be brought in, the girls looked about the room curiously.

“Isn’t this the queerest little house!” Peggy exclaimed. “Not a single window in it. It’s built exactly like the little adobe huts the peons live in.”

“Florence said they bought the place from a Mexican—anyone’d know that at a glance.” Jo Ann walked over across the room to the back door and looked outside. “This must be that funny little kitchen Florence told us about,” she said, gesturing to a small stone building about fifteen feet beyond.

Just then the driver sauntered in and piled some cots and bedding in the center of the cement floor.

Jo Ann wheeled about. “Come on, Peg, let’s sweep out the house and make up the cots. We can do that much, at least.”

By the time they had the cots made up, the Mexicans had finished unloading and were starting off leisurely down the trail behind the oxcart and burros.

“Let’s stop working now and eat our lunch,” called Florence from the kitchen door. “It’s siesta time right now, and it’ll do all of us good to take a nap.”

Peggy grinned over at Florence. “Maybe Jo Ann’ll take a siesta up here. Remember the trouble she got into up on the roof in town during a siesta hour?”

“Don’t worry about me this time. There’s no mysterious window in this house for me to investigate, as there was there.”

“I bet we won’t be here three days before you’ll find some mystery to solve, Sherlock,” teased Peggy.

“Well, Sherlock’s too hungry to look for mysteries now. Let’s eat.”

“That’s what I say,” agreed Florence. “You girls unpack the eats while I go to the spring for some cool water.”

After they had eaten their lunch and had their siestas, the girls worked another hour putting down rugs, arranging gay pillows and blankets on the cots, and making a dressing table out of a packing box.

“Before we start straightening out things in the kitchen, I believe I’d better go down to the goat ranch,” Florence remarked. “I want to see if I can make arrangements to get milk there every day.”

“You mean—goat’s milk?” Peggy asked in dismay, stopping in the middle of slipping a gay cretonne cover on a pillow.

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