The Second Girl Detective Megapack: 23 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Julia K. Duncan

  “Can’t be any worse than the highway,” Marshmallow replied, sending the car into the side road with a twist of the wheel.

  It was a rough drive, but fascinating. Twisting in and out between the weirdly shaped buttes and mesas, fording dry streams, skirting deep arroyos, the twisting route soon made everyone lose all sense of direction.

  “I think we are getting farther away from the ranch,” Mrs. Mallow said. “Perhaps you had better turn back, Marshall.”

  Kitty agreed, too.

  “No place to turn,” Marshall said. “I’d hate to get mixed up in that cactus and sand. I shouldn’t even want to meet another car.”

  The road twisted out of sight under the face of a gaudy orange cliff, and when the car negotiated the bend everyone sat up straight at the sight of a huge herd of cattle, not only on both sides of the road but on it as well.

  “Whew, there must be thousands,” Dave whistled.

  Marshmallow stopped the car and honked violently to clear the road.

  “The big stupids,” he cried in dismay. “They are doing just the opposite!”

  The cattle, smelling the wat£r in the radiator of the automobile, crowded around the car.

  “Ooh, Marshmallow!” Kitty cried. “They scare me! Chase them away.

  “Why, Doris,” she said, looking at her chum, “you aren’t a bit afraid.”

  Doris merely smiled calmly.

  “I’m no bull-fighter,” Marshmallow retorted.

  A huge white-faced steer laid its chin on the side of the tonneau and stared gloomily at the three feminine autoists in the back seat.

  “Shoo!” cried Mrs. Mallow, shaking her finger at the calm-eyed beast.

  The curious cattle had now entirely surrounded the car—back, front and sides.

  “Beefsteak, beefsteak everywhere but not a bite to eat,” chanted Marshmallow.

  “Put her in low gear and inch your way along,” Doris suggested.

  “Or else get out and milk some of the cows,” said Dave. “I’m awfully thirsty from the dust.” Marshmallow started the car and moved forward at the lowest speed it was capable of doing. The automobile literally plowed its way through the herd.

  “Look at their sides—the brands,” Doris shouted to make herself heard above the bellowing. “A clef—Miss Bedelle’s brand, I’ll bet.”

  With the inquisitive cattle at last behind them Mrs. Mallow became concerned again at the uncertain terminus of the road.

  “It probably goes to Miss Bedelle’s ranch,” Doris ventured. “From there we can find our way to the Saylor’s place without trouble.”

  Marshmallow drove doggedly ahead, and suddenly halted abruptly.

  “Something else coming,” he exclaimed. “I hear a noise around the turn.”

  Scarcely had he finished speaking when an automobile appeared around the bend. Marshmallow hastily backed, swinging his car half off the crude roadway.

  The approaching motor, an expensive new sports roadster, slackened speed and crept slowly past.

  Its sole occupant and driver looked at the party curiously, waved in courteous greeting, and sped off toward Raven Rock.

  “That looked like Miss Bedelle,” Doris exclaimed.

  “She reminds me of somebody I know,” Dave said.

  “Me, too,” Doris asserted. “I have it I The stowaway—she looks enough like him to be his sister.”

  “You’re right, Doris!” chorused the others.

  “I’ll bet the stowaway is her brother,” Doris said. “That would explain his anxiety to get to Raven Rock, don’t you see?”

  “But Miss Bedelle is wealthy,” Mrs. Mallow objected. “Certainly no relative of hers would have to steal rides.”

  “He may be the black sheep of the rancho,” Dave laughed.

  “Yes, he probably is,” Doris agreed. “Anyhow, we will soon find out.”

  Marshmallow pointed to a post set up where the road forked. Nailed to the upright was a board on which was crudely lettered “G Clef Ranch” on the half pointing to the left, and “Crazy Bear Ranch” on the right.

  Marshmallow steered right, and in half an hour the cottonwoods came into sight, while a few minutes later the car came to a halt in the ranch yard.

  “Maybe you don’t realize it,” announced the chauffeur, stretching his sturdy legs, “but it’s after two o’clock and we haven’t had lunch!”

  “We have company,” Doris said. “There Comes Ben Corlies, and I do hope he has the missing bag!”

  CHAPTER XII

  “Buried Treasure”

  “No, Ma’am, I didn’t find your bag,” Ben Corlies announced to Mrs. Mallow. “I feel right bad about it, too, because it puts me in a bad light.”

  “Not at all,” protested Mrs. Mallow. “You must not feel that way. Of course, I am distressed at losing the bag because I cannot afford to lose so much money, but I blame only my own carelessness.”

  “I guess anybody’d get rattled, ridin’ around in one of them flyin’ hen-coops,” Ben replied, shaking his head. “Miss Bedelle, she went off in one of her cars after lunch, but all mornin’ she spent up in the air with that Pete fellow. She’s learnin’ to run it, he tells me. Well, she can beg until she cries, but she won’t get Ben Corlies up in it.”

  “Bring Pete down with you soon,” Dave said, as the friends walked over to his car with Ben.

  “He’d of come down with me this trip, but he’s busy fiddlin’ around the cloud-hopper,” Ben replied. “Except for bein’ crazy that way he’s right nice.”

  “By the way, has Miss Bedelle a brother?” Doris asked suddenly.

  Ben started.

  “Yes, but nobody mentions him much,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “A young feller, but wild!”

  Doris looked at her companions with triumph.

  “Fact is, Miss Bedelle took up ranchin’ so’s her young brother would be away from the cities and bad companions,” Ben continued. “But he beat it away from here ’bout a year ago, an’ good riddance.”

  Then, as if realizing he had said more than he had intended, Ben abruptly started his car and sped away.

  “The plot thickens!” Doris exclaimed dramatically.

  “But our hero thins, if there is such a word,” Marshmallow declared. “I’m going to e-a-t, dine!”

  Mrs. Saylor was spreading a table in the cool, fragrant dining room.

  “I figured you went exploring,” she said with a smile, “so I prepared only a cold lunch. There’s some sliced meats, potato salad and canned pears, and iced tea,” she checked off.

  “After lunch,” Marshmallow announced, “I’m going to rest. I’m stiff from riding two different kinds of bronchos—four legged and four wheeled.”

  “I feel just like taking it easy in the shade, too,” Kitty added.

  “Lazy folks, you two,” Doris scoffed. “What do you say, Dave? Let’s go for a long ride.”

  “I’m ready,” Dave agreed. “A good stiff gallop over the hills!”

  Marshmallow and Kitty groaned, but Dave had caught Doris’s meaning wink.

  “I’d like to climb up to the top of one of those funny hills, too,” Doris said. “Let’s ride until we find a big one.”

  “Just the thing,” Dave cried with a great show of enthusiasm. “Marshmallow, you’ll just have to come along. It will do you a world of good!”

  “Not if we were leaving tonight and I’d never have another chance to see the country,” that youth said with conviction. “Me for the shade, a pitcher of something cool and a magazine.”

  “‘A book of verse, a jug of lemonade, and thou singing beside me in the shade,’” misquoted Doris.

  Luncheon over, Marshmallow straightway took himself off to the cottonwood grove, carrying an armful of cushions and numerous magazines.

  “I hope you realize I was joking, Dave,” Doris said, “because I am going to practice some singing.”

  “If you hadn’t winked, I’d have pretended a sunstroke,” Dave laughed. “If I can’t practic
e flying, I’m going to practice napping.”

  So the lazy afternoon was consumed, although Doris, after an hour of vocal practice, did a great deal of thinking as she swayed in one of the hammocks beneath the trees.

  After all, it was no vacation that she was spending at Raven Rock. Serious work had to be done.

  “Perhaps I had better wire Uncle Wardell,” she thought. “But the news may leak out in town what, we are here for, if I do.”

  The one interruption in the afternoon occurred when a picturesque figure rode into the yard.

  It was that of a man in conventional Western garb astride a sturdy mount, and leading a white mule bearing a loaded pack-saddle.

  The man, tall and sun-bronzed, was met by Mrs. Saylor in a manner that showed he was no stranger to the neighborhood. He dismounted, and Bostock, the horse-wrangler, took charge of the animals.

  “Looks as if we have another boarder,” Dave commented, surveying the arrival from beneath lowered lids.

  At the supper table, an hour later, Mrs. Saylor introduced the stranger as a “Mr. Alan Plum, the surveyor.”

  “You must know all the nooks and corners of this territory,” Doris commented to Plum.

  “I could find my way through the country blindfold,” Plum smiled. “It’s mighty interesting country, though, and I don’t tire of it.”

  “What’s to it but sand and cactus and cows and crooked hills?” Marshmallow asked, listening to the conversation.

  “That is all, if you look at it one way,” Plum answered. “On the other hand, it is beautiful and fascinating. I could show you the ruins of some cliff dwellings that were ancient before Columbus was born, or fossil footprints of a dinosaur that must have been fifty feet long.”

  “Near here?” Kitty asked.

  “An hour’s ride will take you to either,” the surveyor said. “Would you like to see them?”

  Even Marshmallow expressed great desire to see the relics of bygone ages.

  “Well, I’ll be busy tomorrow checking over the bench-marks on some land near here,” Plum said. “There are three sections of land between here and the village that some Easterners are interested in, if they can get title to them.”

  Doris almost choked on a slice of bread. “What—why should they be interested?” she managed to ask, trying to make her query appear casual.

  Plum shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m only an amateur geologist,” he said, “but I suspect there may be oil in these parts.”

  A great light dawned on Doris.

  No wonder the deeds for the Raven Rock property were worth committing assault and battery and theft for!

  “May we ride with you?” she asked. “We’d love to explore the country with someone who knows about it. We won’t be in your way.”

  “Delighted to have company,” Plum responded heartily. “Are you early risers?”

  “Up with the larks,” Marshmallow said.

  “Then it’s a party,” Plum smiled. “But be prepared for a stiff ride. Each section is six hundred and forty acres, a square mile, and I have to locate the boundary lines on all three.”

  No one had any trouble going to sleep that night, and in expectation of the cross-country ride they had no trouble in rising early the next morning.

  Mrs. Mallow, whose suspicion of horses was even greater than that of airplanes, decided to remain at the ranch.

  Eight o’clock found the four young friends mounted and ready. Plum took the lead and they trotted off over the road which they had covered in the automobile the preceding afternoon, Wags loping along behind.

  “Title to this property isn’t very clear,” Plum explained as they jogged along. “It isn’t public land, because it was all bought up twenty-five or thirty years ago when the government put it on sale. But some folks never developed their property, and these three sections aren’t even recorded.”

  Doris thought hard.

  Everything that Plum said fitted in with her mission.

  “This property,” she told herself, “is certainly Uncle John’s and the Gates sisters’. And—the crooks have the deeds!”

  Plum chatted about geological formations, tossing off remarks about millions of years as if he had lived them all.

  The four young people liked the surveyor more every minute. He was cultured, with an easy humor and a rich baritone laugh, and physically truly handsome.

  He told them a little about himself.

  “I was a civil engineer once,” he said. “But two years in the Paraguay jungles affected my lungs and I came here for my health. That was fifteen years ago. The climate cured me in two, but I fell in love with the country and stayed.

  “It is romantic and—whoops! Hold tight!”

  Doris’s horse had suddenly risen on its hind legs, snorting and pawing the air. Then it wheeled and would have bolted had not the girl held it in check.

  Dave leaped from his horse, which had begun to lunge and kick, to hasten to Doris’s aid.

  “Get on that horse!” thundered Plum, a stem note of command in his voice.

  All of the horses were backing and filing, their nostrils quivering, and Wags was sprinting book toward the ranch.

  “Listen!” Plum said, lifting one hand.

  To all ears came a buzzing, menacing sound.

  “Wasps!” Marshmallow cried, looking all around him.

  “No, look there,” Plum directed, pointing at the ground.

  Doris’s skin pricked with loathing as she followed the surveyor’s outstretched finger and saw two ugly, brown-blotched coils on the trail, from which rose two swaying heads with gaping mouths.

  “Rattlesnakes!” Doris exclaimed.

  “And big ones,” Plum said, pulling out a revolver.

  His weapon cracked twice, and the venomous heads seemed to dissolve into thin air.

  The writhing coils twisted and stretched beneath the horrified gaze of the four “tenderfeet.”

  As the convulsive motions of the dying reptiles grew less, Plum leaped from his horse and picked up the bodies by the tails.

  “Six-footers,” he exclaimed. “Do you want the rattles for souvenirs?”

  He twisted the links from the tails of the snakes and gave one each to Dave and Marshmallow.

  “The first and foremost rule in this country is, ‘Watch your step!’” Plum advised. “That goes all ways, literally and figuratively.”

  Wags, suddenly reappearing, barked his approval.

  The first bench-mark was located, and Plum took a long sight and headed for the place where the next one should be.

  “I hate to see the oil wells come in here,” he said. “The ugly old derricks, the grease-fouled air and the get-rich-quick, fly-by-night sort of civilization that springs up.

  “But I hear in town that an Eastern syndicate is trying to buy up all the available land here. So far no one living in these parts has sold. They don’t trust the company’s representative at all.”

  Plum kept his eyes straight ahead as he talked, so as not to miss his direction.

  Doris, sweeping the country, as far as her eyes could reach, suddenly drew rein.

  “There’s a man on horseback up there!” she exclaimed, pointing to one of the flat-topped mesas.

  “Where?” Plum asked, halting his horse.

  “He—why, he’s gone!” Doris cried, shading her eyes.

  CHAPTER XIII

  A New Friend

  “Are you sure it was a man and not a stray steer?” Plum asked.

  “No, it was a man,” Doris said with conviction.

  “Probably a cowboy rounding up strays,” Plum commented. “But it’s funny he should duck out of sight as if he didn’t want to be seen.”

  The horses were spurred forward again.

  “Tell us some more about the Easterners,” Doris suggested, riding up beside Plum. “I should think the people around here would be glad to have oil struck on their land. They would all be rich.”

  “Most folks around here are f
ar from poor,” Plum laughed. “The country may not look like much to you but it is some of the best stock-range in the West, and where it is irrigated it is very fertile.

  “No, the old-timers around here are content. It is the people who haven’t their roots in the ground, the idlers and the politicians, who are helping the syndicate to locate here for their own selfish ends.”

  Doris wondered if she should confide in Plum, but decided to be discreet.

  “We rode over some of this country yesterday in a car,” she said. “We saw a lot of cattle with Miss Bedelle’s brand on and thought the property was hers.”

  “It isn’t,” Plum said. “No one rightly knows who owns it, for there are no records to show at the court-house. By rights the property should have been sold for unpaid taxes long ago.”

  Doris wondered if, after all, she was on the right track, for she distinctly remembered that canceled tax bills had been among the papers stolen from her Uncle Wardell.

  Probably this was not the land belonging to Uncle John and the Misses Gates at all.

  “Is there much unclaimed land like this around?” she asked.

  “N-no,” frowned Plum. “There is one halfsection over at the other end of the county, and two or three scattered quarter sections.”

  Doris was more puzzled than ever.

  “We had an unpleasant meeting with a man in town,” she said, changing the subject. “Everyone has been so kind and considerate, but this chap ran into our car while we were parked in front of a store, and instead of apologizing he was very abusive.”

  She described the man who had figured in the unpleasant encounter.

  Plum whistled.

  “That’s the oil man,” he said. “And incidentally, my employer for the moment. Henry Moon is his name. He’s usually pretty smooth and slick.”

  So, all unknowing, they had already had a brush with the enemy, Doris thought to herself.

  “Well,” she mused, “we know who Henry Moon is but he doesn’t know who we are. That’s an advantage for our side.”

  At noon the job was half completed, and Plum pitched camp for the party on the shady side of a big butte. From the patient pack-mule he unloaded a bountiful lunch prepared by Mrs. Saylor, and while they ate the members of the party chatted.