Notes for #39 The Mystery of the Galloping Ghost © 1986
| Page # |
Quote |
| 9 |
Trixie: "I can't believe we're in Minnesota!"
Fourteen-year-old Trixie Belden. |
| 10 |
Though the Wheeler's groom knew everything
in the world about horses, he'd always admitted that he didn't understand
or like cars. |
| 11 |
Honey: "We're going to Minnesota for
two whole weeks. The Murrows produce really outstanding Arabian horses.
He's sending Regan out to study their operation and I convinced Daddy
to send us along." |
| 14 |
Trixie: I wish the boys could have
come along. But they couldn't do that and work as a junior counselors
at camp later this summer and do all the fix-up projects our parents
have lined up for them. |
| 15 |
Diana Lynch and Dan Mangan also had
other summer plans. |
| 16 |
- They came to a sign that said FAIRHAVEN
RANCH.
- A tall, slender man who looked around fifty. His face was tanned
under his straw cowboy hat, and his neck was burned red under the
open collar of his blue workshirt. "I'm Bill Murrow."
|
| 17 |
Bill: "You (Regan)
like your horses one at a time, under a saddle, instead of a hundred
at a time under
a
hood,
right? Same here." Charlene Murrow was just as calm and low-key as
her husband was high-spirited. |
| 18 |
Charlene: "He's (Pat) our son. The
day he turned sixteen, he announced that he was moving into the apartment
he'd fixed up over the stable. |
| 19 |
A tall, slender teenager (Pat), too
muscular to be called thin. He had high cheekbones and a long, straight
nose.
He had large brown eyes and a lock of brown hair that strayed across
his forehead. |
| 20 |
Trixie turned to Honey and discovered
that her usually poised friend was blushing! (After meeting Pat.) |
| 23 |
She (Trixie) made out the figure of
a horse and rider moving slowly and silently in a path parallel to
the trees.
The rider was wearing a straw hat, and his head was down. The horse
had his head down too. |
| 27 |
Pat Murrow was leading out a fiery,
fine-boned black stallion. Bill: "That's Al-Adeen. He's the horse
I've been waiting for my whole life - I hope." |
| 28 |
Riding slowly toward them from the
open land beyond the corral was a straw-hatted horseman. Bill: "Gus
is our hired hand. He's lived around these parts since before I was
born. Still rides his old bay everywhere." |
| 29 |
He (Gus) was short and stocky, with
a stubby beard, and a wide smile that showed missing teeth. |
| 30 |
Charlene: "We saved for years to buy
him (Al-Adeen). If we can show him well enough to attract some attention,
and breed him to some good mares, we may finally start getting ahead
in this business. |
| 31 |
The man (Jon Burke) was wearing an
outfit that went perfectly with his (shiny red) truck - cowboy boots,
stiff-looking jeans, a red shirt with pearl buttons, bolo tie, and
a black felt cowboy hat with a feathered hatband. |
| 32 |
Jon Burke, a young man with a smooth
face, looked flustered. |
| 34 |
Honey: "Don't you think Pat Murrow
is just about the cutest boy you've ever seen? Those beautiful eyes,
those sensitive hands ... " |
| 35 |
Gus lived alone in a cabin that was
within riding distance of the ranch. |
| 36 |
Gus had a slight Norwegian accent.
Charlene: "I mean directly out of
a can. He heats it, eats it, and puts what's left over back in the
refrigerator." Trixie: "That sounds like a good method to me." |
| 37 |
They did discover that the trees at
the back of the property ran along a river. One side of the ranch
was bordered by trees and marked with small sign that said STATE
FOREST. The other side was prairie as far as the eye could see. |
| 45 |
She (Wilhelmina James) was small and
so round that she looked almost like a snowman. She was wearing baggy
plaid pants, and even in the gloom Trixie could see that they matched
poorly with the woman's long-sleeved, floral print blouse. Her gray
hair was pulled back in a bun, from which numerous wisps had escaped.
Her untidy appearance was topped off by a pair of huge eyeglasses,
which had slid down to the very tip of her nose. |
| 49 |
Wilhelmina: "I am a senior associate
at the Institute for Phenomenological Research. Some people prefer
the term 'parapsychological.' We investigate what people commonly
- and inaccurately - call 'ghosts.'" |
| 51 |
Wilhelmina: "It's good to know that
the legend (Galloping Ghost) is still alive. The published reports
are all fifty to one hundred years old." |
| 61 |
Trixie caught a glimpse of a large
sign on the same side of the road as the Murrows' ranch. The sign
said BURKE LANDING. At the edge of the clearing was a construction
trailer with a sign nailed to its side that said RESERVE NOW. OPEN
DAILY 9-4. |
| 64 |
Pat: "It's what they
call a time-share resort complex." Honey: "Isn't there anything you
can do?" Pat: "Burke himself has given us the perfect solution. We just sell out
to him and go someplace where it's peaceful." |
| 65 |
He (Pat) gave Honey a big smile that
showed even, white teeth and made a dimple appear in his right cheek.
Trixie: Oh, no. That did it. She'll have stars in her eyes and her
feet in the clouds for the rest of the trip. |
| 68 |
Gus: "I would have been a farmer, too,
but the Depression came and we lost the farm. Then young Bill's pa,
he gave me work. I've been here ever since." |
| 69 |
Gus: "'The Galloping
Ghost' is sure some fancy name for old Gunnar Bjorkland. He was no
good for nothing.
I never knew Gunnar myself. By the time I was born, they'd already
hanged him." |
| 70 |
Gus: "It's just plain lazy to steal
another man's prize cow instead of raising your own." |
| 77 |
There were small rhinestones in the
frames of the huge glasses the woman (Wilhelmina) wore. Permanent
wrinkles down the sides of the woman's nose, created by the constant
effort to keep the glasses in place. Trixie: When
she sits on that red plaid blanket, she must look like an explosion
at a paint factory. |
| 82 |
Trixie: "It must be painful for him
(Gus) to hear Bill talk about selling. He's been working on this
ranch for over fifty years." |
| 84 |
Trixie: "With a big housing development
right next door, things won't be the same anyway. Maybe this is the
time to sell." |
| 85 |
Trixie: Honey's going to be on Pat's
side in this, no matter what. For the sake of friendship, we'd better
make this topic off-limits. |
| 86 |
Trixie and Honey went to the cabinet
in the tack room and opened the door. The cabinet was empty. |
| 90 |
Trixie: "All the grooming stuff is
buried in this haystack!" |
| 96 |
Bill: "He'd (Mr. Wheeler)
asked me if I could board and train some horses for him. I said no,
because
I didn't have room. But it may be that we'll be moving to larger
quarters." |
| 99 |
Trixie: "I wouldn't go out there tonight
for anything." |
| 104 |
Burke: "I'm running a real estate development
here. What kind of sales am I going to have if word gets out that
the place is haunted? Consider our deal to be officially on hold,
Murrow. And if this ridiculous ghost story spreads, the deal will
be off - and I'll see you in court!" |
| 107 |
Bill: "If that ghost gets me sued,
I'll wring his neck." Pat: "He'd never win in a million years!" Bill: "The money we'd spend defending ourselves against a nuisance suit
like that would drag us under." |
| 109 |
The cabin was dusty and dirty. That
fit in with what they'd been told about old Gunnar. But a tattered
patchwork quilt was stretched neatly over the narrow bed. There was
a half-eaten meal on the table. A tin cup held coffee that was still
warm enough to be giving off an aroma. |
| 113 |
What she (Trixie) saw was a dusty,
dirty room with absolutely no sign of life. |
| 115 |
Wilhelmina: "You girls may have stumbled
onto a most remarkable psychic experience. Retrocognition ... means
'traveling backward in time.'" |
| 118 |
Honey: "Could we spend the rest of
our lives walking into places and things that happened hundreds of
years ago?" It was one thing to go looking for a mystery; it was
quite another to stumble into an adventure in a time and place you
knew nothing about. |
| 120 |
Wilhelmina: "As for the people who
experience it, they seem to be, for some reason, receptive to that
psychic energy." |
| 121 |
Honey: "Actually, I can feel something
in the air whenever somebody I'm close to is upset." |
| 122 |
Honey: "I feel as though it could happen
to me again anytime, anywhere. I feel so helpless!" |
| 124 |
Bill: "Lars Anderson
has company coming in next week. He wants to bring 'em out some evening
to see our ghost!" Charlene: "That was Mark
Onsgard. He wanted to know if his scout troop could have their overnight
camp-out here because
everyone wants to see the ghost." |
| 125 |
Burke: "This means the deal is back
on. If people want ghosts, I'll give 'em a whole ghost town." |
| 130 |
Trixie: "Al-Adeen must have broken
loose!" |
| 133 |
Trixie: "Was Al-Adeen insured?" Bill:
"He's insured for what he cost, not what he's worth." |
| 138 |
Trixie: "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?" |
| 139 |
Gus: "Nobody would want anything to
do with the ranch if they thought it was haunted. So I haunted it." |
| 149 |
Courtney Dahl: "Welcome to Burke Landing.
We'll be opening in the spring of next year." |
| 150 |
Courtney: "I don't think Mr. Burke
is from around here, actually." |
| 151 |
Trixie: (quoting) "Mr. Burke is descended
from pioneer Minnesota stock, and is now opening Minnesota to those
who want to pioneer in the time-share concept." |
| 152 |
Trixie: "Gun-nar Be-york-land. Burke-land.
Burke Land-ing. Get it? Burke is a descendant of Gunnar Bjorkland!
I'll bet he's always been ashamed of having an ancestor who was hanged
as a cattle thief. So he came back here and started this big, fancy
development to prove he wasn't a shiftless failure like old Gunnar." |
| 161 |
Trixie: "Old Gunnar Bjorkland gets
hanged for stealing a cow." |
| 162 |
Trixie: "A hundred years later, one
of his descendants comes back to the same part of the world to redeem
the family name. To make it all work out, he has to steal a horse
and hide it for a few days. Where else but back where the thieving
tradition first started?" |
| 168 |
In the next instant Trixie was tumbling
down the riverbank. |
| 172 |
Trixie let go of the branch with one
hand and reached up, searching for Gus's hand. Finally, she was on
the top of the bank. |
| 176 |
Burke backed the truck up to the trailer,
got out, and began hitching the two vehicles together. |
| 177 |
Pat Murrow had already swung down off
his horse and gone after Burke. He caught the man easily and forced
him to the ground. |
| 181 |
Now Trixie knew that Wilhelmina had
a rented room somewhere in town. |
| 182 |
Bill: "We took Burke off to jail, where
he stayed till first thing this morning. Then he got out on bail.
Apparently, horse-thieving isn't the crime it once was." Charlene: "Not when the horse is back home, safe and sound." |
| 184 |
Wilhelmina: "I was
a fool. In spite of the years I've spent developing objectivity,
I let myself believe
in a ghost story that was quite flimsy. If I hadn't been such a fool,
I might have realized that someone galloping past me on a horse in
the middle of the night was a sign of something unnatural,
not supernatural." |
| 185 |
Charlene: "Gus went home last night
on time." |
| 186 |
Charlene: "And he came to work this
morning on time, too. It was the first he'd heard of it." Bill: "You
(Trixie) needed to believe help had arrived, so your brain supplied
some for you." |
| 188 |
Honey: "We thought Burke came here
to redeem the family heritage that old Gunnar had almost ruined.
What if it turned out to be the other way around - old Gunnar making
up for Burke's wrongdoing?" |
