The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan

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; but when a thunder shower came, washing everything cool and sweet, I opened the kitchen wide to it, and made an angel cake out of the whites of the eggs, and baked a big pan of ginger bread. Zinnia did the washing up; so I was all through and frosting the cakes, when Miss MacDonald telephoned down to the kitchen and asked me to go for a walk with her.

Between times, I'd roasted three chickens and got a salad in the icebox. I wouldn't need to turn a hand to supper for an hour; so I told her that I'd like nothing better than a breath of the clean, sage-seasoned air, and that I'd be ready in ten minutes. I gave Zinnia a few directions, and went upstairs to change my shoes.

As I came down the front stairs, into the living-room, I saw Mrs. Ricker coming up the steps to the porch. She was toting a big old shovel; carrying it out in front of her, and carefully, right side up, like it was a pancake turner and she had a pancake on it. I stopped in my tracks. There are some connections that the mind refuses: President Coolidge with a six-gun, for instance, or Chief Justice Taft with a saxophone, or Mrs. Ricker with a heavy, dirty old shovel.

She stopped to turn sidewise and open the screen door with her foot, and then she came straight along into the living-room, poking the thing toward Miss MacDonald.

"I want you to look at this," she said.

Miss MacDonald, all crisp in white linen, backed away a mite; but she looked, as directed.

I came hurrying to look too. I don't know what I expected to see-nothing less than a dead scorpion; but, certainly, something more than I did see: an old iron shovel with dirt on it.

"Well? " Miss MacDonald questioned.

"I was going to Martha's grave when the shower came up. I stopped in the cabin. This shovel, and another one, were inside the door there. Look at that earth-it is fresh earth. Now I tell you, two people have been digging around this place; and they were at it not longer ago than yesterday, more likely this morning."

"My word! " said Miss MacDonald. It seemed to me there was more annoyance in her voice than there was interest or astonishment.

"Somebody," I pronounced, "still believes that there is money hidden around here."

Mrs. Ricker nodded her satisfaction.

"But surely," Miss MacDonald said, "around a farm, a ranch, that is, around a place of this sort there must be a great deal of digging going on. Gardens-vegetables, you know. That is-one thing and another. " She fumbled it, like that.

"We don't make garden here in July," I told her. "The vegetable gardens and greenhouses are about three miles away from where Mrs. Ricker found the shovels."

"To be sure. " She puckered her brows. "But-Mr. Stanley spoke of fishing. Don't the men dig worms for bait?"

"Anyone," I told her, "who did bait fishing on the Desert Moon, would be about as popular as an S. P. C. A. convention at a round-up. Likely you'll learn our ways, in time. Bait fishing isn't one of them."

While I had been getting this off my mind, Danny had come downstairs. I guess we must have looked funny, the three of us, standing there and staring at the shovel, which Mrs. Ricker was still holding as if it were a pancake turner.

"But-what is it? " Danny inquired.

"It is a shovel," said Mrs. Ricker.

"Yes, I know. But what about it?"