“No,” Pico said. “It was always Hacienda Alvaro.”
“Then why did he write Condor Castle at the top?” Pete cried. “Unless it was some special place that José would know about! A clue!”
Jupiter pulled out his road map of the county. Everyone else peered over his shoulder as he studied it. Then Jupiter sighed and sat back.
“No Condor Castle,” he said unhappily, and then looked up. “Wait! This is a modern map! In 1846 the map would — ”
“I have an old map,” Emiliano Paz said.
The old man left the cottage. The others waited for him impatiently. At last the old man came back with a yellowed old map. Dated 1844, it was half in Spanish and half in English. Both Pico and Jupiter read it carefully.
“Nothing,” Pico said. “There is no Condor Castle.”
“No,” Jupiter had to agree.
Pico looked defeated and angry. “Foolishness, as I said! We will not save our ranch with a pipe dream! No, we must find a better — ”
Emiliano Paz said sadly, “Perhaps you have no other way, Pico. I am sorry, but I came to speak to you of bad news. You are very far behind with your mortgage payments. It is much money for me, and soon I must pay my own debts. I lent to you all the money I had, and now with all you own burned with your hacienda, you cannot pay me. I must have the money, and Mr. Norris has offered to buy your mortgage. I have come to tell you that very soon I must sell to him.”
Pete whispered, “That’s what Skinny meant last night!”
“I thank you for coming to me, Don Emiliano,” Pico said. “What must be, must be. You have your own family to consider.”
“I am sorry. Will you honour me by staying here?”
“Of course, Don Emiliano,” Pico said. “We are friends.”
The old man nodded and walked slowly out of the cottage. His head was bent as he crossed the muddy yard in the rain. Pico looked after him for a moment, and then went outside, too. Soon the boys heard him chopping wood.
“It’s all over,” Diego said hopelessly.
“No, it isn’t!” Jupiter insisted firmly. “We’ll find the Cortés Sword, Diego!”
“We will!” Bob echoed.
“You bet we will!” Pete chimed in. “We’ll… we’ll… gosh, Jupe, what will we do?”
“Tomorrow, we’ll look for every old map we can find,” the stout leader of the trio declared. “Condor Castle must be some secret clue, and we’ll find it. We’ll study every old map in Rocky Beach if we have to!”
“And I’ll help!” Diego cried.
The four boys smiled at each other.
The rain slowed to a drizzle Sunday morning. Diego borrowed a bike and a raincoat from the family of Emiliano Paz and rode into town. He met Jupiter in front of the Historical Society around noon.
“Bob’s covering the library,” Jupiter explained, “and Pete’s dad got him special permission to look at the maps in the County Land Office.”
“We’ll find Condor Castle,” Diego exclaimed. “I know it!”
They hurried into the Historical Society. People were already reading and studying at the tables of the hushed, book-lined rooms, and the assistant historian was busy. But as he directed the boys to the map room, he remarked:
“Someone else was in to look at the Alvaro papers. A tall, thin boy. He seemed to be concerned with what papers you had copied, Jupiter. Of course, I didn’t tell him.”
“Skinny!” Jupiter exclaimed when he and Diego were out of earshot. “He’s really worried about what we’re doing.”
“Because he knows all the valuable things you’ve found on other cases,” Diego said, “and he’s afraid you’ll find a treasure for us.”
“I hope we do,” Jupiter said, “but we don’t have much time.”
In the map room, the boys were alone. They found almost fifty maps from around 1846, some of the whole county, and some of just the Rocky Beach area. They didn’t find Condor Castle.
“Here’s a map of just the Alvaro ranch,” Jupiter said.
“Look how big it was then,” Diego said sadly.
“But still no Condor Castle!”
“And that’s all the maps from Don Sebastián’s time.”
“All right,” Jupiter said, refusing to give up, “we’ll look at every map of Rocky Beach no matter how new!”
“Or old!” Diego said.
There weren’t very many modern maps, and only a few from before the 1840s. Condor Castle appeared on none of them. There was nothing for Diego and Jupiter to do but give up and go back to Headquarters in the salvage yard.
“Maybe Bob or Pete will find something,” Jupiter said hopefully.
He led Diego into Headquarters by the main entrance — a large pipe that went under a huge mound of junk and ended at a trap-door in the floor of the hidden mobile home trailer.
“We call this Tunnel Two,” the stocky leader of the Investigators explained as he and Diego crawled through the pipe. “We’ve got other entrances, too, but we use this one the most. The others are for emergencies.”
“Gee!” Diego exclaimed as he emerged through the trap-door into the hidden trailer. He stared around at the desk, telephone, typewriter, files, electronic equipment, dark-room, bird-cages, plaster statues, and all the other tools and souvenirs the boys had collected in their work.
“This is great!”
“I believe we are very adequately equipped,” Jupiter said a little pompously. “We built or gathered all of it ourselves.”
“No wonder you solve tough mysteries so easily!”
“Not always so easily,” Jupiter said glumly. “Finding any clues to the Cone’s Sword seems extremely difficult.”
“Bob or Pete will find something,” Diego assured him.
As they waited impatiently, Diego wandered around the secret headquarters examining everything. He couldn’t see outside because the junk hiding the trailer was piled against its tiny windows. Jupiter sat frowning, his round face not unlike the gloomy bust of Alfred Hitchcock on the filing cabinet behind him. Then the trap-door opened, and Bob came in.
“Nothing!” the Records and Research man said, and dropped into a chair looking as gloomy as Jupiter. “I looked at every book about the county that the library has.”
When Pete finally emerged through the trap-door, the others only had to look at his face.
“If Condor Castle means anything, fellows,” the tall Second Investigator said, “I guess only Don Sebastián and José knew what.”
“We’re at a dead end, First,” Bob concluded.
Diego was near tears. “Don’t give up, fellows! We — ”
Pete sat up alertly. “Shh! Listen!”
For a long moment there was only silence inside the hidden trailer. Then everyone heard it — a faint rattle of metal outside in the salvage yard. It came again, from a slightly different spot, and then there was a sound of tapping.
