The Mystery Of The Talking Skull Part 2

"Now how in the world did that get there?" he asked. "I certainly don't want an egg in my pocket. Here, boy, catch it."

He threw the egg toward Pete, who quickly put up his hand to catch it. But in mid-air the egg vanished. It seemed to wink out like a light.

"Hmm," the magician murmured, "it must have been a dodo's egg. They're extinct, you know. Well, well, I must be going. Don't forget to call me."

He strode to his car. The Three Investigators half expected something strange to happen as he went, but he simply drove out the gates and turned down the street.

"Wow!" Pete said. "That was some customer!"

"He certainly wanted that trunk badly," Jupiter added. "I wonder if it's just because he and The Great Gulliver were both magicians. Or if there's something special in that trunk that he'd like to have for himself."

They were pondering this when another car drove in through the gate. At first they thought it was Mr. Maximilian returning. Then they saw it was a smaller car, a little foreign sedan. It stopped, and out stepped a young man, whom they recognized as the reporter who had taken their picture at the auction the previous day.

"Hi," he said, "remember me - Fred Brown?"

"Yes, sir," Jupiter answered. "What can we do for you?"

"I came to see if you had opened the trunk yet," the reporter told him. "I think I can get another feature story about that trunk. You see, it may have something special in it. I think it contains a talking skull!"

Chapter 3.

Mystery upon Mystery "A TALKING SKULL?" the boys exclaimed together. Fred Brown nodded.

"That's right. A genuine talking skull. Did you find it?"

Jupiter had to admit they hadn't found anything in the trunk because it had been stolen. Again he told the story. The reporter frowned.

"Darn!" he said. "There goes my feature! I wonder who took it? Somebody who read the story in the newspaper, I suppose."

"I suppose so, Mr. Brown," Jupiter agreed. "Maybe somebody else knew about that talking skull and wanted it. Was it a skull that really talks?"

"Call me Fred," the reporter said. "I can't tell you if the skull really talked or not. I just know it was supposed to. You see, I began thinking about that name on the trunk - The Great Gulliver. I was sure I'd heard it before. So I looked it up in the morgue - you know what a newspaper morgue is?"

They nodded. Bob's father was a newspaper man, so they knew that a newspaper morgue is a room where old news stories, clippings, and pictures arc kept on file to be used for research. It is actually a library of facts about people and events.

"Well," Fred Brown went on, "I decided to look up The Great Gulliver. Sure enough, there were several stories about him. It seems that though he wasn't very much of a magician, he had one special trick. He had a talking skull.

"A year ago Gulliver just vanished. Into thin air, like one of his tricks. n.o.body knows if he died or what. But apparently he left his trunk behind at the hotel, and it came up for auction yesterday and you bought it. I figured that he probably had his magic apparatus in the trunk, including the skull, and it would make a good story."

"You say he vanished?" Bob asked.

"The whole thing is becoming quite mysterious." Jupiter frowned a bit. "A vanis.h.i.+ng magician, a vanis.h.i.+ng trunk, and a skull that is supposed to talk. Very mysterious indeed."

"Now wait a minute, wait a minute!" Pete protested. "I don't like the look on your face, Jupe. You're thinking of turning this into an investigation, and I don't want to investigate any talking skulls. As far as I'm concerned, such a thing doesn't exist and I don't want to learn different."

"We can't very well investigate anything now that the trunk is gone," Jupiter told him. "But I would like to know more about The Great Gulliver, Fred."

"Sure," the reporter said. He sat down on one of Jupe's unpainted iron chairs. "I'll give you the background. Gulliver was a small-time magician, but he had this skull that apparently talked. It would sit on a gla.s.s table, with no apparatus around it, and answer questions."

"Ventriloquism?" Jupiter asked. "Gulliver actually did the talking without moving his lips?"

"Well, maybe. But it would talk when Gulliver was sitting across the room from it, and sometimes even when he was out of the room. Even other magicians couldn't figure out how it was done. But eventually it got him into trouble with the police."

"How did that happen?" Bob asked.

"Well, Gulliver wasn't doing very well as a magician so he turned to fortunetelling, which is illegal. He didn't call it fortune-telling - he called himself an adviser. But he dressed up in Oriental robes and sat in a little room decorated with mystic symbols. For a fee, superst.i.tious people could come and ask the skull questions. He even named the skull, after an ancient Greek wise man - Socrates."

"And the skull answered the questions?" Bob asked.

"So it was said. Supposedly it gave some good advice, too, to people with problems.

But Gulliver went too far. Socrates began giving advice on the stock market and things like that, and some people lost money and complained to the police. Gulliver was charged with illegal fortunetelling and sent to jail.

"He was in jail about a year. When he got out, he gave up magic and fortune-telling and got a job as a clerk. Then one day-pouf! Like that he disappeared. There were rumors that some very tough individuals were interested in him-no one knows why.

Perhaps they had some criminal scheme they wanted to involve him and Socrates in, and he disappeared to get away from them."

"But he didn't take his trunk with him." Jupiter pinched his lower lip, which always stimulated his mental machinery. "That makes it seem that either something happened to him, or he vanished on the spur of the moment."

"Good thinking," Fred said. "Perhaps he was in an accident and never identified."

"I'll bet that's why Maximilian wanted the trunk," Pete put in. "He wanted to get that skull and learn the secret for his own magic act. Maybe he really used to be Gulliver's friend, but he thought that if Gulliver was gone he might as well have Gulliver's tricks for himself."

"Maximilian?" Fred Brown asked, and Jupiter explained about the visit earlier from the tall, thin magician.

"If he tried to buy the trunk, he certainly wasn't behind its theft," Fred said. "I wonder if the thieves thought they could put Socrates to work for them. Well, I don't suppose it matters. I was hoping to get a good story with a picture of you boys with the skull, and maybe you, Jupiter, dressed up in Gulliver's robes. But that's impossible, so I'd better be going. Nice to have seen you again."

Fred Brown drove away. Jupiter looked unhappy.

"It certainly would have been an interesting mystery to investigate," he said. "I'm sorry the trunk is gone."

"Well, I'm not," Pete said. "Any trunk that has a talking skull in it can stay gone, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want any part of it. How can a skull talk, anyway?"

"That's part of the mystery," Jupiter answered. "But there's no use thinking about it because - Oh, here comes Uncle t.i.tus back now."

The big truck drove into the yard, loaded with more junk for the salvage yard.

Jupiter's uncle hopped out and walked over.

"Hard at work, I see," he said to them and winked. "Good thing Mathilda isn't here.

She'd find something for you to do. But you all look pretty thoughtful. Thinking about something important?"

"The truth is, we're thinking about that trunk that disappeared last night," Jupiter told him. "We've just learned something interesting about it."

"Oh, that trunk." t.i.tus Jones chuckled. "It hasn't showed up again, then?"

"Why, no, it hasn't," Jupiter said. "I don't suppose we'll ever see it again."

"Now I wouldn't say that," t.i.tus Jones told him. "Magician's trunk, wasn't it? Well, then, maybe we can make it come back by using magic on it."

The boys all stared at him.

"What do you mean, Uncle t.i.tus?" Jupiter asked. "What kind of magic could bring it back?"

"Maybe this kind." t.i.tus Jones looked mysterious. He snapped his fingers three times, turned around with his eyes closed, and chanted, "Abracadabra, a trunk we lack.

Now it's time that trunk comes back.

"There," he finished, "that's a magic spell. And if that doesn't work, maybe we can get the trunk back just by using logic."

"Logic?" Jupiter was thoroughly puzzled now. His uncle was a merry type of man who enjoyed jokes. It looked as if he was having some kind of joke with them now, but Jupiter couldn't be sure.

"You like riddles and mysteries, Jupiter," t.i.tus Jones said. "You like to solve them by being logical. Now think about what happened last night. Describe it to me."

"Well ... ," said Jupiter, still trying to puzzle out what his uncle was leading up to, "we all came toward the yard. Two men ran out and jumped in a car and drove away.

The trunk was gone."

"So they stole it, eh?" his uncle asked.

"They must have," Jupiter said. "They picked the lock of the gate and - wait a minute!" he cried. His round face turned a little pink, with both excitement and chagrin.

"They were still in the salvage yard, apparently looking for the trunk, when we went after them. They ran to their car and drove off. But they didn't have the trunk when they ran out. So how could they have stolen it? If they'd already had it in their car, they wouldn't have hung around. And since they didn't carry it with them, they must not have been the thieves. There's only one conclusion. The trunk was already stolen before those two men got here!"

Mr. Jones chuckled. "Jupiter," he said, "you're smart. But sometimes it does a person good to find out he isn't as smart as he thinks he is. There's another conclusion you've missed. Maybe the trunk wasn't stolen. Maybe those two men just couldn't find it."

"But I left it beside the office," Jupiter said. "Right out in plain sight. Maybe I should have locked it inside the office, but I didn't think it was valuable enough for that."

"And after you went in to get washed up for supper, and Hans and I were locking up," t.i.tus Jones said, "I said to myself, 'That's a magician's trunk, and wouldn't it be a surprise for Jupiter if it disappeared magically! He could have some good exercise hunting for it.' So I played a little joke on you, Jupiter. I hid the trunk. Then when we surprised those would-be thieves, I thought I'd just leave it hidden until morning in case they tried again. I was going to tell you about it. But then I decided to see if you could figure things out for yourself. Stimulate your thinking machinery a little."

"You hid it?" Bob burst out. "Where, Mr. Jones?"

And Pete echoed, "Where?"

"Where would be a good place to hide a trunk so it wouldn't be noticed?" Mr. Jones asked. But already Jupiter was looking all around them, at the piles of timber and old machinery and other objects that crowded the yard. The trunk could have been hidden under almost anything. But Jupiter's gaze came to rest on something over against the wall. There was a six-foot-wide roof extending from the top of the wall into the yard, and under this roof were kept the more valuable items in the salvage yard, where they would be protected from the occasional Southern California rain.

In one spot, half-a-dozen old trunks were lined up. They were all st.u.r.dy and in good repair. And they were all large.

"The perfect place to hide a small trunk would be in a big trunk!" Jupiter burst out.

"Is that what you did, Uncle t.i.tus?"

"You could always look and see," his uncle suggested.

Jupiter started toward the trunks. But Pete ran ahead and flung open the first trunk.

It was empty. Jupiter opened the next one. It, too, was empty. So were the third and the fourth.

By the time they got to the fifth trunk, Bob had joined them. And as the lid went up, they all stared.

Inside the big trunk, just fitting neatly, was the mystery trunk of The Great Gulliver.

Chapter 4.

Introducing Socrates "NOW LET'S SEE if any of these keys Uncle t.i.tus gave us will open the trunk,"

Jupiter said.

The three boys were back in Jupiter's workshop, hidden from the front of the salvage yard by piles of secondhand material. They had swiftly taken the auction trunk from its hiding place back to where they could work on it unseen.

Some customers wandered around in the front part of the salvage yard, looking for various odds and ends. Mathilda Jones was on hand to deal with them. t.i.tus had told Jupiter he could have some time off with Bob and Pete, until t.i.tus came back with the load of goods he was going to pick up.

As Jupiter worked on the lock, he was still feeling annoyed with himself for not suspecting that the trunk had been in the yard all along. Uncle t.i.tus had played an embarra.s.sing joke on him, but a good one. He should have known better than to jump to conclusions the night before. He should have at least realized the truth by morning, he reflected. He had let surface appearances deceive him completely.

"I made a mistake last night in not a.n.a.lyzing the facts thoroughly," he said. "It teaches you more than you'd learn from doing a thing right the first time. Uncle t.i.tus taught me a good lesson."

Bob and Pete smiled and nodded.

"What about Mr. Maximilian?" Bob asked. "We promised to let him know if the trunk reappeared."

"We promised to let him know before we sold it to anyone else," Jupiter said. "We aren't planning on selling it, at least not now."

"I vote to sell it," Pete said. "After all, Maximilian offered us a pretty nice profit."

But the idea of owning a talking skull had gripped Jupiter's imagination.

"We can think about selling it later," he said. "I want to find out first if Socrates will really talk."

"That's what I was afraid of," Pete said with a sigh.

Jupe continued trying the keys. Finally one made the old lock turn. After unbuckling the two long leather straps that held the lid down, Jupiter lifted the lid.

They all peered in. A length of red silk cloth covered the inside of the trunk. Beneath the cloth was the top tray of the trunk, where a number of small objects were packed, some of them wrapped in different-colored silk cloths. There was a collapsible birdcage, a small crystal ball with a stand, many small red b.a.l.l.s, several packs of playing cards, and some metal cups that fitted snugly into one another. There was not, however, a skull or any bundle big enough to contain one.

"Some of Gulliver's magic tricks," Jupiter stated. "If there's anything important, it'll be underneath, I guess."