Estelle Hopewell proved to be Ada's saving angel—and far more than in their intimate moments, of which there were many in the ensuing years. Estelle immediately fell in love with the hidden Colorado valley of Wolf Creek, and she virtually moved in with Ada and Frank in the Wolf Creek Ranch main ranch house. Frank never really took to her, but he tolerated her for Ada's sake. Estelle was visited in turn by her adventuring husband, who one day looked in the passenger seat of the RC-38US Douglas Ward Cruiser DWC he was test piloting, noticed that his chronicler companion wasn't there, and came looking for her. And she also was visited by her lover, the male bonding novelist J. Harvey Kincaid, who took to the Wolf Creek valley like it was his Atlantis or Nirvana.
The spring of 1926 saw the release, to international acclaim, of the novel Estelle wrote, Pristine Valley, while she was in residence at the Wolf Creek Ranch and that was being touted for a Pulitzer or National Book Award now that her Quentin had come and swept her away to Europe to celebrate the publication of a book of a young, charismatic German political leader who had piqued Quentin's interest as the statements therein matched many of his own views. Estelle didn't understand the man's book, Mein Kampf, but she could not refuse following her husband on his various adventures. Before she had left the ranch, however, she had planted in Ada's mind the notion of turning the Wolf Creek Ranch into a dude ranch for those in the literary and art world who wanted to escape the cities and prepare their art in peace. The publication of her own book would surely, she said, provide the impetus for the flocking of the literary and art world to this pristine Colorado valley.
And so it did. Ada barely had time to prepare for the influx of celebrity visitors to the newly established Wolf Creek dude ranch before their sleek automobiles, completely unsuited for the mountain terrain, started kicking up dust on the canyon road entering the valley. Frank was all for turning his spread into a dude ranch as long as Ada did all of the arranging; the cattle business had slowly been going down hill for several years, and he had had to let William Hagen's logging operations, now part of a large and prestigious construction firm headquartered up in Denver, creep ever farther into his virgin timber areas in the foothills of Hahn's Peak adjacent to the Medicine Bow National Forest.
It was during the summer of 1925, after Estelle had departed and when Ada was able to focus more closely on the real world around her, that Ada observed just how totally her ten-year-old son, Hugh, was bonding with Frank and just how much the youngster loved the ranching life. It occurred to her that both Frank and Hugh would love for the ranch to pass from one to the other and that this could only smoothly happen if she married Frank. But he hadn't asked her to marry him for months, and she was afraid his intentions might have changed—especially as he had watched with some irritation Estelle's possessive mannerisms and observed how often they had disappeared from his view for long periods of time and had both come back into his company with the unmistakable of air of sexual fulfillment in the air.
She must rekindle Frank's ardor—and his proposal of marriage, she realized.
She prepared for him one day after he had ridden the range all day checking the fences that had become necessary to separate his cattle grazing areas from those of the sheep of neighboring spreads. If sheep got onto cattle land, they grazed the grass so short that the grasses were killed and no longer good for feeding cattle, so the cattle ranchers had to keep constant vigil on their grazing lands.
"Frank, you look so tired and worn," Ada called out to him from the porch. "You really should stop riding the range yourself on horseback. I worry about you."
"The day I can't ride a horse into the ground is the day I die," Frank said grumpily. But as he descended from the saddle, he noticed that Ada looked particularly beautiful this afternoon and was wearing one of the dresses that made his juices flow.
Ada drew him a warm bath, and as he was soaking and almost dozing off, she came and stood before him and disrobed. By the time she had finished, he was in full arousal, and when she slipped into the tub with him and reached for his manhood and stroked him with her hand while kissing the nipples on his weather-beaten and deeply tanned, barrel chest, he was panting and wanting her badly.
She did not tease him long or disappoint him, but straddled him with her pelvis when he was engorged and rode him in ways that he didn't ride his horse.
By the time he had ejaculated deep inside her in a full-throttled pumping action, he had whispered his marriage proposal to her yet again, and she, at last, to his great astonishment and delight, had accepted him.
Hours later, when Ada had at last worn out the vigorous and virile rancher, they sat, drinking coffee, in the kitchen of the rambling ranch house, and Frank decided it was time to set the direction for their lives.
"I know how much you want this celebrity dude ranch," he said. "And it if will keep you from needing to escape to the big cities as often as you do, I'm all for it. It's time we moved ahead on that, I think."
"Thanks, Frank," Ada said. "I'll start thinking about what we need and who we can get to do it."
