The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan

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 its usual grin, that he had brought some bad news with him: a slump in the cattle market; moonshine liquor discovered again, down in the outfit's quarters; a delayed shipment of groceries from Salt Lake. I, who in the months that were coming, was to live through more shock, and fright, and distress and disaster than should fall to the lot of a thousand women in all of their combined lifetimes, was worrying, then, for fear we should have to be doing without olive oil and canned mushrooms for a few weeks in the ranch-house!

"I had a letter to-day," he said, "from the Canneziano twins."

I am like a lot of folks who say that they are not superstitious, who just happen to think that it is bad luck to walk under a ladder. More than likely the shivery, creepy sensation I felt, when Sam said that, was due to the cold he had brought in with him, and was not due to the fact that those words of his were the forerunners for all of the grim mysteries and the tragedies that made the Desert Moon Ranch, before the end of July, a place of horror.

"How much do they want? " I questioned.

"No, Mary; they want to come here to live."

"Lands alive! For how long?"

"Danielle wrote the letter. She says they want to come here and rest, indefinitely. There was quite a bit in it about the peace of the deserts and the high mountains here in Nevada. She says she longs for it with all her soul, or something like that."

"Danielle," I said, "always was the best of the two. You going to let them come, Sam?"

"Anything else for me to do?"

"Not a thing-for you. There'd be plenty for others. Those girls are no kin of yours. Let me see-they must be able-bodied young women by now. Eight years old when they were here in 1909, makes them twenty-four years old now, according to my figures. Why a couple of women twins, aggregating forty-eight years, should decide to come here and rest their souls, at your expense, is beyond me."

"I have plenty."

"So has Henry Ford. Why don't they go rest their souls with him? They've got as much claim on him as they have on you. None."

"I reckon."

"Where are they now, anyway?"

"Switzerland."

"Lands alive! I don't pretend to know much about foreign geography, but I've understood that there were a few mountains in Switzerland. Leave those girls rest their souls right there where they are, Sam."

"No-I don't know, Mary. I guess I'll write them a letter and tell them to come along. Lots of room."

I didn't argue any more about it. For twenty-five years I had been housekeeper of the Desert Moon ranch-house, and I had learned, during that time, that there was only one subject, concerning Sam, or the place, on which I could never hope to have any say-so. Trying to argue with Sam about anything that had to do, in any way, with Margarita Ditsie, when she was Margarita Ditsie Stanley, or when she was Margarita Ditsie Canneziano, was about as sensible as hoisting a chiffon parasol for protection in the midst of one of our Nevada mountain cloudbursts.

Margarita Ditsie was of French-Canadian parentage; a dark-haired, big-eyed beauty. Her father kept a gambling hole in Esmeralda County in the early days. Her mother had run away from a convent, after she had become a nun, to marry him. The girl had some of the nun, some of the runaway, and some of the gambling house proprietor in her. It made a queer combination.

When she was eighteen years old she came from Carson to visit Lily Trooper, over on the Three Bars Ranch, in northeastern Nevada, about sixty miles from here. Sam met her there, at one of Ben Trooper's big barbecues. She and Sam were married two weeks later. She was a lot younger than Sam; but, even then, he was the richest man in the valley, with every unwedded woman for a hundred miles around setting her cap for him.