"I'm very sorry, but the horse was trapped inside," the chief replied grimly. "The hangar door had been locked, with an iron bar across it."

Barbara could hardly compose herself. "The hangar doors have never been locked! I certainly wouldn't lock the one with my horse in it! Someone must have set the fires, deliberately. And they knew the horse I loved was inside the hangar."

"We haven't determined it's an arson fire yet," the fire chief said. "Investigators will have to decide that. But I am sorry. We all are. We did our best, but couldn't save anything."

Barbara could see that. But at that moment, what she grieved for more than her property was Becky. She tried not to think of how frightened the mare had been, to be trapped in the hangar with bales of straw when the building had been set on fire. She would never forgive whoever had locked in the helpless, innocent animal.

The thought of Becky being such a terrible victim became too much for her, and Barbara broke into tears. Someone held her then, comforting her. Only after a moment did she see that it was Edna, telling her to go ahead and cry.

"Cry as long and hard as you want."

When Barbara returned to her room at the boarding house that night, Ma Phelps told her Moose Mondrowski had called and she was to call him right back. Barbara knew he lived in rooms behind his store, so she called him there.

"I'm very sorry about your airport fire," Moose told her.

"But you're not alone. Someone set fire to my lumberyard!"

You can't cry forever, even if sometimes you'd like to. Barbara had her cry, and then some. The next morning, she faced what she had to: the fact that she was ruined and broke; or as close to it as she had ever come.

The airport was a total loss, except she still had the Piper Cub. The office building and both hangars had been all but consumed in the fire, and even her car had been lost in it. All she had was half ownership in the metal shells of the three buildings and the land they barely still stood on.

She didn't even count the investment she had made. Now it seemed like a liability; her sole ownership of some worthless desert land. She now felt she had been conned into buying Hat Farm by a handsome but devious man she had been foolish enough to think loved her.




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