Plot
Nancy Drew is invited by her best friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne, to Shadow Ranch in Arizona for a vacation. On the first day there, Nancy discovers that the owners of the ranch, Bess and George's Uncle Ed and Aunt Bet Rawley, are gone. The previous evening, a glowing white horse came galloping up to the ranch, causing a huge commotion, and shortly after, Ed was bitten by a venomous rattlesnake and rushed to the hospital. Bess and George's flight has also been indefinitely delayed, so Nancy is alone at the ranch with Shorty, Dave, and Tex, the ranch's cook, foreman, and head wrangler, respectively.
In the 1880s, an outlaw named Dirk Valentine was romantically involved with the sheriff's daughter, Frances Humber, who lived at Shadow Ranch. Dirk had promised Frances a valuable treasure and left clues and puzzles around the area for her to find it, but he was subsequently arrested for bank robbery and hanged by Frances's father. Frances was too broken-hearted to search for the treasure, and in a fit of grief she ceased all contact with her father and permanently moved to the east coast. Local legend says that Dirk's horse has come back to avenge its master and that misfortune will befall whoever sets eyes on it.
Nancy spends the day helping the ranch hands with chores and exploring the area on one of Tex's horses, Bob. She meets Mary Yazzie, the owner of a local gift store who has a sour relationship with the Rawleys after they rejected her offer to buy a piece of their land. That evening, Nancy and the ranch hands are having a cookout when the "phantom" horse appears again, and suddenly a pipe explodes in the ranch's pump house.
The next day, Nancy finds out that Shorty has inquired with the local geological services about mineral deposits in the area in the hopes of striking it rich; Dave, whose great-aunt was Frances Humber's cousin, has been searching for Dirk Valentine's treasure; Tex's sister had previously worked for the Rawleys but was fired in a bitter dispute; and Mary Yazzie and Tex are secretly in a romantic relationship. She realizes one of the ranch hands or Mary could be sabotaging the ranch on purpose and blaming the incidents on Dirk Valentine's curse. Nancy searches for clues in the Dry Creek ghost town where Dirk had lived, and discovers that someone has been camping out in one of its abandoned buildings. That night, Nancy sees that her gloves are glowing just like the phantom horse, and realizes that she touched phosphorescent powder in the ghost town that someone must be using to make the horse glow. The phantom horse appears again, and the power lines to the ranch are disconnected.
The next day, while visiting the ghost town, Nancy is knocked unconscious by an unseen assailant and wakes up locked in an abandoned jail cell. She manages to escape, and after solving the rest of Dirk Valentine's puzzles, finds his treasure (a chest full of solid gold hearts) at the end of a maze inside a cliff dwelling. After leaving the room that holds the treasure she is confronted by Shorty, who has secretly followed her inside. Shorty admits that he and his friends purposely caused all of the incidents at the ranch in the hopes of scaring everyone away so they could look for the treasure, not realizing the treasure was not located on the ranch. After managing to trap Shorty, Nancy calls the sheriff to have him arrested and rides back to the ranch on the "phantom" horse that he had ridden to the cliff. Mary Yazzie reconciles with the Rawleys, Bess and George finally arrive at the ranch, and the three friends enjoy the rest of their vacation.
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