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  “Worth a try,” Rudy said, trying to keep a straight face. “Okaaay. Got it. And next week you’re going to take a crack at Princess Di?”

  That really broke Barney up. Ty laughed, too, but it was clear that he didn’t think it was all that funny. So after a minute or so Rudy cooled it.

  “Hey, chill out, Crookshank,” he said to Barney, who was still laughing. “I have news with a capital N. Wait until I tell you what I was talking about with…” He nodded in the direction that Heather had disappeared.

  Barney stopped laughing immediately. Rudy waited until he had their complete attention before he said, “How would you two dudes like to give Heather Hanrahan private riding lessons? With my help, of course.”

  Ty snorted. “Riding lessons? What kind of a hairball idea is that? I don’t know anything about riding horses.” He stopped suddenly and looked at Barney, who was nodding.

  “Yeah,” Barney said. “Applesauce. Applesauce would be great for a beginner.”

  “Sure,” Rudy said. “She’d be perfect. As long as she doesn’t see any barrels.”

  Ty was looking confused. “Hey, wait a minute. Would you two dweebs mind telling me what language you’re speaking?”

  Explaining something to Ty made a nice change, because usually he was the big authority on almost anything you’d care to mention. But when it came to the Crooked Bar Ranch and ranches in general, he was totally clueless. He’d been out to the ranch a couple of times with Barney and Rudy, but apparently he hadn’t even heard that Barney’s parents were rodeo performers—which was, Rudy had to admit, something Barney tended not to mention very often.

  “Applesauce is Barney’s mom’s mare,” Rudy said. “She’s a barrel racer.”

  “Barrel racer?” Ty said with his usual scornful snort. “You mean you got horses out there that race with barrels?”

  “Not with,” Barney said. “Around. The barrels are turnaround points and you have to go around them at top speed.”

  “A good barrel horse goes around those things practically horizontal,” Rudy told Ty. “Like doing a killer wheelie, only on legs instead of wheels. When old Applesauce sees those barrels she really gets hyped. But the rest of the time she’s a real cream puff. She’s got a great mouth and she’s the smoothest ride this side of a Rolls-Royce. After riding those riding-stable clunkers Heather will think she’s died and gone to heaven.”

  Rudy could tell that Ty was trying not to look impressed. “You do that too?” he asked Barney. “That barrel racing stuff?”

  Barney shrugged. “Yeah, I’ve done it some. But I like roping better. That’s what my dad does on the circuit. My dad ropes and bulldogs and he used to ride broncs when he was younger. And my mom does stunt riding and barrel racing.”

  “No way!” Ty said. “You mean your mom stands up on the horse’s back and jumps on and off and that kind of stuff?”

  “Yeah,” Barney said. “All that kind of stuff.”

  “You mean your mom? The one I met that day out at your place?”

  Barney did a slow grin and then said, “Same one. Only one I’ve got.”

  “No way,” Ty said again.

  Rudy had been about to mention that he’d done some barrel racing on Applesauce himself, but then he thought better of it. It probably wouldn’t be too smart to make Ty feel that he was going to be the only greenhorn or he might back out of the whole project.

  As it was, he wasn’t too happy about it. “I don’t know,” Ty said. “I’m not all that stoked about this horse thing. I sure wouldn’t mind getting up close and personal with Hanrahan, but as far as the riding thing is concerned—forget it. Horses hate my guts.”

  Then he went on to tell about how, when he was a little kid, he’d been really turned on by cowboy stuff. So his folks hired one of those traveling photographers who come to your house and bring a pony. “One of those black-and-white spotted jobs,” Ty said. “That horse took one look and decided to dog-meat me. I told my mom so, but she didn’t believe me. Sure enough, as soon as they put me on his back that four-legged hit man took off across the lawn and hung me up in the badminton net. The next day I dumped my hat and boots in the garbage and forgot all about growing up to be a cowboy. Haven’t been on a horse since. So how am I going to teach someone to ride when I don’t know how myself?”

  “Barney can teach you first,” Rudy said quickly, fighting the grin that was oozing out at the thought of Ty dangling from a badminton net like a fly in a spiderweb. “He taught me.”

  Ty looked at him, narrow-eyed. “Then you’re an expert at this horse stuff, too, Chickie-baby?”

  “Hey, Lewis!” Barney said in a threatening tone of voice, and Ty got the message. Barney had warned him to stop calling Rudy “Chicken” or “Chickie,” or even “Kentucky Fried,” which he seemed to think was particularly funny.

  “Okay. Okay. Rudy-baby,” Ty said quickly. “You an expert, too, or what?”

  Rudy shook his head. “No, not an expert. Not like Barney. But it doesn’t take long to learn enough to look pretty good. Barney can give you a lesson or two first, and by the time Heather shows up you can look like an old cowhand. She’ll really be impressed.”

  “Sure. Sure she will,” Ty said sarcastically, but a little later he asked Barney if he could really teach him to ride in a hurry. And before they left he had agreed that, in a day or two, he’d go out to the ranch for his first riding lesson.

  The whole discussion had taken up so much time that, when it finally ended, it was too late for the scrounging trip downtown. So getting the miners’ helmets was going to have to wait until some other time—which didn’t exactly break Rudy’s heart.

  Chapter 5

  AFTER TY AND Barney left, Rudy finally got into gear and started in on the things he’d meant to get done that morning—like fixing his bicycle chain, vacuuming the living room—a promise he’d made Natasha—and finishing an almost-overdue library book. The bicycle chain, he decided, had better come first—in case he needed to ride out to the ranch some time soon for Heather’s first riding lesson.

  After spreading out his tools in the shady spot where the grape arbor crossed the driveway, he started changing the broken links in the chain and thought about what his approach would be the next time he saw Heather.

  He felt pretty good about the Heather thing. Actually, it was his third scheme for dealing with the goldmining problem, and it seemed to be the best one yet. The second, volunteering to baby-sit his sisters, had been a desperate move when his number one plan, to get a job downtown, hadn’t worked out.

  What he’d been planning to do originally was get a full-time job so that whenever Ty and Barney wanted him to go gold mining he could just say something like, “Wish I could, but I’m on duty at the firehouse at that particular time.”

  Of course, that wouldn’t solve the whole problem—like the part about Barney spending so much time with Ty this summer. Or the part about Barney doing something that was not only dangerous but also illegal. The illegal part was something new. It had only been recently that Barney had found a new kind of dangerous activity to play around with. In the past, Barney’s worst schemes had been the kind that might put somebody in the hospital, but since Ty had appeared on the scene there’d been a few that just might have wound up in the police station. Adventures that involved things like graffiti spray-painting, swiping street signs, and jimmying soft-drink machines to get free Cokes.

  There didn’t seem to be anything Rudy could do about that sort of thing. He’d tried. But like always, lecturing Barney only made him more determined, and gave Ty another reason to go into his “Rudy the chicken” act. So, short of turning into a fink, there was nothing Rudy could do.

  But at least having a steady job would give him a better excuse for his personal cop-out. A better excuse than admitting the truth, which was that, where gold mining was concerned, he was a bigger chicken than anyone, even Ty Lewis, could possibly imagine.

  So he’d spent a lot of time looking for
a job, but when he’d been turned down by the fire department, and the hotel, and the service station, and a half dozen other places, he’d gotten so desperate that he told Natasha he was willing to spend his summer taking care of the M and M’s.

  At first she couldn’t believe he meant it, but that didn’t surprise Rudy. It wasn’t easy for him to believe either. When she finally did believe him she said it was very noble of him. So noble that she would only agree to having him baby-sit in the afternoons, so he could have his mornings free. That seemed okay. He’d heard Ty say that he usually slept late during vacations, so mornings probably weren’t going to be a problem. So it was settled, and there went all his afternoons, except on Natasha’s days off.

  But when you came right down to it, having to admit you were stuck with a summer of baby-sitting was embarrassing too. To say that you couldn’t go gold mining because you had to fight fires was one thing, but to say you had to baby-sit your sisters was something else again. Besides which, it didn’t give him any way out at all on Mondays and Tuesdays, which were Natasha’s days off. Still, it had been the best plan he could come up with until the Heather thing happened.

  The bicycle chain was still in pieces when the M and M’s came around the corner. Ophelia ran to meet them and they stopped to play with her for a minute before they noticed Rudy sitting in the driveway and raced each other up to get to him.

  “Hi, Rudy,” Moira said. “What are you doing?”

  “Yeah. What are you doing?” Margot squatted beside him and pushed her curly mop of blond hair right in front of what he was trying to do. “Can we do it too?”

  Rudy stifled a sigh, shoved her out of the way, and went on trying to get the chain back on the bicycle. “Look,” he said. “I have to get this finished right away.”

  “Why? Why do you have to?” Margot’s head was back in the way. This time Rudy shoved her a little harder and she tipped over on the driveway. Her lower lip turned down and began to wobble.

  “Ye gods,” Rudy muttered under his breath. A whole summer of stupid questions and whiny complaints. He didn’t see how he was going to stand it. He went on fooling with the chain for a minute or two to calm himself down before he said, “Look. Why don’t you guys just quit bothering me for just a few more minutes. Why don’t you just go play in the backyard or something.”

  “But Mom said you were going to play with us,” Moira whined. Squatting down, she picked up Rudy’s pliers and tried to use them to untie Margot’s shoelaces. “Mom said you promised.”

  Rudy grabbed the pliers and put them back in the tool chest. “I will, I will play with you. Just as soon as I finish this.” It was about then that the chain pinched his finger and slipped off the sprocket wheel for the third or fourth time. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out of here before I…”

  They stared at him, wide-eyed. Margot’s chin was trembling again and Moira’s face was screwed up as if she expected to be hit. Rudy took a deep breath, counted to ten, and started over.

  “Look,” he said. “I need a little privacy because, well, at the moment I’m putting rocket blasters on my bicycle so I can shoot right up into the sky. You know, like they did in E.T.”

  Moira’s eyes went from narrow slits to wide and dreamy with amazing suddenness. “Yeah,” she said in a breathless voice. “Right up across the moon.” Moira was like that. She usually believed all his weird stories even when she knew better. She looked at Margot. “Rudy’s going to fly across the moon on his bicycle,” she said.

  Margot was still frowning. “Can people really do that? On bicycles?” she asked.

  “Sure they can,” Moira said. “Come on. Let’s go in the backyard and play flying bicycles. Okay?”

  Rudy couldn’t believe his luck. In another fifteen or twenty minutes the chain was back in working order and he put the bicycle in the garage and went into the backyard where the M and M’s were still running around in circles holding imaginary handlebars and making flying noises. They were so busy playing that he was able to go into the house and fix himself a sandwich and get the book on supernatural creatures he’d checked out of the library. They were still at it when he came back out, so he sat on the back steps and ate the sandwich, and read about dragons and vampires.

  The flying bicycle game turned out to be a real winner. It lasted for almost an hour during which time there was only one brief outbreak of shoving and punching serious enough to force Rudy to interrupt his reading. And then it only took a brief threat—“Okay! The next one to throw a punch is dog meat”—and things settled down enough so that Rudy could go back to his book.

  When the bicycle game finally fizzled they went indoors and had cookies and milk and read the funny paper before they really started pestering Rudy to think of something else they could do.

  When he said, “Well, you haven’t practiced your ballet today,” they only glared at him, and when he suggested that they play with their Barbie dolls, they both groaned.

  “Barbie dolls are boring,” Margot said. “And besides, Mom said you were going to play with us.”

  Rudy groaned. Thanks a lot, Mom. But he supposed she’d felt she had to say something to make the M and M’s accept the new arrangement. They’d always really liked going to Eleanora’s and they’d thrown a fit when Natasha told them they would have to start coming home right after lunch. So, of course, she’d told them about all the fun things they could do at home with Rudy.

  “All right,” Moira said, “then read to us. Mom said you were going to read to us too. How about the Bobbsey Twins?”

  Rudy opened his book. “How about supernatural creatures? The next chapter is on werewolves. Okay?”

  So they all three—four counting Ophelia—settled down on the saggy old couch in the living room and Rudy read the werewolf chapter. It was another big success. The M and M’s were crazy about his werewolf impressions, and even when he was just reading they listened so hard they almost forgot to blink.

  When he got to the end of the chapter he had a brainstorm. “Hey,” he said. “What if Barbie was at a dance one night and she stayed until midnight and on the way home she started getting these big fangs and fur all over—”

  He didn’t have to go any further. He hadn’t even finished the sentence when they dashed out of the room.

  The M and M’s played Barbie doll werewolves all the rest of the afternoon and Rudy was able to get some more reading done and do the vacuuming and even spend some time making plans about Heather’s riding lessons.

  Natasha came home a little bit later than usual. She looked tired and tense, and when Rudy asked how her day had gone she said she’d had another quarrel with her boss and smashed her finger in the antique cash register, and her brand-new panty hose had sprung a gigantic run.

  “Other than that, it was lovely,” she said. Then she collapsed on the couch and kicked off her shoes and twisted her leg around to look at the run. “Look at that,” she said. “Just bought them yesterday. Three eighty-five down the drain.”

  She was looking pretty depressed and she didn’t even laugh when Rudy said, “Hey, how about if we make a lot more runs in them so you can pretend they were meant to be that way. You know, like buckshot jeans. That kind of stuff is really in lately.”

  All Natasha managed was a weak smile, and then she sighed, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes. She sat that way for several minutes. Rudy sat down sideways across the overstuffed chair and waited.

  With her head tipped back that way and her dark hair kind of smoothed back Natasha looked—well, like a ballet dancer, which is what she was until she gave it up when she was only nineteen and came back home to Pyramid. She’d been pregnant with Rudy at the time, but that wasn’t the only reason she’d given up on the dancing. She had, as she’d told Rudy more than once, decided to come home even before she found out she was pregnant, because her mother was very sick and needed her. So she came back to the old house where the Drummond family had lived since soon after the gold rush and took care
of her mother, and after his birth, of Rudy too. Then her mother died while Rudy was still a baby and a couple of years later Art Mumford came along and Natasha decided to marry him. Of course, Art didn’t last too long as a husband, but by the time he left there were the M and M’s and Natasha was pretty much stuck in Pyramid Hill.

  Not having a legal father had never bothered Rudy all that much. Natasha said his real father was a really great guy, but that he wasn’t the marrying kind and that she didn’t blame him for what happened. So Rudy had never particularly blamed him either—although he could see how having a baby when she was so young hadn’t made Natasha’s life very easy. And marrying Mumford and having the M and M’s certainly hadn’t helped either.

  Rudy was still thinking about all the extra problems Natasha had gotten herself into by marrying Mumford when, right on cue, the sound of squeals and thuds drifted down the hall. Two little Mumford problems heard from. Natasha opened her eyes, looked toward the door, and sighed. “Fighting again,” she said. “And again and again, I suppose?”

  “No, not really,” Rudy said. “Things have been pretty peaceful around here, actually. Only a minor skirmish or two all afternoon.” Raising his voice, he called, “Hey, you two, knock it off. Mom’s home.”

  The M and M’s appeared in the doorway a second or two later looking startled. “Knock what off?” Margot asked, doing a superinnocent thing with her big round eyes.

  “You know what,” Rudy said. “We heard you.”

  They stared at each other blankly for a moment before Moira laughed. “Oh, that,” she said. “We weren’t fighting. We were just killing a werewolf.”

  Natasha looked puzzled, but when Rudy grinned and said, “Oh well, that’s perfectly all right, then,” she finally smiled too. She held out her arms and the M and M’s ran to hug her. They were all three curled up on the couch together and the M and M’s were chattering away about how good they’d been and how they hadn’t had any fights, and Natasha was laughing and chattering, too, when Rudy struggled out of the saggy old chair and wandered into the kitchen.