The Mystery in Arizona

‘Taut no such luck.” He grinned at his sister.
    Di, who so often got words mixed up, received a tiny dictionary. She looked hurt for a second, then laughed with the others.
    Jim received a plastic puppy that looked so much like his springer spaniel, Patch, that he was amazed. Brian, the future doctor, found that his package contained a miniature stethoscope. Mart, whose current ambition was to attend an agricultural college, received a set of tiny garden tools.
    Mrs. Sherman joined them then. “Look at what I got,” she shouted gleefully. “A skillet, no less, the size of my thumbnail.”
    In a few minutes Jane Brown, Mr. Wellington, and Tenny became the center of the group. They had all received plastic toys and were enjoying them immensely. Jane’s little cowgirl seemed made to order for riding Tenny’s bucking bronco. Mr. Wellington, who would play Santa Claus on Christmas Day, had been presented with a miniature of the jolly old elf himself.
    “That reminds me,” he said, “I must try on my costume to make sure it fits perfectly. Who will volunteer to help me get into it?”
    “We all will,” Sally and her brothers replied, and they hurried off to their cabin.
    The cowboy orchestra began to tune up for dancing, and soon Jane and Tenny were waltzing together. Foreman Howie chose Mrs. Sherman for his partner while Uncle Monty danced with Rosita.
    “Rosita looks very happy,” Trixie whispered to
    Honey, “but you can tell she’s only pretending. She’s such a good sport she wouldn’t let her worries spoil the Christmas Eve party.”
    “We’ve just got to do something about her,” Honey whispered back.
    When the music stopped, Rosita slipped away, and Uncle Monty came over to where the Bob-Whites were standing beside the tree. He took a large white envelope from his pocket and said mysteriously, “This fell out of the piñata, but nobody seemed to notice. It’s got the name Bob-Whites on it.” With a grin, he presented it to Trixie and Jim, the co-presidents of the club.
    “You open it, Jim,” Trixie whispered excitedly. “I can’t slit the flap of the envelope.”
    Jim obeyed and pulled out a check. “Four hundred dollars!” he yelled. “Wow! But we don’t deserve it, Uncle Monty. Our two weeks won’t be up until next Monday.” The surprised Bob-Whites looked at their host.
    Uncle Monty chuckled. “Felt I ought to give you a little extra in place of notice,” he said. “Because, as of midnight, you’re fired.”
    “Fired?” Trixie gasped. “Why?” And then she knew the answer. “Oh, oh, the Orlandos have come back!”
    He nodded. “They’ll be back tomorrow morning. I got a letter from them today explaining the whole mysterious departure. You were right, Trixie. They didn’t dare tell me why they wanted to go, for fear I wouldn’t understand. As a matter of fact, they liked working here so much that they almost didn’t go this year, but at the last minute Senor Orlando’s brother arrived and convinced them that they would be very wrong to stay away.”
    “The dark stranger,” Trixie muttered. “No wonder Petey called him Tio—he’s his great-uncle.”
    “Stop mumbling to yourself,” Mart whispered. “Trixie was right about another thing,” Uncle Monty continued, “but perhaps I’d better begin at the beginning. Come along.”
    He led the way to his own suite of rooms and, when he and the girls were settled comfortably on the huge divan with the boys curled up on the bright rug at their feet, he began.
    “It all dates back to the middle of the sixteenth century when the founder of the Orlando family set off with Coronado to find the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola. He was a lad of eighteen, the son of an Aztec noble who had been a member of the great Montezuma’s court. The boy’s mother was Dona Isabella of a royal Spanish family, so when the child was baptized, he was given the name Pedro and her illustrious last name, Orlando.
    “At any rate, when the lad returned with the other remnants of Coronado’s band, he was only twenty and so was not too disheartened by the failure of the expedition. He went into the business of raising cattle, built an enormous hacienda, married, and had a large family. It is his birthday which his descendants celebrate every year in the ruins of the ancestral home.”
    “We guessed that it had something to do with a birthday,” Trixie murmured, “but from what Petey said, it sounded as though the Orlandos might have