ON THE STAKED PLAIN

by Eric P. Kelly'O6. The Macmillan Company. 250 pages.$2.00.

IF YOUR TWELVE-YEAR-OLD SON, who naturally has a sweet and submissive disposition like your own, suddenly develops an unusual stubbornness when told to put down his book and go to bed, he is probably reading "On the Staked Plain," Eric P. Kelly's latest book.

"On the Staked Plain" is an exciting story of adventure, buried treasure, and generally mysterious happenings in the panhandle section of the American Southwest, and in a Vermont farmhouse. The incidents cover a period from 1880 to 1938. The leading character is a girl of the present day who wishes to become a detective and who finds, among the papers in her father's Amarillo law office, an account of the long-forgotten Horatio Bennett case and a mysterious fenced-in plot of land, which arouses her curiosity and starts her and her father on the hunt for buried treasure and its legal owners.

Professor Kelly spent a year in New Mexico while writing this story and made a careful study of the early history of this fascinating section of America. He has reconstructed for young people of the present the spirit and feeling of the adventurous days of the past, when men were willing to face danger and death in their search for gold or for new homes and opportunities for themselves and their children.