The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain Read online

  “I did ask Mr. Architrave about that,” he admitted, “but—”

  “But he hemmed and hawed and started to bluster, which should have tipped you off right then and there. He’d got his wires crossed somehow and was ashamed to say so. Once he finds out where he went wrong he’ll weasel out from under and blame you, so why don’t you stop while you’re still ahead?”

  “I had an awful time getting this backhoe up here,” he muttered.

  Dittany looked down at the churned-up track the machine had left. “Yes, and you ran right through the Plantain-leaved Pussy-toes. Look, do you see that big Boulder over there?”

  “Clearly and distinctly. What about it?”

  “You start up that ugly mess of metal, eh, and head straight as a die for that boulder. When you get exactly three feet beyond the ash tree—”

  “Which is the ash tree?”

  “What did they teach you in percolation school, for heaven’s sake? How can anybody not know what an ash tree looks like?”

  “I know perfectly well what an ash tree looks like. They have bunches of orange berries on them. And you can pick off a twig and use it to keep witches away,” he added with a thoughtful inflection that Dittany chose to ignore. “They have feather-compound leaves, visible buds, and no glands.”

  “They don’t have leaves in March,” she replied primly, “nor do they have orange berries because the birds ate them over the winter. So why don’t you leave your rotten old backhoe sitting there till the buds come out and the glands don’t, eh? Then you’ll know where to—”

  “Get down!”

  The man from the Water Department flung Dittany behind him as an arrow whizzed through the air and buried itself in the ash tree. She screamed, partly from shock, partly because she’d landed against something hard and sharp on the backhoe. Ethel began to bay and the man to yell.

  “Hey, you over there! Watch where you’re shooting.”

  Dittany stared up at the long shaft, still quivering from its impact with the tree. “That’s a hunting arrow,” she said shakily. “It could kill a moose.”

  “If we’d been a few steps closer, it could have gone straight through the pair of us,” said her protector even more shakily. “What the hell kind of town is this, anyhow? You all carry bows and arrows like Robin Hood and his merry murderers. Do you take pot shots at each other for fun, or what?”

  “No.” Dittany wet her lips. “We’re drilled from the cradle up never to shoot unless we’re sure of a clear target. We never have accidents.”

  “Then maybe this was no accident, eh? Look, Miss—”

  “Henbit,” she replied automatically. “Dittany Henbit.”

  “Miss Henbit, I don’t know about you but I’m either mad as hell or scared as hell, and I’m not sure which. I’m going to have a look over that ridge. Can you hold the dog back here?”

  “I’ll try. Be careful.”

  Dittany clung to Ethel’s collar and watched him crawl forward, using whatever cover he could find, until he disappeared over the top of the ridge. No other arrow followed, and she let out her breath at last in an immense sigh of relief. That must have been simply a wild shot, then the bowman would have heard the yelling and barking and held fire. But why hadn’t he or she heard them earlier, arguing over the backhoe? The shot couldn’t have come from far away or the arrow wouldn’t have penetrated the tree so deeply.

  Ethel whimpered, and Dittany took a firmer grip on her collar. The dog was being oddly well behaved, now she thought of it. Normally Ethel would have gone bounding up to a hunter and spoiled his shot if she’d got the chance. Why hadn’t she done so this time? Either she’d been too interested in the argument over the backhoe, or the wind hadn’t carried the hunter’s scent over the ridge, or else she’d recognized it as that of somebody she knew and disliked. Ethel had a few unfavorite people, and with those she could be remarkably snooty.

  The arrow had stopped jiggling. Dittany scrutinized the shaft and was surprised to see a solid inch-wide black band above the feathers. Everybody who shot in and around Lobelia Falls had some sort of mark on his or her arrows to distinguish them from anyone else’s. They all knew each other’s marks in the same way that one lobsterman knows another’s pots by the shape and color of the buoys. Dittany’s, for example, had a narrow band of pale green next to the feathers to show she was a member of the Grub-and-Stake, and three rings of pale blue above it. The pale blue identified her as a Henbit and the three rings indicated that she was the third generation of her family to belong to the club. In some families the marks got far more complicated, but they were easy enough to read when one knew the code. Never in her life, though, had she seen such a simple, ominous mark as this. A hunting arrow shot from a bow with a 65-pound pull could be a deadlier weapon than a rifle bullet. That one black band made her very uncomfortable indeed.

  The man from the Water Department was gone what seemed like an awfully long time. Dittany, more uneasy by the moment, was inching her way out from behind the backhoe and wondering how insane she’d be to go and look for him when he came stumbling over the ridge, his face a ghastly mask.

  “What happened?” she cried. “Did you see who shot the arrow?”

  “No.” He sat down on a stump and wiped a shaking hand across his mouth. “I saw Mr. Architrave. Pinned to the ground. With an arrow clean through him, back to front. Excuse me, I think I’m going to be—”

  He was. At last the sounds of distress from behind the backhoe ceased and he came back, wiping his face again.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. “Didn’t know I was such a sissy. Miss Henbit, you’ll have to go for the police, eh? Take the dog just in case.”

  “You’re not staying here alone?”

  “What else can I do? It’s not right to leave him.”

  “But what if the archer comes back?”

  His face twisted into a wry attempt at a grin. “That’ll be my tough luck, won’t it? For God’s sake, could you hurry?”

  Chapter 2

  LUCKILY NO PLACE WAS far from any other place in Lobelia Falls. Three minutes and twenty-seven seconds after she’d left the Enchanted Mountain, Dittany was at the police station, panting out her story to Sergeant MacVicar.

  “And you say John Architrave is lying on that bleak mountainside pierced through the heart by an arrow black and dire,” said the sergeant, who sometimes beguiled the duller stretches by reading Arethusa Monk’s books.

  “I said Mr. Architrave was dead,” Dittany replied. “I don’t know what part of him the arrow went through because that man from the Water Department didn’t tell me and I’m only assuming it had a wide black band around the shaft because the one that almost hit us did.”

  “But nobody’s arrow has a black band around the shaft,” said Sergeant MacVicar. He was a past president of the Male Archers’ Target and Game Shooting Association and ought to know if anyone did.

  “Somebody’s does because if I’d been two feet taller it might have parted my hair for me,” Dittany insisted. “Don’t you think we ought to get back there as fast as we can?”

  “M’yes, that would appear to be the judicious course. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just ask Mrs. MacVicar to step in and mind the phone.”

  This was no big deal since the police station was situated in what might otherwise have been the MacVicars’ front parlor. Mrs. MacVicar entered, having first shed her apron, for she was punctilious about maintaining the dignity of her husband’s office, shook her neat and comely head, and urged all speed as naturally she was avid for further information.

  “Some hunter from the States, no doubt,” was her theory. Mrs. MacVicar tended to lay any local disruption of law and order to hunters from the States, of whom in fact Lobelia Falls had very few. “And you say it was Minerva Oakes’s boarder who found him?”

  “I said it was a new man from the Water Department,” Dittany replied in surprise. “I’ve no idea where he lives. I don’t even know his name.”

  “Frankland,�
�� said Mrs. MacVicar promptly. “Tall, broad-shouldered chap about thirty years old with an affable though somewhat unpolished manner. Curly reddish-brown hair, blue eyes, ruddy complexion, clean-shaven—”

  “And a weak stomach,” Dittany finished to show she wasn’t entirely unobservant. “He was being sick all over the mountain.”

  “Ah, well, your average layman is not hardened to vile atrocities,” said Sergeant MacVicar as if he were in the habit of finding bodies on the station doorstep with the morning paper. “Mother, see if you can get hold of Dr. Peagrim and explain that he’s wanted up there as soon as possible. We’ll be on the lookout for him.”

  He accoutered himself with handcuffs and a number of other things he couldn’t imaginably need, bowed Dittany into the police car, and off they roared, although not very far, as it was necessary to get out and walk once they reached the periphery of the Hunneker Land Grant. Frankland ran down to meet them, looking a shade less green by now, and managed to lead Sergeant MacVicar to the corpse without further upheaval. Both men appeared to take it for granted Dittany would either go on home or cower beside the backhoe, but she tagged along a discreet step or two in the rear, wishing she hadn’t been quite so rude about the now demised Mr. Architrave.

  When she saw the form spread-eagled on the ground, though, she lost any sense of personal concern. It simply wasn’t real, that fat black dummy with the black-banded shaft sticking out a few inches between the shoulder blades.

  “John was a heavy-set man and he has on a thick overcoat,” mused Sergeant MacVicar, “yet the arrow went through him like a hot knife through butter. That was not done with a dainty lady’s bow.” He smiled a bit at the one Dittany was still carrying, though in fact it was no paltry weapon. “A hunting bow with at least a 65-pound pull and probably more, I should say. It would take a strong man to draw that.”

  “Not necessarily,” Dittany started to argue. “I know some women who—” She shut up. This was no time to advertise any friend’s prowess.

  “And you saw no sign of anybody, Mr. Frankland, if I am correct in calling you so?” the sergeant inquired politely.

  “That’s right, Frankland. Most people call me Ben. No, the only sign of life I saw was that arrow that just missed us over by the backhoe. I expect Miss Henbit told you about that, eh?”

  “Yes, she did, and where is the arrow now?”

  “It’s still in the ash tree,” Dittany replied. “It went in pretty deep. I noticed because I’m so used to chasing arrows,” she half apologized because after all it had been rather brave of Ben Frankland to go over that ridge not knowing what he’d find, even if he perhaps hadn’t then realized how dangerous a longbow can be.

  Sergeant MacVicar shook his head. “Anybody who shoots no better than that has no business out here. What puzzles me is why he shot more than once. Did you make no outcry?”

  “I yelled my bloody head off when that arrow zinged past us,” said Frankland.

  “And Ethel barked and I’m sure I must have screamed,” Dittany added. “We hadn’t been exactly silent beforehand, either. We were having a few words about whether he should be digging up the wildflowers.”

  “Ah,” said Sergeant MacVicar. “Then it would seem that the miscreant shot poor old John first, by accident or so we must piously hope. Hearing voices in the distance, he then loosed a second arrow in the hope of frightening you off so that he could escape unseen.”

  “But why bother? We never dreamed Mr. Architrave had been shot. If it hadn’t been for that other arrow coming at us, we wouldn’t have known anybody else was up here.”

  “John may have cried out when he was struck.”

  “If he did, we didn’t hear him.”

  “Ah, but the bowman would not know that, would he? Being on the opposite side of the ridge, eh, he would have heard John more loudly and you more softly, if you catch the drift of my argument. It would not occur to him that with you the reverse would be true. The only other explanation that occurs to me is that the hunter never knew he’d hit John and was merely shooting at random for practice, which it would appear he sorely needed. But in that case, why did he not go looking for his arrows?”

  There was an uncomfortable little silence. The three of them looked at each other, then Sergeant MacVicar said in a firm departmental tone, “In any event it was none of our folk. Nobody in Lobelia Falls has arrows like these.”

  “If you want my opinion for what it’s worth,” said Frankland, “it was some drunk who came up off the highway.”

  He gestured at the ribbon of asphalt that stretched from the back side of the Hunneker Land Grant toward the distant horizon with “nothing to break the monotony but a farmhouse or two. “Probably saw what looked like a deserted area and thought he’d get in a spot of quiet poaching. Mr. Architrave had said he’d meet me here, as I mentioned to Miss Henbit, and I’d been wondering where he was. It must have been just that he came up one side of the ridge while I was on the other. With that squatty build and his black overcoat, I suppose a person might have mistaken him for a black bear if they didn’t look too hard, eh?”

  Sergeant MacVicar nodded profoundly. “That might well happen.”

  “So the hunter could have shot him sort of accidentally on purpose as you might say, then maybe got excited and let off a wild shot just for the heck of it, heard us yelling and realized what he’d done, and hightailed it out of here.”

  “You did not hear a car drive off?”

  “Not that I recall, but we mightn’t have noticed with the highway not all that far away. Anyway, Miss Henbit and I were both sort of in shock for a second there, I guess, after that arrow came at us. Then we chewed the fat about her holding the dog while I went to see what was up, and I took my time getting over the ridge, I don’t mind telling you. I was none too keen on stopping another of those arrows like the tree did. And when I spotted Mr. Architrave, I—well, it hit me right in the guts, if you want to know. I guess I didn’t put up much of a show as a hero, eh? Anyhow, as soon as I could pull myself together, I went back and asked Miss Henbit to go for the police.”

  “As was right and proper,” said Sergeant MacVicar. “This is exactly how you found John? You didn’t try to move him?”

  “God, no!” Frankland mopped his face again. “I wouldn’t have touched him with a ten-foot pole. I could see there was nothing to be done, though I suppose we should have got a doctor anyway.”

  “A call is out for Dr. Peagrim,” Sergeant MacVicar replied rather grandly. “If Mrs. Stumm has not started her twins, he should be along any time now. Your theory has merit, Mr. Frankland. I shall examine the terrain for clues. It would be advisable for you to suspend any further activity in the area for the time being.”

  “Yes, but what’s this activity for?” cried Dittany. “Mr. Architrave gave Mr. Frankland a plot plan with red dots on it where leaching tests were supposed to be done. Can you imagine why?”

  Sergeant MacVicar pondered, then shook his majestic head. “I cannot. John explained nothing to you, Mr. Frankland?”

  “No, just told me to bring the backhoe up here and dig where the dots were. I figured it wasn’t my place to ask questions, being new on the job. I thought maybe he’d tell me when he met me here. Say, you know, he must have heard me trying to jockey that darned backhoe up the slope. I wonder why he didn’t come over. Of course he wouldn’t have known which spot I meant to dig at first. See, he’d given me this plot plan.”

  Frankland pulled out the map of the Hunneker Land Grant for MacVicar’s inspection. “I was just starting to work on this spot here when Miss Henbit came along and told me I was acting in violation of the Conservation Committee so I decided I’d better lay off till I’d made sure I wasn’t in the wrong place, though I didn’t see how I could be. If Mr. Architrave had come over I could have checked with him. Might have saved his life, eh?”

  Sergeant MacVicar perched a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles on the impressive Highland sweep of his nose and studied the map. “Yo
u were apparently at the indicated place, but I am as puzzled as Dittany with regard to John’s reason for sending you here. Mrs. MacVicar’s Cousin Maude’s oldest son Clinton has endeavored without success ever since last June to get a percolation test done on some land he wants to build on and others have similar tales of woe stemming from John’s dilatory habits. You must know, Mr. Frankland, that, while Lobelia Falls has thus far rejected a town sewer as being pretentious and citified, we are very strict about proper septage and leaching beds. Percolation tests are an essential prelude to any construction project, but as no construction would ever be planned up here, John’s reason for ordering these particular tests eludes me. I am reluctantly forced to the conclusion that poor old John, whom we have always valued more for the rectitude of his character than for the strength of his intellect, had finally, as my irreverent grandson would put it, popped his cork. Dittany, would you be good enough to explain to the ladies at the club that Mrs. MacVicar is unavoidably detained on official business?”

  “Oh my gosh!” gasped Dittany. “What time is it?”

  “Half past two. You are on the Tea Committee this month, and you have already been late twice in a row.” Sergeant MacVicar’s cork, at least, was firmly in place.

  Dittany sped for Applewood Avenue without even pausing to say good-by.

  Chapter 3

  THE HOUSE ON APPLEWOOD Avenue had become Dittany’s more or less by default when her mother remarried and moved to Vancouver. Her new stepfather had offered to include his wife’s only offspring in a package deal, but Dittany had refused. She was very fond of Bert, but she had no desire to move.

  Whereas the former Mrs. Henbit had always been a goer, Dittany herself was a natural-born stayer. Lobelia Falls was where she belonged. From the time she could remember, she had participated wholeheartedly in community life. At five years of age she’d pranced around the kindergarten’s field day maypole with a pair of pink crepe paper butterfly wings pinned to her yellow organdie back. At eight she’d marched with the Brownies in the Dominion Day parade. At eleven she’d picked up discarded Molson’s Ale bottles and Hatfield’s Potato Chip wrappers for six hours without a break during the Girl Guides’ Annual Roadside Cleanup Day. At fifteen she’d whanged a mean glockenspiel in the regional high school band.