The Mystery of the Galloping Ghost

said. “I guess you’d know better than anyone what the ghost would
and wouldn’t do, huh, Gus. I mean, you are the ghost, right?”
    Gus
straightened up with difficulty, one hand supporting his back. “How did you
find out?” he asked.
    “I
dreamed it,” Trixie told him. “When we were at the cabin, we thought the ghost
must have just left because the coffee and beans were still hot. But when I
dreamed about it last night, I realized the stove was stone-cold when I bumped
into it. Hot food and a cold stove don’t make sense—even for a ghost. That
meant the whole thing was phony. And that meant you were the ghost, because you were the only one who knew that we knew
about the cabin.”
    Gus
stubbed at the straw with the toe of his boot. “I never thought you’d look all
around the cabin. I thought you’d just get scared and go running home to tell
everybody about the ghost.”
    “You
must have thought that about the other pranks you played,” Trixie said,
figuring Gus had something to do with them, too.
    “Well,
wasn’t that why I did them?” Gus asked. “After that day when I told you how
Mrs. Murrow doesn’t like to talk about the ghost, I thought, ‘ You betcha ! She’s probably right.
Nobody would want anything to do with the ranch if they thought it was haunted!
That Burke fellow would go away for sure.’ So I haunted us.”
    “Hiding
the brushes and combs must have been easy for you to do,” Trixie said. “But how
did you rig the other tricks?”
    “Making
the picture fall was easy, too,” Gus said. “When I went to wash up, I just
ducked into the living room for a second. I pulled the picture hook out so it
was barely hanging in the wall. Any little rattle in that old house would knock
the picture down.”
    Trixie
nodded. “And nobody even thought about how you’d walked through the house
minutes before. After that, the haunting got harder, right?”
    “Not
much,” Gus said. “For that gust of wind, I sneaked up under your window with an
old blacksmith’s bellows. Whoosh!” He pantomimed the
bellows’ motion. “Then I used a tape-recording machine to get the galloping
noise. I’d made the tape over at my place— just turned on the machine and rode
past it.” Seeing the girls’ astonished looks, he unexpectedly grinned. “I don’t
like cars, but I ain’t old-fashioned.”
    In
spite of herself, Trixie grinned back at him. “You must have gotten pretty
frustrated when we still didn’t start blabbing to everyone about hearing
ghosts.”
    “You
girls are tough, I’ll give you that,” Gus said.
    “That’s
when you decided to begin haunting other people, starting with the surveyor,”
Honey said.
    “Now,
that guy, he scared easy,” Gus said. “I just sneaked through the bushes and
popped up in front of him. My head wasn’t floating, either—it was right on my
shoulders! But he didn’t stay around for a closer look.”
    “That
was the simplest prank of all, and that’s the one that worked,” Trixie said.
    “Sure
did! If I’d known that fellow was going to tell everyone he’d seen a ghost, I
could have skipped all that work with the cabin,” Gus said.
    “You
did set up the retrocognition !” Honey exclaimed,
sounding as if the weight of the world had just dropped off her shoulders.
    “I
don’t know about that,” Gus said, suddenly suspicious.
    “She
just means the haunting,” Trixie said quickly, not wanting Gus to get out of
his talking mood. “How did you do it?”
    “Oh,
it wasn’t hard. I knew you girls would hightail it to
that cabin as soon as you found out about it. So I waited till you took off.
Then I took a shortcut and beat you there. I plunked down some dishes, set out
the beans, poured the coffee out of my Thermos, and hung up the hat. I wanted
to time it so the food would be warm, but I almost cut it too close. I didn’t
even have time to pick up the fork I’d dropped before I heard you girls
coming.”
    Honey
groaned. “That was a mistake—and we thought it was a great big clue!”
    Gus
looked slightly pleased with himself. “But how did you undo everything?” Trixie
asked. “When we went back later—”
    “You
went back?” Gus interrupted. “You girls are really tough!”
    “Well,
we did go back,” Trixie said hurriedly, not wanting to explain why or with
whom. “Everything looked different, as though no one had been there for years.
How did you manage that?”
    Gus
sniffed. “All I did was gather up the stuff