The Water Hole: A Western Story
About this ebook
In 1925 widowed businessman Elijah Winters brings his daughter, Cherry, from Long Island to stay at a trading post in a remote area some distance from Flagstaff, Arizona. Removed from the country clubs and speakeasies, Cherry is at first bored with simple ranch life, and to entertain herself she flirts with several of the cowboys, not realizing they are very different from the young men she knew back east. Also very different is Stephen Heftral, a young archaeologist who is searching for an ancient and lost kiva of a primitive Indian tribe that disappeared centuries before in what became the land of the Navajos.
Heftral believes that this lost kiva is most probably in a desert fastness called Beckyshibeta, the Navajo word for water hole. Elijah colludes with Heftral to awaken Cherry to a new and healthier way of life by taking her, by force if necessary, to the site. Cherry resents being kidnapped but comes to forget the luxury of her past in the beauty and dangers of the canyons—and in the thrill of making an important archaeological discovery.
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About the author
Zane Grey® (1872–1939), born in Ohio, was practicing dentistry in New York when he and his wife published his first novel. Grey presented the West as a moral battleground in which his characters are destroyed because of their inability to change or are redeemed through a final confrontation with their past. The man whose name is synonymous with Westerns made his first trip west in 1907 at age thirty-five. More than 130 films have been based on his work.
