The cowboy shook his head. “Not a family. Only a man, Danish, but he was white all right. Sven Pedersen was his name but everyone called him ‘Lucky Loon.’ The name fitted him on two counts. Lucky because he struck it rich so often, and he certainly was ‘loony’ if that means crazy.”
“What did he do?” Mary asked, her blue eyes wide and a little terrified.
“Sven Pedersen had a secret—Dad said—and that was why he took to hoarding all the wealth he got out of his gold and turquoise mines. My father was a boy then. He says he hasn’t any doubt but that old rock house up yonder is plastered with gold and turquoise.”
Dora asked in amazement, “Doesn’t anybody know? Hasn’t anyone ever climbed up there to see?”
“No one that I’ve heard tell about,” Jerry said. “No one cared to risk his life doing it, I reckon.” Then, seeming to feel that he had sufficiently aroused his listeners’ curiosity, the cowboy went on to explain. “As Sven Pedersen grew old, he got queerer and queerer. He took a notion that he was going to be killed for his money, so after he’d built that rock house, he shut himself up in it, and if any intruder so much as rode through that gateway in the rocks over there, bang would go his gun and the horse would drop dead. He was sure-shot all right, Sven Pedersen was.”
Dick Farley’s large eyes glanced from the high house out to the gate in the wall of rock. “I bet the rider of the dead horse scuttled away mighty quick,” he said.
“I reckon he did,” Jerry agreed when Dora exclaimed in a tone of horror: “He must have shot a man once anyway. Mary and I saw the half-buried skeleton of one out by the gate. We were sure we did.”
“Maybe so,” Jerry went on explaining. “You see no one could tell whether the Lucky Loon was in his house or out of it; no one ever saw him in the door or on the ledge, but they found out soon enough when they heard his gun bang.”
“How did he get his food and water?” Dick asked.
“Maybe there’s a spring on the mountain,” Dora suggested.