tenth of next month.... What’s that? Well here, why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Mr. Cook cupped a hand over the mouthpiece and nodded to Sandy. “He wants to know how you feel about it.”

“Let me talk to him!” Sandy nearly tripped over the rug in his hurry to get to the phone.

“Hello, Dad!” he shouted. “How do I feel about it! I think it’s a chance of a lifetime!” There was a pause as Sandy listened carefully for several minutes. “Sure,” he said at last, a grin of delight creeping over his face. “You bet! Great, Dad! I’ll wire you as soon as we get back. Goodbye and give Mom a hug for me!”

Sandy put down the receiver and looked at the Cooks with a dazed smile of happiness. “It’s all set!” he breathed. “What a great guy!”

Mr. Cook beamed his pleasure as Mike bounded over to Sandy and walloped him exuberantly on the back. “Attaboy, Sandy! I knew it all along!”

“Well,” said Mr. Cook. “Congratulations on becoming an official member of the expedition. Soon as dinner’s over, we’ll go into the den and do a little homework—draw up a list of the things we’ll need and talk over the kind of country we’ll be going through.” He looked over at Mike with a smile on his face. “But let’s wait till after we’ve eaten. If we get to talking about it at table, your mother won’t be able to get a word in edgewise.”

All through the meal, Sandy tried to put thoughts of the trip out of his mind, but with little success. His attempts at polite table talk only brought amused glances from Mrs. Cook. Mike, too, seemed preoccupied, even to the point of refusing a third helping of fried chicken—an event that so stunned his mother that she almost forgot dessert.

When they finally finished, Mr. Cook pushed back from the table and stood up. “And that, I think,” he said, smiling gently, “was the quietest meal ever eaten in this house. You fellows are a couple of real sparklers in the conversation line.”

“Well, Dad ...” Mike began to protest.

Mr. Cook held up his hand. “I know. I know. You want to talk about the trip. I don’t blame you. So do I. Come on in here and let’s get it off our chests.” He led the way into his comfortably furnished den and paused before a pipe rack. The walls of the room were hung with Mr. Cook’s hunting trophies. Two whitetail deer flanked a stone fireplace, and over the mantel loomed the head of a huge Alaska brown bear. At one end of the room, rows of bookcases shared wall space with a gleaming walnut gun cabinet.

Mr. Cook selected a pipe, fingered some tobacco into the bowl and dropped into a chair near the fireplace. “Now,” he said. “Let’s have some questions. The floor is open for discussion.”

Both boys started together.

“Do you think I’d better ...” Sandy blurted.

“How are we going to ...” Mike began.

They looked at each other and grinned.

“After you, my dear Alphonse.” Mike bowed solemnly. “You’re the guest.”

“Go ahead, Sandy,” Mr. Cook invited.

Sandy leaned forward in his chair. “I was going to ask if I should send for my rifle. I have a .22 at home.”

Mr. Cook laughed and put down his pipe. “I don’t think you’d use it once, Sandy,” he said. “This is big-game country we’re going into. We’ll see mule deer and elk, pronghorn antelope and mountain goats. If we’re lucky we may even spot a grizzly or a bighorn sheep. And we’re almost certain to run into a mountain lion or two.”

“A mountain lion,” Sandy breathed. “What a trophy that would make. I bet Pepper March never even saw a mountain lion!”

“Who’s Pepper March?” Mr. Cook asked.

Sandy scowled. “Somebody I know back home,” he said.

Mr. Cook smiled. “You don’t seem to like him much.”

“Oh, he’s all right,” Sandy explained. “It’s just that he gets under my skin sometimes.”

“What would you do with a mountain-lion trophy?” Mr. Cook asked. “Do you have room for him at home?”

Sandy thought a moment. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “But I know what I could do.”

“What?”

“Start a trophy room at Valley View High. Jerry and I could build some cases, and Quiz—he’s our brainy friend—could write up descriptions of all the animals—like they have in natural-history museums.”

Mr. Cook nodded approvingly. “Good idea. A museum’s the perfect place for a lion. But over a fireplace, I’d rather have a six-point buck any day.”

“How do you rate big-game trophies, Dad?” Mike asked.

“That varies with the animal,” Mr. Cook replied. “An elk, for example, is measured for spread between antlers, and the number of points—or branches—growing out of each antler. If I remember rightly, the record elk had a spread of nearly seventy inches and about seventeen points.”

“Whew!” Sandy whistled. “He must have been built like a truck!”

“He was a real granddaddy, all right,” said Mr. Cook and smiled at the memory. “But to get back to your question about guns, Sandy. Here are the cannons we’ll be taking along.” Mr. Cook got up and moved over to the gun rack at the end of the room.

“For power shooting, we’ll use this Weatherby .300 Magnum. And I think you boys ought to get used to this one.” Mr. Cook reached up and took down a beautifully balanced bolt-action rifle. “That’s a Remington 721 in a .30/06 caliber. It’s lighter than the Weatherby but it packs quite a punch.”

“Enough to bring down a mountain lion?” Mike asked eagerly.

Mr. Cook looked at the two boys and allowed a slight smile to play at the corners of his mouth. “Since you both seem to have mountain lions on the brain, I’ll tell you something I was going to keep a secret ...”

But before he could finish, the sound of a telephone bell tinkled softly from the desk in the den.

“I’ll take it here, Julia!” Mr. Cook called as he reached for the receiver. “Hello,” he said. He listened for a moment, then broke into a beaming grin.

“Hank Dawson! You old son of a gun! Good to hear from you.” With the telephone still cradled to his ear, he maneuvered the cord across the desk and sat down in the chair behind it. “So you got my telegram.... Yes, we’ll be there. On the eighteenth. Oh, and Hank—bring along kits for four. That’s right. A friend of ours is coming along. A lad named Sandy Steele. Right. See you then. Goodbye.”

Mr. Cook put down the telephone with a chuckle and swiveled around to face the boys. “Well,” he said. “Speak of the devil ...”

“Who was that?” Mike demanded.

“That, Mike, was about the best professional guide and hunter in the Rockies. His name’s Hank Dawson and he has a honey of a hunting lodge up in the Lost River Range. The three of us have a date to meet Hank on the eighteenth. He’s meeting us with pack mules and horses at a place called Mormon Crossing on the Lost River. I think you’ll like Hank. He shares an enthusiasm of yours.”

“What’s that?”

“Mountain lions. His hobby is going after the big cats. He makes a good bit of money collecting the bounty on their hides. Hank says he wants to take us up in the hills for a cougar hunt.”

Mike jumped to his feet and gave a war whoop that rattled the windows. “Where exactly is this place we’re going to?” he asked excitedly. “What’s our first stop in Idaho?”

“Which question do you want me to answer?”

“Where are we going first?”

Mr. Cook spread the map over his desk. “Here,” he said, pointing the stem of his pipe at the juncture of three rivers in central Idaho. “Near the town of Salmon. We’ll stop there, hire some boats and a guide and get you two fellows used to a little white water.”

“White water?” Sandy’s expression was blank.

“Rapids. We’re going to have to run dozens on our trip downriver. They’re dangerous, too. We’ll portage our way around the worst ones, but we’ll go through most of them. By the way, do you know what portage is?”

“Not exactly, no,” replied Sandy.

“Well, it’s simple enough. When you get to a part of any stream that isn’t navigable for one reason or another, you pull in to land and tote everything, including the boat, to the next navigable part.”

“‘Simple,’ he calls it,” groaned Mike.

“It’s hard work, of course; but you’ll both come back in better shape than you’ve ever been in your life.”

Mike scrambled to his feet. “In that case,” he announced, “I’m going to have to start preparing myself. I think I remember a little cold chicken going back into the icebox, and that’s no way to treat chicken!” He started for the door.

“But you just finished dinner,” his father pointed out.

“I know,” Mike shot back over his shoulder. “But I didn’t do a very good job of it. Too busy thinking about the trip.”

Mr. Cook made a notation on the paper in front of him. “Item one on our list. Hire the Queen Mary as a provision ship so Mike will never have to go hungry.”

“The Queen Elizabeth’s bigger,” Mike called and disappeared into the kitchen.