The Sandy Steele Mystery MEGAPACK®: 6 Young Adult Novels (Complete Series). Roger Barlow
Valley View games. Says he likes the way I run touchdowns.” Pepper leered at Sandy, who was not always the spectacular player that Pepper was. “Also, Mr. Cavanaugh appreciates the plugs I gave to his laboratory whenever I explained my voice-caster, so what do you think…?”
“He’s going to install you as a loud-speaker in one of his TV sets,” Quiz suggested.
“Nah!” Pepper stopped the laughter with a lordly, upraised hand. “He’s giving me a summer job. I’m going to help him hunt uranium.”
“Where?” Sandy gave his pal a stricken look.
“Where? Why, the place where there’s more uranium than almost anywhere in the United States. But you wouldn’t know where that is.”
“Oh, no,” groaned Quiz. “Not the Four Corners. Not there! Ain’t there no justice?”
“What do you mean?” Pepper looked at him doubtfully.
“I mean Sandy and I have jobs there too, and Four Corners is going to be awfully crowded this summer.”
“Oh.” Some of the wind went out of Pepper’s sails. Then he brightened. “I’ll buy another round of Cokes if either of you is going to get sixty dollars a week,” he crowed.
CHAPTER TWO
Kit Carson Country
“This sure isn’t my idea of a boom town!” Sandy grumbled as he and Quiz got off the eastbound Greyhound at Farmington, New Mexico, dropped their dusty bags and stood watching the early morning bustle on the little town’s wide streets.
“Yeah.” Quiz wagged his head. “The Wild West shore ain’t what she used to be, pardner. No twenty-mule-team wagons stuck in Main Street mudholes. No gambling dives in evidence. No false store fronts. No sheriff in a white hat walkin’ slow-like down a wooden sidewalk to shoot it out with the bad man in a black hat. Ah, for the good old days.”
“Oh, go fly a jet.” Sandy grinned. “Let’s look up Mr. Hall. Funny, his giving us his home address. He must have an office in town.”
They strolled along, noticing the new stores and office buildings, the modern high school.
Farmington would never become a ghost town. It was building solidly for the future.
Suddenly Quiz grabbed his friend’s arm. “Look at that oilman who’s just made a strike,” he said. “We’ll ask him if he knows Mr. Hall.”
“How do you know that he is, and has?” Sandy demanded as they approached a lanky stranger.
“Because he’s wearing a brand-new Stetson and new shoes, of course,” Quiz explained, as to a child. “Drillers always buy them when their well comes in.”
“Trust you to know something like that,” Sandy said in mock admiration.
“Well now,” drawled the Farmingtonian when they put their question, “you’d have to get up earlier than this to catch John Hall in town. John keeps his office in his hat. Might as well spend the day seeing the sights, and look him up at his motel when he gets back from the Regions tonight.”
“What sights?” asked Sandy when the oilman, obviously a transplanted Texan, had stumped away in high-heeled boots that must have hurt his feet. “Those mountains, maybe? They look close enough to touch. Let’s walk out to them.”
“Don’t let this clear, thin air fool you,” Quiz warned. “Those mountains are probably twenty miles away. We’d need a car to—”
A great honking and squealing of brakes behind them made the boys jump for safety. As they turned to give the driver what-for, Pepper March stuck his curly head out the window of a new jeep that was towing an equally new aluminum house trailer as big as a barn.
“Welcome to our fair city,” Pepper shouted. “Saw you get off the bus, so I prepared a proper reception. How about a guided tour while I run this trailer over to Red’s camp?”
“How long have you been here?” Sandy asked as they climbed aboard.
“Red flew me over last Friday in his Bonanza. I’ve got the hang of his entire layout already. Nothing to it, really.”
As he headed the jeep for the mountains, Pepper kept up a monologue in which skimpy descriptions of the countryside were mixed with large chunks of autobiography.
“Every square mile of this desert supports five Indians, fifty sheep, five hundred rattlesnakes and fifty thousand prairie dogs,” he joked as they left the pavement for a winding dirt trail. They bounced madly through clumps of sagebrush, prairie-dog colonies, and tortured hills made of many-colored rock.
“These roads wear out a car in a year, and you have to put in new springs every three months,” he added as they hit a chuckhole that made their teeth rattle.
“Look at those crazy rock formations,” he said later while the boys sweated and puffed to jack up the rear end of the trailer so it could get around a particularly sharp hairpin turn in the trail. (Now they knew why Pepper had extended his invitation for a tour!) “No telling what minerals you might find if you used electronic exploration methods on scrambled geology like this. Why, only last night, while we were sitting around the campfire at Elbow Rock, I said to Red: ‘Red,’ I said, just like that—we’ve become real pals already, you know—‘Red,’ I said, ‘why don’t we branch out? Why don’t we look for oil as well as uranium, now that we’re out here?’ And Red said to me: ‘Pepper,’ he said—”
“‘—when did you get your Ph.D in geology?’” Sandy cut in.
“Nothing like that at all! ‘Pepper,’ he said, ‘you’re right on the electron beam. We’ll organize the Red Pepper Oil Exploration and Contracting Company and give John Hall and those other stick-in-the-muds a run for their money.’ Oops! Hope we didn’t break anything that time!”
The jeep’s front wheel had dropped into a pothole with a terrific thump.
They found that the axle had wedged itself against a rock. Thirty minutes later, while they were still trying to get it loose, a rattletrap car pulled up beside them and an Indian stuck his flat, mahogany-colored face through its window.
“Give us a hand—please,” Pepper ordered. The newcomer started to get out. Then his black eyes settled on the lettering on the side of the trailer:
Cavanaugh Laboratories
Farmington, N.M. & Valley View, Cal.
“Cavanaugh! Huh!” snorted the Indian. He slammed the door of his car and roared off in a cloud of yellow dust.
“Those confounded Indians,” snarled Pepper, staring after him in white-faced fury. “I’d like to… Oh, well. Come on, fellows. Guess we’ve got to do this ourselves.”
They finally got the jeep back on the trail and drove the twenty miles to Elbow Rock without further mishap. There Pepper parked beside a sparkling trout stream. They raided the trailer’s big freezer for sandwich materials and ate lunch at a spot overlooking a thousand square miles of yellow desert backed by blue, snowcapped peaks. Pepper was at his best as a host. For once in their lives, Sandy and Quiz almost liked him. At least here he seemed much pleasanter than he did at home, lording it over everyone—or trying to.
In the cool of the afternoon—85 degrees in the sun instead of the 110 degrees the thermometer had shown at noon—they rode the jeep back to Farmington by way of a wide detour that took them within sight of the San Juan River gorge.
“I wanted to show you those two oil-well derricks over yonder,” Pepper explained. “They’re a mile and a half apart, as the crow flies. But, because they’re on opposite sides of the river, they were 125 long miles apart by car until we got that new bridge finished a few months ago. Shows you the problems we explorers face.”
“The San Juan runs into the Colorado, doesn’t it?” Quiz asked as he studied the tiny stream