The Mystery of Monster Mountain

Anna did not join the boys for lunch. Instead. she went into her office and closed the door.
“Why is she that upset?” said Bob. “She can get another key, or another lock, or whatever she needs to get into her safe deposit box.”
Jupe could only shrug, and the boys ate in silence. They hastily washed their dishes, then went out into the back yard. Jupe paused and stared at the clean-swept earth, which now showed the footprints of everyone who had gone back and forth from the pool site.
 “Ho, Jupe!”
Hans was calling from the edge of Joe Havemeyer’s excavation. The boys heard a vigorous pounding. Someone was hammering at the bottom of the future swimming pool.
Jupe, Pete, and Bob hurried over and looked down. Konrad was in the hole, pounding nails into planks to make the forms that would hold the poured concrete.
“Did you find out anything?” asked Hans. Konrad stopped hammering and waited.
“We’ve been looking for Cousin Anna’s key,” said Jupe. “I’m afraid we didn’t find it. Now we can concentrate on Havemeyer. I’m sure we’ll be able to get some information about him for you. Bob has to make a telephone call. Where is Havemeyer, by the way?”
Hans pointed toward the top of the ski slope. “He has taken his gun and some things in a knapsack and has gone up there. He said he had work to do in the high meadow and he will come back later.”
The Three Investigators left the brothers and walked down the drive. They turned right on the village street, and soon came to the little gas station where Hans and Konrad had asked for directions the day before. The inquisitive attendant was nowhere to be seen, and the place appeared to be closed. There was a telephone booth on one corner of the property. Bob stepped inside, closed the door, and placed a call to his father at the newspaper office.
“Well?” said Pete, when Bob emerged from the phone booth.
“We’re in luck.” Bob reported. “I got the standard lecture about calling him when he’s at work. but he does know a newspaperman who lives in Reno, and he’ll get in touch with him and see what he can find out about Havemeyer. He said I should call him tomorrow night after he’s home.”
“Good enough.” said Jupiter.
The boys strolled back up the village street past the Slalom Inn, then went on down the road toward the Sky Village Campground.
“This vacation isn’t exactly what I expected,” said Pete. “We were going to camp out and hike and fish. Instead we wind up sleeping on the floor in the inn and eating Cousin Anna’s home cooking. If it were a little foggy, I’d think we were back in Rocky Beach.”
“We can camp out, I suppose,” said Bob. “We could move our tent down here this afternoon. Hans and Konrad probably wouldn’t come. They’re too nervous about Cousin Anna’s husband. But we can do it.”
Jupe grinned. “Aren’t you afraid of the bears?” he asked.
“That bear didn’t bother us last night,” Bob pointed out. “He was only after food.”
 “But something bothered Mr. Jensen,” Jupe reminded him. “What could it have been? And why did Havemeyer sweep away the tracks this morning?”
The three boys went around a bend in the road and the campground lay before them. It consisted of five stone firepits in the ground, and an equal number of redwood picnic tables. To the right was the bed of a small stream. It was almost dry. Only a trickle of water ran down through the rocks. Beyond the campground a path twisted away through the brush.
Pete looked at the creek and ran his hand through his hair. “I can see what Joe Havemeyer meant about water being a problem here,” he said. “If we move our gear down, we’ll have to bring water from the inn.”
“There doesn’t seem to be much point to that,” said Jupiter. “Besides, I’d like to stay close to the inn, at least until we get more information about Havemeyer. There are too many odd things about him. And the attack on Mr. Jensen… ”
“That couldn’t have been Havemeyer,” said Bob. “We could see Havemeyer inside the inn at the time Jensen was hit.”
“No. It couldn’t have been Havemeyer. But something fishy is going on at the inn. I’d like to know what it is.”
There was a rustling in the bushes behind Jupe. All three boys jumped.
“Scare you?” asked an amused voice. “Sorry about that”
Jupe spun around. The man who ran the gas station in Sky Village emerged from a clump of wild lilac. He was busily stuffing a wad of muddy, crumpled paper into a burlap sack.
“You boys a little bear-shy?” he asked. His keen eyes twinkled. “Hear you had a scare at the inn last night.”
“How… how did you know?” asked Jupe.
“Mr. Jensen stopped by this morning to buy some gas,” explained the man. “I noticed he had a stiff neck, so I asked what was the matter. I kind of like to find out about people. He was madder ’n a hornet. Claimed somebody gave him a rabbit punch while he was trying to take a picture of a bear.”
“So far as we know, that’s what happened,” said Bob. “Mr. Havemeyer thinks it was a second bear.”
“Interesting way for a bear to behave,” said the man. “Still, you can’t tell, and we’ve had a lot of bears in the village this year. Always do in the dry years. They raid everybody’s trash cans. I always let them alone. That way I don’t have any grief.”
The man surveyed the campground. “That’s better,” he announced. “A couple came in here from the city last week and made an awful mess. Paper towels all over creation and orange peels in the creek. Makes you lose your faith in people.”
 “Are you responsible for the campground?” asked Bob.
“Not really,” said the man, “but it’s about the only thing around here that brings in business in the summer, and I like to sell gas. Campers tell one another about the conditions in the different campgrounds. If this place got a bad name, I could close up my station and starve from May until the snow flies.”
“I see,” said Bob.
“My name’s Richardson, by the way,” said the man. “Charlie Richardson, only they call me Gabby.” He chuckled. “I wonder why they do that.”
Pete laughed. “I wonder, too,” he said. He held out his hand. “I’m Pete Crenshaw and this is Jupiter Jones. My pal with the glasses is Bob Andrews.”
Gabby Richardson said he was pleased to meet the boys, and shook hands all around.
“You thinking of moving your camp down here?” he asked. “I saw when I passed Anna’s place that you had your tent out under the trees.”
“Actually, we slept inside last night,” said Jupe. “After the bears raided the trash, Mr. Havemeyer thought it would be better.”
Gabby Richardson laughed. “Easy knowing Anna Schmid’s new husband hasn’t been on Monster Mountain very long if he’s spooked by a bear or two.”
“Monster Mountain?” echoed Pete.
“Yep. Oh, I guess for the benefit of you tourists I ought to call it Mount Lofty, like it says on the maps. But when I was a kid, there were just five families living here, and we called it Monster Mountain.” He pointed toward a watchtower which was barely visible on the high slopes toward the north. “See that fire tower? It’s abandoned now, but when it was used it was officially the Monster Mountain tower.”
Pete sat down at one of the picnic tables. “Any reason why they called it that?” he asked.
Gabby Richardson sat next to Pete and leaned back against the table. “When I was young,” he said, “the grown folks used to tell us there were monsters on the mountain — giants and ogres who lived in caves and ate kids who stayed out past dark.”
Bob laughed. “That sounds like a story some mother made up to keep her kids in line.”
“Probably,” agreed Richardson, “but we believed every word of it, and what the grown-ups didn’t tell us, we made up ourselves. We scared each other half to death telling how terrible creatures came out on nights when there was a full moon and prowled around houses, looking for ways to get in. An old trapper lived here once, and he swore he’d found the footprints of some huge man in the snow high up near the glacier. Said it was a barefoot man. That was pretty silly. A man would freeze his toes off running barefoot up there.”