The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan

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 he was going to take the sedan and drive down to Rattail for the mail.

I suspicioned, right then, that he was up to something. He could not fool me into thinking that he would take a fifty mile trip-twenty-five miles each way-through the desert heat for no other reason than to get the mail. He couldn't do any trading, since all of Rattail would be off to the Telko celebration. When Danny seemed hurt and troubled about him going, and when he went riding right off, anyway, I decided that Sam must have sent him, expecting some word concerning Canneziano. I was wrong.

We had had a stiff breeze, with a promising sprinkle of rain in the morning; but it had died down about noon and, at two o'clock, it was too tarnation hot to do anything but try to keep cool. I stacked the dinner dishes, to wash in the evening, and joined the others, sitting around in the living-room with the electric fans going full blast.

Sam, chess board in hand, stopped long enough by my chair to say in an undertone, "What did I tell you, Mary? ‘It is always darkest, just before the dawn."

That piece of optimism from him was due, in part, to the extra good holiday dinner he had just eaten; and in part to a sense of quiet, edging close to peace, that had pervaded the place since morning. I had noticed it, too, with thankfulness, and had accounted for it with the supposition that Gaby had spent all of her energy in meanness the day before, and was obliged to rest up for a spell.

"That's a nice little piece," I answered Sam. "There is another one, though, isn't there, about a lull before the storm?"

That was not pure contrariness on my part. I was expecting, every minute, to see Gaby break out again. She didn't. She yawned around, and fussed about, and then went and sat beside Danny, who was looking at the pictures in _The Ladies Home Journal_, and put her arm around her, and petted her up a little-a most unusual performance for her.

When Chad, who had been monkeying with the radio, got a rip-roaring patriotic program from Salt Lake, the two girls went upstairs together.

A few minutes later I had an errand upstairs-a real one, I wouldn't have taken myself up in that heat to satisfy any curiosity-so, out of habit, I stopped at Gaby's door to listen. I heard the girls giggling in there; and, knowing no great harm is afoot when girls giggle, I went on, got my scrap of pongee silk to mend Sam's shirt, and came downstairs again.

Sam and Hubert Hand were deep in their chess game. Mrs. Ricker was tatting. Chad and Martha were playing dots and crosses. In spite of the noise from the radio, there was a comfortable feeling about the room that made me lonesome for the days we had all had together before the Canneziano girls had come.

The radio program, which was to last from two until four o'clock, had just that minute stopped. Martha, who when she didn't forget it, usually fed her rabbits about that time of day, had gone out to do it. Gaby came downstairs, humming a tune.

She had on the tomato soup colored wrap that she had worn on the train, and the hat to match the wrap. She was carrying a beaded bag. She never dressed up like that, to go walking around the place; a wrap, even such a light one, in the heat of that day, was downright ridiculous.

Chad said, "All dressed up and no place to go?"

She tossed her head at him, and hurried straight down the room and out through the glass doors. Chad followed her. They stopped together on the porch. She stood with her back to me. Chad faced me. In a minute, I saw his mouth bend up into a grin of bliss. Nothing would have surprised me more. For this reason.

As that girl had walked through the room, I had seen that she walked in mortal fear. In spite of her humming, in spite of her attempted swagger, fear was in her widened eyes, in her drawn in chin, in the contraction of her shoulders. Wherever it was that she was going, she was afraid to go. But where could she go? John had the sedan. Except for the trucks, which she couldn't drive, and her pony-she surely would not be dressed like that to ride horseback-there was no way for her to get off the place. It must be, then, that someone was coming to the place, and that she was going out alone to meet them. Who? Canneziano? Not unless Sam had been mistaken about the time when he was to be released from prison. Usually, when people think at all, they think quickly. All this had gone through my mind while she had walked the forty feet to the door. Before Chad smiled, I had spoken to Mrs. Ricker.

"That girl," I said, "is afraid of something."

Mrs. Ricker darted her tatting shuttle back and forth. She moistened her lips, with her tongue; but changed her mind and said nothing.

Gaby and Chad stood on the porch talking for two or three minutes-a very short time, at any rate. Then she went down the steps, and Chad, still smiling, came back into the room.

As he came in, Danny called down from the top of the stairway. "Gaby-oh, Gaby?"

She knows where Gaby is going, and whom she is going to meet, and she, too, is afraid, I decided, because of the queer, strained quality of her voice.