loss. He questioned her closely about the missing purse, and was eloquent in trying to comfort her.
“It will turn up all right,” he said. “The trouble is you have too much time to worry about your loss. Tomorrow you must ride out with me. I want to show you those Indian ruins.”
He escorted Mrs. Mallow to the hammocks under the cottonwoods, discoursing spiritedly on the charms and wonders of the great Southwest.
Doris watched the middle-aged couple move off in laughing conversation.
“Plum seems to find Mrs. Mallow very interesting company,” she said, turning to Dave with a smile.
“I don’t blame him,” Dave grinned. “If I were only twenty-five years older I’d jump at the chance of acquiring such a charming son as Marshmallow, here.”
“Oh, go stick your head in the watering trough,” Marshmallow said.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely if we found ourselves, in the middle of a romance,” Kitty laughed, joining in the fun. “I wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Plum would take up ranching. Would yoti invite us to your round-ups, Marshmallow?”
“I’ll lasso that foolish surveyor and brand him,” Marshmallow threatened. “What does he mean, forcing himself on my mother like that?”
Dave sensed that Marshmallow was not enjoying the conversation, and changed the subject.
“There is going to be a grand moon,” he said. “Let us walk up to that little hill just over there, and Doris—will you sing for us?”
“I’d love to,” Doris said, simply and sincerely. “I’ve been yearning to sing just as you have been yearning to fly, Dave.”
The four chums sauntered slowly toward the round butte that rose a hundred yards or so from the house. Doris walked silently, her mind busy with the facts she had learned that day, facts which convinced her that unscrupulous, greedy men were her opponents in the contest for the property. She debated with herself the advisability of summoning aid from one or another of her uncles.
Yet, a few minutes later, it was a sweet, untroubled voice that rose through the moon-silvered air in the lovely old tune of “Sweet Alice Ben Bolt.”
CHAPTER XIV
The Clouds Gather
“I am going to drive over to the ruined cliff dwellings with Mr. Plum this morning,” Mrs. Mallow announced at the breakfast table next morning.
“Won’t you all come along?” she added. “It will be very interesting.”
Marshmallow looked distinctly annoyed.
“Dave and I heard the men at the corral talking about a bull-dogging contest ‘near here today,” he said. “We thought we might all go over and see it.”
“What is it, a sort of dog show?” Doris asked mischievously.
“No,” Dave explained. “It hasn’t anything to do with dogs. Cowboys ride up to a free steer and wrestle it to the ground by the nose and horns. It is very exciting, and dangerous.”
Kitty wrinkled her nose.
“And cruel,” she added.
“I want to ride into town,” Doris said. “I intend to poke through the—stores.”
“Well, it looks as if we separate for the day,” Marshmallow commented. “Tell Plum he can use the car, Mother. Dave and I are going to ride over with the cowboys on horseback.”
Kitty and Doris watched Plum and Mrs. Mallow drive off, and then swung into their saddles.
“Don’t you try any bull-dogging,” Doris warned Dave. “I prefer you in one piece.”
“I won’t go at all, if you like,” Dave offered. “I’d just as soon ride into town. I need a haircut.”
“Ain’t no barber in Raven Rock, pard,” laughed one of the horse-wranglers. “We just uses the hoss-clips on ourselves, here.”
Everybody laughed, and Doris and Kitty touched spurs to their ponies and trotted off toward town, Wags sitting on the horse with Doris.
“Just compare this with sitting back in a cabin plane at a hundred miles an hour,” gasped Kitty through the bitter dust, as the girls jogged along. Eventually Raven Rock was reached.
“What’s all the excitement?” Doris wondered. For Raven Rock something unusual was astir. Usually two persons seen at any one time in the street constituted normal traffic, but fully a dozen men and two or three women were headed toward the railroad station.
From afar came the wailing whistle of a locomotive. The pedestrians doubled their pace.
“Hear that?” a stranger called to the girls as they drew rein in the plaza. “That’s ol’ Number Ten, the Kansas City Limited, whistlin’ for a stop. Always uster go through here so fast we never could count the cyars!”
“This must be history in the making for Raven Rock,” Doris laughed. “Let’s see the important people who are getting off the Limited.”
The crack train thundered into the little adobe town, overshooting the station by fifty yards in its haste. Curious townsfolk surged forward toward the Pullmans.
“Look, Kitty, even our friend who backed into us is down to see the train come in,” Doris exclaimed. “There is his car.”
Just then an unusual movement beneath the last car caught Doris’s eye.
It was the dining car, and from the space created by the steps and the folding section of floor that drops over them when the door of the car is closed, a pair of legs emerged.
Unseen by anyone but the two girls, a slender male figure squirmed to the ground and ran hurriedly to the station, rubbing cinders from his eyes.
“Kitty! Look at that man! It’s the stowaway!” gasped Doris.
“As I live and breathe, it is! He got here anyhow,” her chum exclaimed. “Well, you must admire his pluck.”
“Here come the important people who stopped the Limited,” Doris said.
Trailed by the little crowd of townsfolk, whose attention was obviously divided between the great train now beginning to move and the passengers who had honored Raven Rock by disembarking, three men strode over the cinders.
“Why—why, they are with Henry Moon, the man who backed into us,” Doris gasped. “Then they must be—oh, Kitty!”
“Doris, what is the matter? You are as white as a sheet!” Kitty cried.
“That dark-faced man. He—he—oh, I’m sure he is one of the men who robbed Uncle Wardell!”
Kitty joined Doris in staring at the three men. “Have them arrested!” she said. “Quick!”
“How can I?” Doris wailed. “I can’t
