“Why not?”

“Search me. Maybe he just doesn’t like Yankees.”

“Gotcha,” Pete said cheerfully.

Moving lightly On the balls of his feet, he started past the young man. The Mexican swung at him. If his fist had landed on Pete’s face, it would have knocked him flat. It never reached him. As the man struck, Pete hit him hard just below the shoulder with a knife-hand strike, the shuto-uchi. The leather-covered arm stopped in mid-swing as though paralyzed. Then it fell slowly to the man’s side. He grabbed his own shoulder with his other hand and faced Pete.

Pete waited, his legs slightly bent, his hands flat in the ready posture.

The Mexican looked at him, startled. He was still gripping his own shoulder, trying to knead some life back into it.

Pete raised his right hand, ready to chop at him again.

The man shook his head. “Okay,” he muttered in Spanish. “Okay. Enough. I’m not going to get my neck broken. Not even for a million pesos.”

He was still shaking his head as he walked away.

At that moment Jupe burped. The tension broke as Bob and Pete hooted with laughter. Jupe’s face burned.

“Chicken tacos staging a comeback?” Bob teased.

“Hey, let’s move it,” Pete said. “Our bus is ready to go.”

The Three Investigators climbed onto the bus. They hadn’t seen the woman with the purple shawl in the cafe. But there she was again in a back seat.

They watched her take several peso bills out of her purse and hand them out the window beside her. A brown hand reached up and grabbed them. As the hand closed over the money, the guys caught a glimpse of the sleeve of a leather jacket.

They settled into their seats as the bus started forward.

It was the last leg of their long trip. All three guys fell into an uneasy doze that lasted all night. They found it difficult to sleep much. Every village they passed through had concrete mounds a foot high stretching right across the main street. The bumps kept people from driving too fast through the town — and from sleeping on buses.

They arrived in Lareto around nine o’clock in the morning. The bus stopped in a small square with trees and benches grouped around a bandstand.

The guys had phoned Dusty from the border. He was waiting for them in his Jeep, obviously pleased to see them. But he seemed strangely impatient, too. As he helped them stow their bags in the Jeep, he kept saying it wouldn’t be long before they got to the ranch — as though it couldn’t be too soon to suit him.

As they drove out of the square, Jupe turned and looked behind him.

The woman in the purple shawl was standing on the sidewalk staring after them. Jupe waved at her in a friendly way. She didn’t wave back.

He couldn’t blame her for being sore at them. The way he figured it, she had given several thousand pesos to that Mexican in the leather jacket to stop the Three Investigators from getting to Lareto.

And here they were.

They drove for two hours before they reached the ranch. Most of the time they were on a dirt road that wound up through wooded hills. Ahead of them in the distance they kept glimpsing a range of tall mountains. Dusty explained they were part of the Sierra Madre.

That reminded Bob of an old movie he had seen on television. “That’s where Humphrey Bogart and his pals found the treasure of the Sierra Madre, isn’t it?” he asked with a smile.

Dusty didn’t seem to realize Bob was kidding. He shook his head seriously. “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was just a movie,” he said. “There’s no treasure in those mountains.”

Bob made a face at Pete in the back seat.

Soon after that they reached the ranch. The ranch house was a long, low wooden building standing in open grassland that sloped down to a lake. The only signs of life were some horses grazing in an open field.

Pete looked at the lake. He guessed it was about two or three miles long and maybe half a mile wide. Should be a great place for fishing, he thought, glad he had brought his rod and tackle with him. He couldn’t see any houses on the other side of the lake, only a clump of trees. But way beyond the trees he could make out what looked like the tower of an old church. So probably people did live over there.

Dusty led the way across the porch and into a large, pleasant room with an open fireplace and comfortable chairs.

“I guess you’re hungry, aren’t you?” he asked.

“You’ve read my mind,” Pete agreed. Dusty clapped his hands and almost immediately a Mexican man appeared through the archway at the end of the room.

“This is Ascención,” Dusty said. “He’s the cook around here.” He didn’t bother to introduce the three visitors by their names.

Ascención was about fifty, sturdily built, with a deep brown craggy face and straight black hair. He was wearing cowboy boots and jeans and a denim shirt. He looked more like a ranch hand than a cook, Jupe thought.

Dusty spoke rapidly to him in Spanish, Jupe caught the words “breakfast” and “at once.” Ascención nodded. His brown eyes were so dark, they looked almost black. Bob noticed that he never looked directly at Dusty. The tension between them reminded him of rival rock stars.

Ascención was a great cook. He soon brought in a big platter of ham and eggs, hash browns, and hot rolls. Pete and Bob settled down to everything with healthy appetites. Jupe stuck to the ham and eggs.

Proteins were okay with Keil Halfebrot. Carbohydrates were the killers.

Dusty sat at the long table with them but didn’t eat anything. He kept picking the dough out of a roll in a nervous way. He seemed to be waiting for his three guests to finish so he could get on with something. Something that was worrying him.

“Had enough?” he asked as soon as Pete had swallowed his last mouthful.

“Yeah. It was great,” Pete said. He could have eaten another whole plateful, but Dusty had already started toward the door.

“Come on,” he called. “I’ll show you over the ranch.”

Outside, he quickly led the way around the end of the house to a wide fenced-in field. On one side of the field was a small wooden shed.

“Like to see my burro,” Dusty said. He wasn’t asking them. He hurried the three guys toward the shed. Before they reached it a small donkey, what Mexicans call a burro, stumbled out of the shed and skittered shyly away from them.

Except for a black line down its back and across its shoulders, it was so light-skinned it was almost white. It had huge ears, which it kept twitching nervously, and a long tufted tail. Its front legs had been hobbled with a rope so that, although it seemed anxious to run away, it could move only with short, unsteady steps.

Pete, who liked all animals on sight, started quickly forward. He held out his hand to pat the burro’s neck, Dusty stopped him.

“Don’t touch her and don’t say anything,” he told the three guys in a low, urgent voice. “She’s very young. Less than two years old. And she hasn’t been tamed yet.”

The burro had managed to get several yards away by then. She kicked out suddenly with her hind legs as though warning them not to come any closer.

“Quite a lot of wild burros live in the mountains. This one strayed onto my land a couple of months ago and I decided to keep her,” Dusty explained. “I call her Blondie. You can guess why.”

He looked at Pete. “You can try calling her now if you like,” he said. “Just say, ‘Come here, Blondie.’ Let’s see what she does.”

Here he goes again, Pete thought resentfully, telling us what to say like we were third graders. But Pete really liked the little animal, so he played along.

“Come here, Blondie,” he called in a gentle voice. “Come here.”

The burro laid her long ears back so that they were almost touching her neck. Pete knew from his experience with horses that this meant Blondie was wary. Or angry. He called her again, but all she did was hobble a few more feet away from him.