The Desert Moon mystery

I knew, that evening in April, when Sam got home from Rattail and came stamping snow into my kitchen, his good old red, white, and blue face stretched long instead of wide in it...

I am not an admirer of men. Looking at most any man, I find myself thinking what a pity it was he had to grow up, since as a little, helpless child he would have made a complete...

It was three years after Mrs. Ricker came to the ranch, bringing John and Martha, that Hubert Hand put in his appearance. He had got Mr. Indian Chat Chin, as everybody called hi...

Chadwick Caufield, the other member of our household, who was present on the Desert Moon Ranch at the time of the first murder, came only two years ago last October.

The girls got here on Friday, the eighth of May. Sam and I rode down to Rattail in the sedan to meet them, and John took the small truck down to bring up their baggage.

The first minute I heard that the Canneziano girls were coming to the Desert Moon, I was certain that they were not coming for the peace of the mountains and the deserts. Going...

Revenge. Out of all that crazy conversation the one word kept pestering me like a leaking faucet. No matter what I was doing, or thinking, that word, revenge, kept drip, drip, d...

The girls had been on the Desert Moon a little better than six weeks when, one evening, Sam came out into my kitchen were I was setting bread. Belle, Sadie and Goldie had gone h...

For three days, beginning with the fourth of July, there was to be a big celebration and rodeo at Telko. Trying to keep cowpunchers on the ranch, when there was a celebration of...

I am not claiming that I possessed one particle of common sense at that minute, nor for a good many minutes after that. My actions would give the lie, direct, to any such assert...

When I got back to the house, John was driving up the road in the sedan. He had been to Rattail for supplies and for the mail. He tossed the mailbag out to me, and drove around...

In spite of all my efforts not to do so, I have, again, run on ahead of the story. But, I declare to Goodness, the horror of it, after all these months, is still so strong upon...

The morning of the third was biting hot, with that stinging, piercing heat that we have, when we have heat at all, in this high altitude. The sixty mile trip across the deserts...

After dinner, which we didn’t have until nearly one o’clock on the fourth of July, owing to Chad’s not getting the ice-cream frozen on time, John surprised us all by saying that...

I went into the kitchen to get supper. Danny, in spite of her headache, insisted upon helping me. She did the best she could. She managed to get the table set, in between times...

Sam’s first plan, after he and Hubert had made a quick ride to the cabin and back with no sight of Gaby, was for the two of us to go down the road in the sedan. Fortunately, he...

The next thing that I knew I was lying on my back listening to someone screaming, above the voices of Sam and Mrs. Ricker. I realized that those awful sounds were coming from my...

The sheriff, the coroner, the undertaker, a newspaper reporter, and another man that the coroner had brought along for a juryman, drove up to the ranch at five o’clock that morn...

No clues! Land’s alive! The place was positively cluttered with clues; and most of them about as useful, in the end, as clutter generally is. I am not saying that none of them w...

John came into the room. “The outfit is back, or most of it,” he said. “Darn their souls! Curiosity, nothing else. But for this, they wouldn’t have shown up for two days yet. I...

“It might be,” Sam said, as he refilled his pipe, “that Chad did not write this. I’ll send it, with some of his other writing, to one of these handwriting experts I’ve read about.”

All the while I was getting a make-shift dinner ready, that last thought of mine kept bothering me like the smell of something burning. So, as soon as dinner was over (I need no...

I should have been there, long before. I went right in, apologizing, and trying to explain. But, when I saw that she meant for us to sit in Gaby’s room, I suggested that we go s...

“What I can not understand,” she said, “is, that Gaby knew that she might be killed. And yet, so far as anyone knows, she did not do one thing to save herself. If only, only she...

I put my arm around her shoulders and drew her close to me. “Honey,” I said, “forgive your old Mary. We are all overstrung, overwrought. I didn’t mean to speak so sharply.”

When I went down to the living-room, at five minutes before three, Danny, John, Mrs. Ricker and Martha were all there. Danny and John were sitting at the far end of the room. Mr...

“Well,” he said, “I can talk all right. But I want to start with this understanding. I don’t know any facts that amount to a damn. You’re right that I have suspicions. If you we...

“If you mean me, dad,” John spoke right up, and I’d given a pretty penny to have had him say something else, for, of course, Sam had not meant him, “I’m not worried. They don’t...

Sam lowered his brows, and turned those blue searchlights of his on her. “That is a bad beginning, my girl,” he said, kindly enough, though. “You don’t think that. Not for a min...

“Damn the key in Mary’s pocket!” Sam exploded. “I’m beginning to think I was right, at first, when I said that Mary locked the door, absent mindedly, and dropped the key in her...

It seemed to me that, when Sam’s pipe hit the floor, it made a noise like doom cracking. We all sat still as stones. I suppose it could not have been more than a minute, but it...

The doctor, who was younger and more cruel than even a doctor has a right to be, said that Martha had died from a stoppage of the heart, undoubtedly induced by the strong drug i...

“Never mind, Ollie. No need confessing, as you say, any of that. Sam knows all about us. He’d guessed it, or most of it, years ago. I’ve just now told him the rest. It is all ri...

“All satisfied, then?” Sam questioned. “All satisfied that Martha killed her, and that Chad carried the body upstairs and hid it for her, and left the false clues—including the...

Hubert answered the telephone, and called to Sam. I followed him into the living-room to hear what was to be heard. I think that John and Mrs. Ricker followed for the same reason.

He pushed right past me, into the room, without waiting for an invitation. He always was a polished-up, perfumed little fellow, but that evening, what with his gray spats and a...

“He is by way of being a wrestler, I believe; and won the name for some particularly clever hold that brought his man down every time. I have never gone in for that sort of thin...

On Friday afternoon, late, I went with John and Sam down to Rattail to meet the train. When it came thundering, snorting up, I thought of the last time that Sam and I had met a...

We had got into the sedan, by that time, and were riding along the Victory Highway. I declare to goodness, a sound that was pretty much like a ripple of giggles went tittering a...

Miss MacDonald came down to breakfast in the morning, trim and white as a new candle. She ate heartily, complimenting the food. She asked after Danny, who had not come down for...

“I was afraid of that,” Miss MacDonald said, when I returned with my information and nothing else to the dining-room. “Now then: Would it be possible for you to remember who las...

“To prove to you,” she said, after an instant’s hesitation, “that my refusal to answer questions is not merely an attempt to appear wise and mysterious, I am going to answer thi...

When it came to helping in the kitchen, that girl was more help in five minutes than Belle, Sadie and Goldie, all three of them together, had been in half a day. She didn’t ask...

July 7. Saw body in crematory late to-night. Cause of death, strangulation. Probably work of expert. Look for Japanese on ranch. Broken fingers on right hand. Beautiful, costly...

As indicated by her notes for July eleventh, on that afternoon Miss MacDonald had cleaned the attic, thoroughly, and had found nothing to pay her for her trouble. Keeping me in...

I am tired of apologizing for myself. I will state, merely, that I managed to say the one thing, under those circumstances, that I should not have said. “Do you know who the mur...

“One reason is,” I said, “that anybody who doesn’t know any better than to suspicion Danny, in this affair, would need a lot more help, to get anywhere, than I could give them.”

“I had a careful copy of it, locked up, of course. I have been leaving the letter in plain sight on my desk for bait. Don’t you see, Mary,” she forgot her formality in her excit...

“I am helping Miss MacDonald,” he said. “Making it easy for her to watch me and convincing her that I’m more or less of a nut, at the same time. Two birds with one stone——”

I went into the kitchen and put through a fairly good batch of baking, considering that I’d got a late start at it. I had intended only to stir up a sunshine cake for supper; bu...

We had come to the stream, and to the shade of the aspen trees. I sat down on one of the rocks, above the first fishing hole, and unfolded the papers she had given to me, and read:

She began, right straight forward and sensible: “I knew that was in the letter, and I longed to destroy it, on that account, but I was afraid. I knew that its disappearance woul...

Canneziano did not come down for breakfast the following morning. I thought that a little strange, for meals were the one thing he had been real polite to ever since he had been...

I myself heard the sheriff say to Sam, late in the afternoon of the day we had found Canneziano, strangled in his bed, “I tell you what, Sam, this is a pretty dirty business—all...

Miss MacDonald had thought it necessary to have Martha’s body exhumed and sent to San Francisco. That is what the coroner and the undertaker had been about on their second trip...

I stayed in my room for half an hour, thinking with all my might that I was thinking. At the end of that time, discovering that I had not turned out one single rational thought,...

“If necessary, Mary, by God, he put it up to me, straight. He came to me, and said that he had to get off the place for a while. Had to. I baited him along. Asked him where he w...

“Listen. Bit by bit it works into the whole, like a picture puzzle—each segment slipping right into place. There is just one hole in it all, and I think your Danny’s kindness an...

When I finally did get myself downstairs, I found Sam, seemingly alone in the living-room, playing solitaire. I judged, from the look he gave me, and from the way he had his sho...

Before mine had completely left me, I had attempted to telephone to Sam, down in the outfit’s quarters, and had failed to get a reply to my call. I had told Mrs. Ricker and Zinn...

Sam says, bitterly, that the only thing I need to explain is the one thing that can ever be explained: how one girl, by changing her clothes and by washing her face, could turn...