his questions about burros, he felt more interested in the little animal. He decided to pay her a visit.
Ascención was in the field with her, refilling her water tub. The moment the burro saw Jupe she trotted eagerly toward him. He patted her neck.
The Mexican had taken off his shirt in the noonday sun. Jupe noticed that his chest and back were the same even brown color as his face. Jupe couldn’t tell if that was Ascención’s own color or if a lot of work outdoors had deepened the man’s naturally brown skin. For sure the Mexican was darker than Jupe. Even with daily swims, Jupe was still a pale Anglo who spent too much time indoors in front of his computer screen.
Jupe gestured at the burro. “Blondie’s no longer. ” He didn’t know the Spanish word for “hobbled,” but Ascención guessed what Jupe meant when he pointed to the burro’s front legs.
“No, that. ” Ascención used the word that seemed to come naturally to him when he talked about Dusty. It was X-rated. “That took the rope off her yesterday evening.”
“Why?”
“He’s not afraid she’ll run away now that you’re here.”
“Me? Why me?”
“She’s grateful to you.”
“What for?”
“She thinks you saved her life. And they are good animals, burros. Very faithful. Very grateful.”
He picked up his bucket and walked away. Jupe went after him, followed by Blondie. But the Mexican refused to answer any more questions. He said he had work to do.
Pete and Bob had caught several trout. Ascención grilled them for lunch. Jupe suddenly recovered from his stomach ache and ate two of them. After all, they were pure protein.
“Let’s walk off those calories,” Jupe said after the meal. “How about it, guys?”
Pete and Bob guessed at once that he wanted to talk to them alone. The three of them set out across the fields to a clump of woods near the lake.
As soon as they were settled in a clearing among the trees, Jupe told them about his call to Hector Sebastian. He pulled his sheet of notes out of his jeans pocket.
“Burros have a very good sense of hearing,” he reported. “Amazingly good. And they’re not like dogs. They don’t recognize people by their smell. Mostly by their voices. They’ll often attach themselves to one person and when they do, they’ll respond at once to that person’s voice.”
“You mean once they fall for you, they’re hooked for life,” Bob said. “Looks like Blondie’s all yours.”
“Knock it off,” Jupe growled. “I bet that’s what the whole moronic crossword contest was about. Dusty was looking for a voice that matched some other guy’s. Some young American who had been a friend to Blondie.”
He explained what Ascención had said.
“Somebody who saved her life at some time. I don’t know how. And I don’t know who that guy was. But when Dusty heard my entry to the competition, he thought my voice was closest to that other person’s. So he edited my tape onto the machine I found in his desk this morning. He kept only the words he needed. Come here, Blondie, whoa, and so on. Then he tried those words out on the burro. But I guess the taped voice didn’t work. Not very well, anyway. So Dusty couldn’t be sure until we got here and Blondie could hear my natural voice. That’s why he was so nervous all through breakfast yesterday. He couldn’t wait to find out. And when it did work — remember how excited he got?”
Pete and Bob were silent for a moment, thinking over what Jupe had said.
“Makes sense so far,” Bob agreed. “But. ”
“Yeah,” Pete put in. “But what’s it all about? Why spend all that dough and waste all that time to find a voice a little Mexican burro thinks she recognizes?”
Jupe shook his head. “Beats me,” he admitted. “But something else bugs me even more than that.”
“What?” Bob asked.
“We know it’s possible,” Jupe explained, “to find two people whose voices sound alike. You thought that was my voice on the tape I found in my mailbox, Pete. But it’s less than one chance in several billion that those two people also look alike.”
He glanced at his page of notes. “And burros also have excellent eyesight,” he went on. “In many ways better than we have. They don’t recognize people only by their voices. They recognize them by sight as well.”
Bob nodded. “Yeah, that does seem to — ” His voice broke off.
The other two guys had heard it too. The sound of footsteps hurrying away, deeper into the woods. Moving as quietly as they could, the Three Investigators set off trying to follow the sound.
But the eavesdropper knew the woods better than they did. They soon lost the trail. They heard no more footsteps. Nothing but the flutter of birds.
They decided to split up and search the whole area separately.
Jupe was the first one back at the clearing. He hadn’t found anyone. A few minutes later Pete joined him. He shook his head when Jupe glanced at him. Then the tall guy sprawled on the grass.
They had to wait another ten minutes for Bob. He had his hands in his pockets and was smiling in the cool, casual way that often meant he knew something the others didn’t.
“You see someone?” Pete asked him. “Or is that classified info?”
“Not a living soul,” Bob told him. He leaned against a tree. “But I did find this.”
He took his right hand out of the pocket of his jeans. He was holding something between his fingers.
Jupe and Pete could see it was a piece of wool about three inches long. The kind of rough wool Mexicans made shawls out of.
The wool was bright purple.
I’m worried about Blondie,“ Dusty said at breakfast the next morning.
Pete looked up from his ham and eggs. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Got her mind on something? Is she moody? Staring into space?”
Jupe kicked him under the table.
Dusty continued as if he hadn’t heard. The rancher was in one of his nervous moods. He had eaten hardly any breakfast. “That burro will soon be in trouble if she stays in that field.”
Jupe had seen the burro for a moment that morning. It seemed to him she was doing fine in her field. Grazing on the long grass, she looked healthy. Her coat was smooth, her eyes bright. She had been outside her shed when Jupe appeared and had galloped to meet him. She could gallop surprisingly fast.
He decided to keep all this to himself. Maybe Dusty would reveal another
