Nan Ryan Read Online Free

and sophisticated. At twenty-one she had come to the nation’s capital, her mother’s birthplace and still home to her only living Howard relative. The Howard name was an old and highly respected one in Washington. Her aunt, Lydia Howard Dansby, enjoyed a great deal of influence with the city’s powerful.
    Lydia Howard Dansby had invited her only niece, Diane, to share the imposing Howard ancestral home, with a promise to help Diane find just the correct position in the nation’s capital, if she insisted on being employed. Diane had quickly accepted, and Aunt Lydia had been as good as her word.
    For the past four years Diane had held the envied position of well-paid stenographer and trusted aide to one of the country’s most dynamic young senators. At first it had been a challenge. Now she was anxious for a different kind of challenge.
    Despite Montana Senator Clay Dodson’s urging her to stay on, Diane was leaving, and she could hardly wait to be gone. Her mind was made up. She couldn’t be swayed. Either by her aunt Lydia or the handsome senator.
    “But, my dear Diane,” the young senator had entreated when first she told him of her plans, “you can’t desert me. You can’t. Diane, I need you.”
    “I’m sorry, Clay, truly I am,” she had replied, touched by the tenderness and disappointment in his warm brown eyes, “but someone else needs me more.”
    It was the truth.
    She was badly needed by those whom she most loved, the Colonel and Granny Buchannan.
    From the time she was five years old, Diane’s paternal grandparents had owned and operated the Colonel Buck Buchannan’s Wild West Show . When she was a child, the touring extravaganza had played to sold-out houses all over America and Europe. In its heyday the show had been so successful the troupe crisscrossed the country in shiny custom-made rail cars, sailed to the Continent on the Cunard Line’s finest ships, booked the most opulent hotel rooms at home and abroad.
    Sadly that was no longer the case.
    Colonel Buck Buchannan’s Wild West Show was in deep financial trouble. Had been in trouble for the past few years. There were numerous reasons for the show’s steady decline. First, the bloom was off the rose. What had been a new, exciting spectacle twenty years ago was now familiar. The paying customers had become jaded. They had seen, dozens of times, the Rough Riders and the Mexican charros and the buffalo herds and the reenactment of the stagecoach ambushed by hostiles.
    There were no surprises to the program. No new daring acts to make the crowds cheer or gasp with excitement.
    Then, too, other forms of entertainment had become increasingly popular. The theater. The opera. The colorful P. T. Barnum’s Circus. Thomas Edison’s new kinetoscope shows.
    Most damaging of all was the proliferation of other wild west shows. When Colonel Buck Buchannan’s Wild West Show began, it was the first and only traveling extravaganza of its kind. Every performance was sold out weeks in advance, and crowds were awed and amazed by what they saw in the arena. Now there were more than two dozen similar shows, most with far better acts and more original programs than the Colonel’s.
    Worse, Diane had been hearing rumors that Pawnee Bill—owner of the moneymaking Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show and the archenemy of her grandfather—was planning a takeover of the Colonel’s ailing show.
    Diane couldn’t let that happen. She wouldn’t let that happen!
    She would do what she had been considering for the past year. She’d give up her position in Washington, D.C., and join her grandfather’s troubled troupe. She’d add her own name and act to the bill in an attempt to beef up the take. She’d install modern business procedures. Using her D.C. connections, she’d help the Colonel search out a bank willing to lend the much-needed operating capital.
    Her violet eyes flashing with fierce determination, Diane forcefully slapped the palm of her right hand down atop