“Well,” Bob said, “we’re here now. I guess we could look around and see if we can find any clues.”
Pete stared at the broken walls and fallen beams of the old barn. “Gosh, it’s some mess. Where do we start?”
“I think,” Bob replied slowly, “Jupe would say first things first. We should look outside the barn for anything that might have been dropped, or maybe for some footprints.”
Pete nodded, and they spread out on either side of the corral in front of the barn. Bent low, and peering at every inch of the soggy ground, they worked their way slowly across the corral towards the entrance to the barn. The days of rain had turned the whole yard into a slick and sticky clay mud. It covered their shoes and made uneasy sucking sounds as they moved.
They met in front of what had once been the barn door. All that remained of it was a charred door frame, twisted and leaning crazily.
“Not even a twig on the ground,” Pete groaned. “The mud’s so deep it’d probably cover anything smaller than a boulder anyway.”
“And I don’t think there would have been any footprints even before the rain. Adobe soil is hard as a rock when it’s dry,” Bob said. “Let’s try inside.”
Inside, the burned barn was a terrible mess of fallen roof timbers, collapsed walls, the remnants of rooms and stalls, and the blackened jumble of the hundreds of valuable items the Alvaros had been going to sell to Uncle Titus. Two of the outer walls had fallen in completely, and the other two were only skeletons. The windows in the standing walls looked like gaping wounds. After days of rain, the stench of the burned debris was terrible. Almost nothing in the barn was recognizable. The boys stood and looked at the confusion.
“How do we find anything in here?” Pete moaned. “I mean, we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
“We’re looking for anything that could give us a clue to who was here and took Pico’s hat,” Bob said, refusing to be so easily daunted. “And you know what Jupe would say — we’ll know it when we see it!”
“Swell,” Pete said, “but just how do we find anything in this wreck, and where do we start to look?”
“We start where the hat was last known to be,” Bob declared, and pointed to the side of the door frame. The front wall was one of the two walls still standing. “Look, the peg Pico hung his hat on is still there on what’s left of that wall.”
“What’s left of the peg,” Pete muttered, but followed Bob to the wall.
A row of three pegs just inside the door had been burned to stubs, but they were still visible on a blackened wall stud. Bob and Pete began to search the ground beneath the pegs.
The floor was a jumbled litter of wood ashes and burned debris. Aside from roof tiles, it was hard to be sure of what anything was. The boys found hundreds of small, broken, and blackened pieces as they moved away from the wall in a widening circle, but nothing that seemed to mean anything, or belong to anyone except the Alvaros.
Pete finally sat down on a fallen roof beam. “If there’s a clue, it needs a sign on it,” he said.
“I guess you’re right, Second,” Bob admitted reluctantly. “There are so many pieces of broken — ”
“Hey, someone’s coming,” Pete said. He got up and hurried towards the door. “It must be Jupe and Diego. Ju — ” He jumped back out of sight against the burned walls, his voice a sharp whisper. “Bob! It’s three guys!
“Strangers!” Bob crouched behind a mound of debris and peered out the door.
“They’re coming towards the barn! I don’t like the look of them. Quick, over there under those beams!”
They scurried quickly but silently to one side of the barn. Here, the side wall had fallen in over some roof beams that leaned up against the front wall. Underneath the beams was a small, dark, triangular space. The boys crawled into it, then lay on the ground and looked out. Careful to make no sound, they barely breathed.
Moments later the three men came into the barn.
“Wow,” Pete whispered uneasily, “they look mean.”
The three men stood just inside the door, looking around at the ruins. One was a big, black-haired man with a thick moustache and three days’ growth of black stubble on his heavy face. The second was small and skinny, with a narrow, rat-like face and mean little eyes. The third was fat and bald with a big red nose and broken front teeth. They were all dirty and rough looking, and dressed like saddle-tramp cowboys in worn jeans, muddy cowboy boots, work shirts, and greasy, battered Stetson hats. Their rough hands and faces looked as if they hadn’t been washed for a month.
None of the men looked happy as they stared at the ruins.
“We ain’t gonna find nothin’ in here,” the small, skinny man said. “How we find anythin’ here, Cap?”
“We gotta find ’em,” said the big, black-haired man with the moustache.
“No way, Cap,” the fat one said in a high, squeaky voice. He shook his big head back and forth. “No way, no sir.”
“Just you all look, you hear?” Cap said. “They gotta be right aroun’ here.”
“Sure, Cap,” the fat one squeaked. He began to kick at the debris, peering expectantly at the floor as if whatever they were looking for would appear any second.
The small, rat-like man began to walk around looking here and there, but not too hard. The big one, Cap, swore at him.
“Get down and look, Pike, you ain’t pickin’ daisies!”
The skinny Pike glared at Cap for a moment, then bent lower and began to search harder. Cap turned towards the fat one.
“You, too, Tulsa. We’ll each take a section, you got that?”
Tulsa immediately dropped to his hands and knees in the ashes and began to crawl around with his fat face almost touching the floor. Cap and Pike stared at him in disgust for a moment, and then fanned out to search on either side of the leaning door frame.
“You sure they was lost in here, Cap?” Pike asked.
“Sure, I’m sure. We had to jump the ignition to get out of here that day, didn’t we? Had to go get another set later.”
Twice as the three men searched the ruins, one of them passed close to where Bob and Pete lay hidden and holding their breath. The big, black-haired Cap was so close the boys could have touched his boots. Pete gulped, and silently pointed to a thin-bladed, heavy-hilted knife sheathed in Cap’s boot!
“I don’t know,” the skinny Pike said after a time. “Who says they wasn’t lost somewhere’s else before?”
“We had ’em to drive here, didn’t we, stupid?” Cap said in disgust.
“Okay, so maybe they got dropped outside!” Pike shot back.
The skinny little man sat down on a beam right over Bob and Pete! With another ugly-looking sheath knife he began to whittle at a burned splinter of wood.
“Okay,” Cap finally conceded, “maybe you’re right. I guess we ain’t gonna find ’em in here without a light anyhow. Let’s go look where we was parked that day, and if we don’t find ’em, we’ll go get some lights.”
As the boys tried not even to breathe, Pike jumped up and hurried out of the ruined barn with the other two. Bob and Pete listened for a time without moving. They could hear the three men talking and arguing out in the muddy yard. Bob and Pete waited. Then there was silence outside. Cautiously, they crept out from under the collapsed wall and slipped to the door. The yard was empty. Bob turned to Pete with his eyes gleaming.
“I don’t know who they are, Second,” he said, “but I’ve got a hunch they were here the day of the fire and probably had something to do with Pico’s hat! I think they lost some car keys!”
“That’s what it sounded like,” Pete agreed. “They look like cowboys. Maybe they work for Mr. Norris!”
Bob added, “They sure want to find those keys, and that means the keys are dangerous to them — or to someone! Let’s look hard!”
“We already did, Records,” Pete pointed out. “Those guys couldn’t find them, either.”
“They didn’t look very hard, and now we know what we’re looking for,” Bob said. “I saw a burned rake over there — go get it! We’ll rake up the debris around the peg!”
Pete found the rake in a corner. Its handle had been burned half away, but the metal part was still usable. He began to rake through the ashes and debris. Every time the rake struck something metallic, he and Bob bent over excitedly to examine the object. Their search was a little easier than before because the day had brightened, letting more light into the roofless barn. The clouds were breaking up and patches of blue showed overhead.
Finally Bob cried, “Pete!” and pointed down. Something glinted in the light.
