The Girl From Hollywood

[Dark Saint Alaick]

"I am afraid," he said, "that I don't quite get you. What tip? What are you talking about?"
"You called up the station, Mr. Crumb. We had central trace the call. There is no use--"
Crumb interrupted him with a gesture. He didn't want the officer to go so far that it might embarrass him to retract.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, a light of understanding illuminating his face. "I believe I have it. What was the message? I think I can explain it."
"We think you can, too," agreed the sergeant, "seein' you phoned the message."
"No, but I didn't," said Crumb, "although I guess it may have come over my phone all right. I'll tell you what I know about it. A car drove up a little while after dinner, and a man came to the door. He was a stranger. He asked if I had a phone, and if he could use it. He said he wanted to phone an important and confidential message to his wife. He emphasised the 'confidential,' and there was nothing for me to do but go in the other room until he was through. He wanted to pay for the use of the phone. I didn't hear what he said over the phone, but I guess that explains the matter. I'll be careful next time a stranger wants to use my phone."

[Dark Saint Alaick]

"I would," said the sergeant drily. "Would you know him if you saw him again?"

"I sure would," said Crumb.

They rose to go.

"Nice little place you have here," remarked one of them, looking around.

"Yes," said Crumb, "it is very comfortable. Wouldn't you like to look it over?"

"No," replied the officer. "Not now--maybe some other time."

Crumb grinned after he had closed the door behind them.

"I wonder," he mused, "if that was a threat or a prophecy!"

A week later Slick Allen was sentenced to a year in the county jail for having morphine in his possession.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN


AS Shannon Burke alighted from the Southern Pacific train at Ganado, the following morning, a large middle-aged man in riding clothes approached her.
"Is this Miss Burke?" he asked. "I am Colonel Pennington." She noted that his face was grave, and it frightened her. "Tell me about my mother," she said. "How is she?"
He put an arm about the girl's shoulders.
"Come," he said. "Mrs. Pennington is waiting over at the car." Her question was answered.
"Tell me about it," she said at length in a low voice.
"It was very sudden," said the Colonel. "It was a heart attack. Everything that possibly could be done in so short a time was done. Nothing would have changed the outcome, however. We had Dr. Jones of Los Angeles down--he motored down and arrived here about half an hour before the end. He told us that he could have done nothing."
They were silent for a while as the fast car rolled over the smooth road toward the hills ahead. Presently it slowed down, turned in between orange trees, and stopped before a tiny bungalow a hundred yards from the highway.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

"We thought you would want to come here first of all, dear," said Mrs. Pennington. "Afterward we are going to take you home with us."
They accompanied her to the tiny living room, where they introduced her to the housekeeper, and to the nurse, who had remained at Colonel Pennington's request. Then they opened the door of a sunny bedroom, and, closing it after her as she entered left her alone with her dead.
Beyond the thin panels they could hear her sobbing; but when she emerged fifteen minutes later, though her eyes were red, she was not crying.
They led her back to the car, where she sat with wide eyes staring straight ahead. She wanted to scream, to tear her clothing, to do anything but sit there quiet and rigid. The short drive to Ganado seemed to the half mad girl to occupy hours. She saw nothing, not even the quiet, restful ranch house as the car swung up the hill and stopped at the north entrance. In her mind's eye was nothing but the face of her dead mother and the little black case in her traveling bag.
The colonel helped her from the car and a sweet-faced young girl came and put her arms about her and kissed her, as Mrs. Pennington had done at the station. In a dazed sort of way Shannon understood that they were telling her the girl's name--that she was a daughter of the Penningtons. The girl accompanied the visitor to the rooms she was to occupy.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Shannon wished to be alone--she wanted to get at the black case in the travelling bag. Why didn't the girl go away? She wanted to take her by the shoulders and throw her out of the room; yet outwardly she was calm and self-possessed.
Very carefully she turned toward the girl. It required a supreme effort not to tremble, and to keep her voice from rising to a scream.
"Please," she said, "I should like to be alone."
"I understand," said the girl, and left the room, closing the door behind her.
Shannon crept stealthily to the door and turned the key in the lock. Then she wheeled and almost fell upon the travelling bag in her eagerness to get the small black case within it. She was trembling from head to foot, her eyes were wide and staring, and she mumbled to herself as she prepared the white powder and drew the liquid into the syringe.
Momentarily, however, she gathered herself together. For a few seconds she stood looking at the glass and metal instrument in her fingers--beyond it she saw her mother's face.
"I don't want to do it," she sobbed. "I don't want to do it, mother!" Her lower lip quivered, and tears came. "My God, I can't help it!" Almost viciously she plunged the needle beneath her skin. "I didn't want to do it to-day, of all days, with you lying over there all alone--dead!"

[Dark Saint Alaick]

She threw herself across the bed and broke into uncontrolled sobbing; but her nerves were relaxed, and the expression of her grief was normal. Finally she sobbed herself to sleep, for she had not slept at all the night before.
It was afternoon when she awoke, and again she felt the craving for a narcotic. This time she did not fight it. She had lost the battle--why renew it? She bathed and dressed and took another shot before leaving her rooms--a guest suite on the second floor. She descended the stairs, which opened directly into the patio, and almost ran against a tall, broadshouldered young man in flannel shirt and riding breeches, with boots and spurs. He stepped quickly back.
"Miss Burke, I believe?" he inquired. "I am Custer Pennington."
"Oh, it was you who wired me," she said.
"No--that was my father."
"I am afraid I did not thank him for all his kindness. I must have seemed very ungrateful."
She followed him through the living room and the library to the dining room, beyond which a small breakfast room looked out toward the peaceful hills. Young Pennington opened a door leading from the dining room to the butler's pantry, and called to his mother.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

"Miss Burke is down," he said.

The girl turned immediately from the breakfast room and entered the butler's pantry.

"Can't I help, Mrs. Pennington? I don't want to go to any trouble for me. You have all been so good already!"

They seemed to take it for granted that Shannon was going to stay with them, instead of going to the little bungalow that had been her mother's--the truest type of hospitality, because, requiring no oral acceptance, it suggested no obligation.

Shannon could not have refused if she had wished to, but she did not wish to. In the quiet ranch house, surrounded by these strong, kindly people, she found a restfulness and a feeling of security that she had not believed she was ever to experience again. She had these thoughts when, under the influence of morphine, her nerves were quieted and her brain clear. After the effects had worn off, she became restless and irritable. She thought of Crumb then, and of the bungalow on the Vista del Paso, with its purple monkeys stencilled over the patio gate.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

She wanted to be back where she could be free to do as she pleased--free to sink again into the most degrading and abject slavery that human vice has ever devised.

On the first night, after she had gone to her rooms, the Penningtons, gathered in the little family living room, discussed her, as people are wont to discuss a stranger beneath their roof.

"I sized her up over there in the kitchen to-day," said Custer. "She's the real article. I can always tell by the way people treat a servant whether they are real people or only counterfeit. She was as sweet and natural to Hannah as she is to mother."

"I noticed that," said his mother. "It is one of the hall marks of good breeding; but we could scarcely expect anything else of Mrs. Burke's daughter. I know she must be a fine character."

In the room above them Shannon Burke, with trembling hands and staring eyes, was inserting a slender needle beneath the skin above her hip. In the movies one does not disfigure one's arms or legs.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN


THE day of the funeral had come and gone. It had been a very hard one for Shannon. She had determined that on this day, at least, she would not touch the little hypodermic syringe.

She tried to shut the idea from her mind. She tried to concentrate her thoughts upon the real anguish of her heart. She tried to keep before her a vision of her mother; but her hideous, resistless vice crowded all else from her brain, and the result was that on the way back from the cemetery she collapsed into screaming, incoherent hysteria.

They carried her to her room--Custer Pennington carried her, his father and mother following. When the men had left, Mrs. Pennington and Eva undressed her and comforted her and put her to bed; but she still screamed and sobbed--frightful, racking sobs, without tears. She was trying to tell them to go away. How she hated them! If they would only go away and leave her! But she could not voice the words she sought to scream at them, and so they stayed and ministered to her as best they could. After a while she lost consciousness, and they thought that she was asleep and left her.

Perhaps she did sleep, for later, when she opened her eyes, she lay very quiet, and felt rested and almost normal. She knew, though, that she was not entirely awake--that when full wakefulness came the terror would return unless she quickly had recourse to the little needle.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

In that brief moment of restfulness she thought quickly and clearly and very fully of what had just happened. She had never had such an experience before. Perhaps she had never fully realized the frightful hold the drug had upon her. She had known that she could not stop--or, at least, she had said that she knew; but whether she had any conception of the pitiful state to which enforced abstinence would reduce her is to be doubted. Now she knew, and she was terribly frightened.
"I must cut it down," she said to herself. "I must have been hitting it up a little too strong. When I get home, I'll let up gradually until I can manage with three or four shots a day."
When she came down to dinner that night, they were all surprised to see her, for they had thought her still asleep. Particularly were they surprised to see no indications of her recent breakdown. How could they know that she had just taken enough morphine to have killed any one of them? She seemed normal and composed, and she tried to infuse a little gaiety into her conversation, for she realized that her grief was not theirs. She knew that their kind hearts shared something of her sorrow, but it was selfish to impose her own sadness upon them.
She had been thinking very seriously, had Shannon Burke. The attack of hysteria had jarred her loose, temporarily at least, from the selfish rut that her habit and her hateful life with Crumb had worn for her. She recalled every emotion of the ordeal through which she has passed, even to the thoughts of hate that she had held for those two sweet women at the table with her. How could she have hated them? She hated herself for the thought.