Carolyn Keene - Nancy Drew by The Kachina Doll Mystery Read Free Book Online Page B

rattling long before I got there, wouldn’t it?”
    “Let me have the flashlight,” Chuck ordered. “And somebody hold my horse. I’ll go up and see if I can find the snake.”
    “You be careful, Chuck,” Heather warned, surrendering the flashlight to her brother.
    “Are you sure you’re all right, Nancy?” George asked, moving to Nancy’s side now that Heather had finished examining the horse. “You weren’t hurt at all?”
    “Just frightened half to death,” Nancy assured her. “It all happened so fast. ”
    The others gathered around making suggestions about the snake and telling tales of their own brushes with rattlers. It was several minutes before Chuck slid back down the side of the wash.
    “What did you find?” Nancy asked.
    “Your rattlesnake,” Chuck answered, holding out his hand so that she could see the odd-looking thing that lay in his palm. It rattled slightly from the movement, and Dancer snorted and pulled back against Nancy’s steady hold on her reins.
    “What is it?” Bess squeaked, stepping back just as the horse had.
    “It’s the rattle from a big snake,” Chuck explained. “Some people cut them off dead rattlers and make them into tourist souvenirs. I found it lying on the trail.”
    “But how...?” Heather began, then turned to face Nancy, her eyes wide with fright. “Did you say it came down the cliff after you?” she asked.
    Nancy nodded.
    “Then someone must have thrown it from up there.” Chuck uttered the words that had already begun to fill Nancy’s mind with pictures of the possible consequences.
    Heather gasped. “Nancy could have been injured!” she cried out. “If Dancer had lost her footing in that rock slide coming down, she could have been seriously hurt!”
    “Well, nothing like that happened,” Nancy said soothingly. “I’m fine and Dancer’s all right, so I think we should just put this behind us and get back to the ranch.” She did not want to mention their unknown enemy to Heather’s friends, but she asked herself the same question Bess, George, and the McGuires did. Was this another deliberate attempt to get her off the Kachina Doll case?
    The young people remounted and rode their horses along the wash. Once they reached the resort, Nancy, Bess, and George escorted the guests to their cars, but their good nights were subdued and everyone left rather quickly. Not knowing what else to do, the girls settled in the lobby, waiting for Chuck and Heather to come up from the stable.
    “You think it was deliberate, don’t you, Nancy?” George asked breaking the silence.
    Nancy sighed. “Someone had to drop that rattlesnake down the cliff, and I was the only one riding by at the time.”
    “I agree,” George said. “And it wasn’t the Kachina spirit, either.”
    Nancy chuckled, “I’m sure it wasn’t. As a matter of fact, the spirit seemed almost friendly last night. Whoever threw that rattler wasn’t friendly at all.”
    “That’s for sure,” Heather agreed from the archway that led to the hall of the Kachina paintings. “We were just talking about that.”
    “And what did you decide?” Nancy asked as Chuck joined his sister in the doorway.
    “That you’d better stop your investigation,” Chuck replied.
    “What?” Nancy looked from one to the other. “But I’ve just begun.”
    “That awful letter you showed us was bad enough,” Heather said. “And the accident and finding the scorpion in your suitcase and the toppled cactus. But this.... If it means things like this are going to happen, we can’t let you go on, Nancy. When I wrote to you and asked you to come here, I had no idea that you would be in any kind of danger.”
    Chuck nodded. “The letter and the scorpion, maybe, were warnings. But you could have been killed tonight! That’s more than a warning.”
    “I’ll just have to be more careful in the future,” Nancy replied firmly. “If someone is trying this hard to frighten me away, that must mean I’m making