When Grey was unable to find any theatrical manager to produce it, he turned it into a short novel, “Amber’s Mirage”, a three-part serial published in Ladies Home Journal (5/29-7/29) and collected in restored form in Rangle River: Western Stories (Five Star, 2001). It was at Arizona movie locations that Mildred began her own Western romance with a contemporary setting. When no publisher could be found to accept it, Grey rewrote the story and published it under his own name as “Desert Bound”, a six-part serial appearing in McCall’s (12/25-5/25).

The second of the unproduced and unpublished stage plays on which Millicent Smith and Zane Grey collaborated that Grey subsequently turned into a magazine serial was The Courting of Stephen. The play is a romantic farce that shows how the principal female character turns the tables on the man she wants to marry, using variations of Stephen’s own courtship techniques. The Water Hole was the result, rendering into English the Navajo word Beckyshibeta for an area that conceals below ground an ancient Indian kiva and at the same time is a source for water in the midst of the surrounding desert. The holographic manuscript for this serial is in Zane Grey’s handwriting, so it is impossible to determine the extent to which Smith contributed to this version, but there is no question that the heroine was her creation and Grey did what he could to embody Mildred’s personality even more into the Cherry Winters character in the story. When “The Water Hole” appeared as a twelve-part serial in Collier’s (10/8/27-12/24/27), all of the character names had been changed. When the serial was posthumously published as Lost Pueblo by Harper & Brothers as the 1954 Zane Grey novel, the text was that of the magazine version, and so the numerous excisions the magazine had made from the text as well as the altered character names were retained. The text published here restores what Zane Grey wrote including all the characters as he originally named them. How the enchantment of the desert could change a person physically and spiritually for the better was a theme for Zane Grey certainly as old as Desert Heritage (Five Star, 2010), written in 1909. Whether Grey should have tried to write a contemporary 1920s romantic farce, as Mildred continued to urge him to do, and how enjoyable the result was are issues best left to the judgment of the reader. All I can say is that The Water Hole is unlike anything else Zane Grey ever published.

One

Cherry Winters did not see anything of Arizona until morning. The train had crossed the state line after dark. New Mexico, however, with its bleak plains and rugged black ranges, its lonely reaches, had stirred in her quite new sensations. Her father had just knocked upon her door, awakening her at an unusual hour. She had leaped at her father’s casual proposal to take a little trip West with him, but it had begun to have a rather interesting significance to her. And Cherry was not so sure how she was going to take it.

They had arrived at Flagstaff late in the night, and Cherry had gone to bed tired out. Upon awakening this morning, she was surprised at an absence of her usual languor. She appeared wide-awake in a moment. The sun streamed in at the window, very bright and golden, and the air that blew in with it was sharp and cold.

“Gee! I thought someone said it was springtime,” said Cherry as she quickly got into slippers and dressing gown. Then she looked out of her window. Evidently the little hotel was situated on the outskirts of town. She saw a few scattered houses on each side, among the pine trees. There were rugged gray rocks, covered with vines and brush. The pines grew thicker and merged into a dark green forest. In the distance showed white peaks against the deep blue of sky. Cherry had an inkling that she was going to like this adventure.

She did not care to admit it, but, although she was only twenty years old, she had found a good deal too dull at her home in the East. Serious thought appeared to be something she generally shunned, yet to her, now and then, it came involuntarily.

While she dressed she pondered upon the situation. She had never been West before. After college there had been European travel, and then the usual round of golf, motoring, dancing, with all that went with them.