The Chinese Parrot (Charlie Chan Detective Series) — page 74: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

oe —— V. MADDEN'S RANCH steep, rock-strewn grade. "Go easy, Horace," he murmured. Presently they were on the floor of the desert, the road but a pair of faint wheel tracks amid the creosote brush and mesquite. Once their headlights caught a jack-rabbit, sitting firmly on the right of way; the next instant he was gone forever. C arefully Will Holley guided his car down the Bob Eden saw a brief stretch of palm trees back of a barbed-wire fence, and down the lane between the trees the glow of a lonely window. "Alfalfa ranch,” Will Holley explained. "Why, in heaven's name, do people live out here?" Eden asked. "Some of them because they can't live anywhere else," the editor answered. "And at that—well, you know it isn't a bad place to ranch it. Apples, lemons, pears—" "But how about water?" 74 comiicboeoe S CO