Mystery Ranch (Paperback)

Excerpt: ... beneath Wong's assault, as the cook described, partly in pantomime, the manner of Bill Talpers's downfall the night before. "Do you mean to say that Talpers was over here last night and that here is where he got that scalp-wound?" demanded Lowell. Wong grinned assent, and then vanished, after making a sign calling for secrecy on Lowell's part, as Helen arrived, ready for the ride. Lowell was a good horseman, and the saddle had become Helen's chief means of recreation. In fact riding seemed to bring to her the only contentment she had known since she had come to the Greek Letter Ranch. She had overcome her first fear of the Indians. All her rides that were taken alone were toward the reservation, as she had studiously avoided going near Talpers's place. Also she did not like to ride past the hill on the Dollar Sign road, with its hints of unsolved mystery. But she had quickly grown to love the broad, free Indian reservation, with its limitless miles of unfenced hills. She liked to turn off the road and gallop across the trackless ways, sometimes frightening rabbits and coyotes from the sagebrush. Several times she had startled antelope, and once her horse had shied at a rattlesnake coiled in the sunshine. The Indians she had learned to look upon as children. She had visited the cabins and lodges of some of those who lived near the ranch, and was not long in winning the esteem of the women who were finding the middle ground, between the simplicity of savage life and the complexities of civilization, something too much for mastery. Lowell and Helen galloped in silence for miles along the road they had followed in the automobile not many days before. At the crest of a high ridge, Helen turned at right angles, and Lowell followed. "There's a view over here I had appropriated for myself, but I'm willing to share it with you, seeing that this is your own particular reservation and you ought to know about everything it contains," said Helen. The ridge...