Virginia's Ranch Neighbors

by Grace May North

Peyton was much more troubled than he wished the girls to know. It was his house and they were his guests, and his sister’s. Too, he had been quietly watching his new Mexican overseer for the past few weeks, as some of his actions seemed very strange.

Then Peyton left the kitchen.

“Oh, how I do wish this mystery was solved,” Margaret declared as she sank down in a rocker, her eyes watching the closed door leading into the front room, but almost instantly she was on her feet again clutching Virginia’s arm.

“Look! Quick!” she whispered. “Didn’t the door open a crack?”

Virginia laughed. “No, no, child,” she replied. “Don’t let your imagination run riot. I am sure there is some perfectly natural commonplace reason for Betsy’s disappearance. You girls know perfectly well that there is no such thing as a ghost. You hear stories about them but you never met a single person who ever saw one.”

Then they were silent, just waiting, they knew not for what.

In the meantime Peyton had gone down to the bunk-house.

The lad knew that the girl could not have left the room by any of the exits known to him. The front door had been heavily barricaded by the Spanish Don on the inside and as Peyton did not use that room, he had not opened the massive wooden doors. The windows were barred and the only door of which he had knowledge was the one leading into the kitchen. Suddenly he recalled that there was another door but he had found it locked, with no key in evidence, and believing it led into a store room of some kind, he had thought little of it.

When Babs had cried out that she had seen a face peering in at one of the barred windows, a dark face that looked like Trujillo’s, Peyton had determined to go at once to the bunk-house and find out the whereabouts of his head rider.

There was a very long adobe building in which the ten peons lived together. Not far from it was one small solitary adobe which had been built for the overseer of the Three Cross Ranch. It was in this that Trujillo slept, although he took his meals with Peyton at the big house. The owner of the ranch felt that this was a courtesy due his head rider, and, moreover Trujillo had served him well by saving his cattle on the day of his first appearance in the wild March blizzard.