The Forbidden Trail

Roger Moore is seven when the book opens, tall, thin, and quick-tempered, the son of a factory owner whose business goes down in a strike and a canceled contract. Morrow follows him through engineering school and out to Archer’s Springs in the Arizona desert, where he sets out to build an engine that runs on sunlight. The work is slow, short of money, and punished by heat. His friend Ernest Wolf and Charley Preble, the neighbor girl he grew up beside, carry much of it with him, while the money behind the plant comes from a German banker whose interests reach well past power engineering. Published in 1919 under the name Honoré Willsie, it draws on the two years she spent in the Arizona desert with her first husband, Henry Willsie, who built experimental solar plants.