“One question at a time, please,” Jerry told the eager girls. “No, they didn’t go. Dad said it was his turn to watch one night. There was a cutting wind and since it was very dark, he thought he’d just slip inside of the rock gate where the blowing sand wouldn’t hit him. Dad got sort of sleepy, after a time, crouched down on the sand, when suddenly he heard a gun bang. He leaped out of the gate, up on his horse and galloped for home. He laughs when he tells that story. He reckons now that he’d dreamed the shot since Sven Pedersen never was seen again and that was thirty years ago.” The cowboy had looked at his watch. “Jumping Steers!” he exclaimed. “Most milking time and here I’m fifteen miles from the ranch. Dick, will you ride home with the girls?”
Jerry had whirled his horse’s head and had started for the gateway, the others quickly following. Dick, at the end, was just passing through the gate when they distinctly heard the report of a gun.
CHAPTER II
THE GHOST TOWN
Safely outside of the wall of rocks, the four young people drew their restless horses to a standstill. Mary’s nettlesome brown pony was hard to quiet until Jerry reached out a strong brown hand and patted its head.
Mary lifted startled blue eyes. “Jerry, what do you make of that?” she asked. “We couldn’t have imagined that gun shot and surely the horses heard it also.”
Jerry’s smile was reassuring. “’Twas the story that frightened you girls, I reckon,” he said, glancing about and up and down the road as he spoke. “It’s hunters out after quail or rabbits, more’n like.”
Then, seeing that Mary still glanced anxiously back at the gate in the rock wall, Dick said sensibly, “Of course you girls know that Sven Pedersen couldn’t be in that high house. He must have been dead for years if he was old when Jerry’s father was a boy.”
“Of course,” Dora, less inclined to be imaginative, replied. Then to the cowboy she said in her practical matter-of-fact way, “Hurry along home to your milking, Jerry, and Dick, don’t you bother to come with us. Now that you’re working on the Newcomb ranch you ought to be there. It’s only a few miles up over this sunshiny road to Gleeson. We aren’t the least bit afraid to ride home alone, are we?” She smiled at her friend.
Mary, not wishing to appear foolishly timid, said, in as courageous a voice as she could muster, “Of course we’re not afraid. Goodbye, boys, we’ll see you tomorrow.”
Turning the heads of their horses up a gently ascending mountain road, the girls cantered away. At a bend, Mary glanced back. The boys were sitting just where they had left them. Jerry’s sombrero and Dick’s cap waved, then, feeling assured that the girls were all right, the boys went at a gallop down the road and across the desert valley to the Newcomb ranch which nestled at the base of the Chiricahua range.
“They’re nice boys, aren’t they?” Mary said. “I’ve always wished I had a brother and I do believe Jerry is going to be just like one.”
Aloud Dora replied, “I have noticed that sometimes he calls you ‘Little Sister.’” To herself she thought: “Oh, Mary, how blind you are!”
Dreamily the younger girl was saying – “That’s because we were playmates when we were little so very long ago.”
“Oh my, how ancient we are!” Dora said teasingly. “Please remember that you are only one year younger than I am and I refuse to be called elderly.”
Mary smiled faintly but it was evident that she was still thinking of the past, when she had been a little girl with golden curls that hung to her waist; a wonderfully pretty, wistful little girl. When she spoke, she said, “It’s only natural that Jerry should call me ‘Little Sister.’ Our mothers were like sisters when they were girl brides. I’ve told you how they both came from the East just as we have. My mother met Dad in Bisbee where he was a mining engineer, and Jerry’s mother taught a little desert school over near the Newcomb ranch. She didn’t teach long though, for that very first vacation she married Jerry’s cowboy father. After that Mother and Mrs. Newcomb were good friends, naturally, being brides and neighbors.”
Dora laughed. “Twenty-five miles apart wouldn’t be called close neighbors in Sunnybank-on-the-Hudson where I come from,” she said.
Mary, not heeding the interruption, kept on. “When Jerry and I were little, we were playmates. I spent days at the ranch sometimes,” her sweet face was very sad as she ended with, “until Mother died when I was eight.”
“Then you came East to boarding-school and became like a sister to me,” Dora said tenderly. “Oh, Mary, when you came West to be with your dear sick dad, I wonder if you know what it meant to me to be allowed to come with you.”
“I know what it means to me to have you, Dodo, so I ’spect it means the same to you,” was the affectionate reply.
For a time the girls cantered along in thoughtful silence. The rutty road was leading up toward the tableland on which stood the now nearly deserted old mining-town of Gleeson.
Far below them the desert valley stretched many miles southward to the Mexican border. The girls could see a distant blue haze that was the smoke from the Douglas copper smelters.
The late afternoon sun lay in floods of silver light on the sandy road ahead of them. It was very still. Not a sound was to be heard. Now and then a rabbit darted past silently.
“How peaceful this hour is on the desert,” Mary began, glancing at her friend who was riding so close at her side. Noticing that Dora was deep in thought, she asked lightly, “Won’t you say it out loud?”
“Why, of course. I was just wondering why Jerry hurried us away so fast from Lucky Loon’s rock house.”
“Because he had to do the milking,” Mary replied simply.
Dora nodded. “So he said.” Then she hastened to add, “Oh, don’t think I’m inferring that Jerry told an untruth, but you know that some evenings he has stayed with us for supper and – ”
Mary glanced up startled. “Dora Bellman,” she said, “do you think maybe there was someone up in that rock house watching us all the time we were there; someone who fired the gun just as we were leaving to warn us to keep away?”
Dora, seeing her friend’s pale face, was sorry that she had wondered aloud. “Of course not!” she said brightly. “That’s impossible!” Then to change the subject, she started another. “Jerry didn’t have time to tell us about the Evil Eye Turquoise, did he?”
“Dora, do you know what I think?” Mary exclaimed as one who had made an important discovery. “I don’t believe he will tell us about that. I acted so like a scare-cat all the time we were there, he won’t ever take us there again and he probably won’t tell us the story either.”
“Then I’ll find it out some other way,” Dora declared. “I’m crazy about mysteries as you know, and, if there really is one about that rock house, I want to try to solve it.”
She said no more about it just then, as they had reached the old ghost town of Gleeson. They turned up a side street toward mountain peaks that were about a mile away. On their right was the corner general store and post office. A crumbling old adobe building it was, with a rotting wooden porch, on which stood a row of armchairs. In the long ago days when the town had been teeming with life, picturesque looking miners and ranchers had sat there tilted back, smoking pipes and swapping yarns. Today the chairs were empty.
An old man, shriveled, gray-bearded, unkempt, but with kind gray eyes, deep-sunken under shaggy brows, stood in the open door. He smiled out at them in a friendly way, then beckoned with a bony finger.
“I do believe Mr. Harvey has a letter for us,” Dora said.
The old man had shuffled into the dark well of his store. A moment later he reappeared with several letters and a newspaper.
“Good!” Dora exclaimed as she rode close to the porch.