“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.