The Girl From Hollywood

[Dark Saint Alaick]

CHAPTER THREE

As the two young men climbed the hill to the big house, a few minutes later, they found the elder Pennington standing at the edge of the driveway that circled the hill top, looking out toward the wide canyon and the distant mountains. In the nearer foreground lay the stable and corrals of the saddle horses, the hen house with its two long alfalfa runways, and the small dairy barn accommodating the little herd of Guernseys that supplied milk, cream, and butter for the ranch. A quarter of a mile beyond, among the trees, was the red-roofed "cabin" where the unmarried ranch hands ate and slept, near the main corrals with their barns, outhouses, and sheds.
The two young men joined the older, and Custer put an arm affectionately about his father's shoulders.
"You never tire of it," said the young man.
"I have been looking at it for twenty-two years, my son," replied the elder Pennington, "and each year it has become more wonderful to me. It never changes, and yet it is never twice alike. See the purple sage away off there, and the lighter spaces of wild buckwheat, and here and there among the scrub oak the beautiful pale green of the manzanitascintillant jewels in the diadem of the hills! And the faint haze of the mountains that seem to throw them just a little out of focus, to make them a perfect background for the beautiful hills which the Supreme Artist is placing on his canvas today. An hour from now He will paint another masterpiece, and to-night another, and forever others, with never two alike, nor ever one that mortal man can duplicate; and all for us, boy, all for us, if we have the hearts and the souls to see!"

[Dark Saint Alaick]

"How you love it!" said the boy.
"Yes, and your mother loves it; and it is our great happiness that you and Eva love it, too."
The boy made no reply. He did love it; but his was the heart of youth, and it yearned for change and for adventure and for what lay beyond the circling hills and the broad, untroubled valley that spread its level fields below "the castle on the hill."
"The girls are dressing for a swim," said the older man, after a moment of silence. "Aren't you boys going in?"
"The girls" included his wife and Mrs. Evans, as well as Grace, for the colonel insisted that youth was purely a physical and mental attribute, independent of time. If one could feel and act in accord with the spirit of youth, one could not be old.
"Are you going in?" asked his son.
"Yes. I was waiting for you two."
"I think I'll be excused, sir," said Guy. "The water is too cold yet. I tried it yesterday, and nearly froze to death. I'll come and watch."

[Dark Saint Alaick]

The two Penningtons moved off toward the house, to get into swimming things, while young Evans wandered down into the water gardens. As he stood there, idly content in the quiet beauty of the spot, Allen came down the steps, his cheque in his hand. At sight of the boy he halted behind him, an unpleasant expression upon his face.
Evans, suddenly aware that he was not alone, turned and recognized the man.
"Oh, hello, Allen!" he said.
"Young Pennington just canned me," said Allen, with no other return of Evan's greeting.
"I'm sorry," said Evans.
"You may be sorrier!" growled Allen, continuing on his way toward the cabin to get his blankets and clothes.
For a moment Guy stared after the man, a puzzled expression knitting his brows. Then he slowly flushed, glancing quickly about to see if any one had overheard the brief conversation between Slick Allen and himself.
A few minutes later he entered the inclosure west of the house, where the swimming pool lay. Mrs. Pennington and her guests were already in the pool, swimming vigorously to keep warm, and a moment later the colonel and Custer ran from the house and dived in simultaneously. Though there was twenty-six years' difference in their ages, it was not evidenced by any lesser vitality or agility on the part of the older man.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Colonel Custer Pennington had been born in Virginia fifty years before. Graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and West Point, he had taken a commission in the cavalry branch of the service. Campaigning in Cuba, he had been shot through one lung, and shortly after the close of the war he was retired for disability, with rank of lieutenant-colonel. In 1900 he had come to California, on the advice of his physician in the forlorn hope that he might prolong his sufferings a few years more.
And so Pennington had come West with Mrs. Pennington and little Custer, Jr., and had found the Rancho del Ganado run down, untenanted and for sale.
He judged from the soil and the water that Ganado was not well suited to raise the type of horse that he knew best, and that he and his father and his grandfathers before them had bred in Virginia; but he saw other possibilities. Moreover, he loved the hills and the canyons from the first; and so he had purchased the ranch, more to have something that would temporarily occupy his mind until his period of exile was ended by a return to his native State, or by death, than with any idea that it would prove a permanent home.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

CHAPTER FOUR


WORK and play were inextricably entangled upon Ganado, the play being of a nature that fitted them better for their work, while the work, always in the open and usually from the saddle, they enjoyed fully as much as the play. While the tired business man of the city was expending a day's vitality and nervous energy in an effort to escape from the turmoil of the mad rush-hour and find a strap from which to dangle homeward amid the toxic effluvia of the melting pot, Colonel Pennington plunged and swam in the cold, invigorating waters of his pool, after a day of labour fully as constructive and profitable as theirs.
"One more dive!" he called, balancing upon the end of the springboard, "and then I'm going out. Eva ought to be here by the time we're dressed, hadn't she? I'm about famished."
"I haven't heard the train whistle yet, though it must be due," replied Mrs. Pennington. "You and Boy make so much noise swimming that we'll miss Gabriel's trumpet if we happen to be in the pool at the time!"
They were still bantering as they entered the house and sought their several rooms to dress.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Guy Evans strolled from the walled garden of the swimming pool to the open arch that broke the long pergola beneath which the driveway ran along the north side of the house. Here he had an unobstructed view of the broad valley stretching away to the mountains in the distance. Down the centre of the valley a toy train moved noiselessly. As he watched it, he saw a puff of white rise from the tiny engine. It rose and melted in the evening air before the thin, clear sound of the whistle reached his ears. The train crawled behind the green of trees and disappeared.
He knew that it had stopped at the station, and that a slender, girlish figure was alighting, with a smile for the porter and a gay word for the conductor who had carried her back and forth for years upon her occasional visits to the city a hundred miles away. Now the chauffeur was taking her bag and carrying it to the roadster that she would drive home along the wide, straight boulevard that crossed the valley--utterly ruining a number of perfectly good speed laws.
The headlights of a motor car turned in at the driveway. Guy went to the east porch and looked in at the living room door, where some of the family had already collected. "Eva's coming!" he announced.
With a rush the car topped the hill, swung up the driveway, and stopped at the corner of the house. A door flew open, and the girl leaped from the driver's seat. "Hello, everybody!" she cried.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Snatching a kiss from her brother as she passed him, she fairly leaped upon her mother hugging, kissing, laughing, dancing, and talking all at once. Espying her father, she relinquished a dishevelled and laughing mother and dived for him.
"Most adorable pops!" she cried, as he caught her in his arms. "Are you glad to have your little nuisance back? I'll bet you're not. Do you love me? You won't when you know how much I've spent, but oh, popsy, I had such a good time! That's all there was to it, and oh, momsie, who, who, who do you suppose I met? Oh, you'd never guess--never, never!"
"Whom did you meet?" asked her mother.
"Yes, little one, whom did you meet?" inquired her brother.
"And he's perfectly gorgeous, " continued the girl, as if there had been no interruption; "and I danced with him--oh, such divine dancing! Oh, Guy Evans! Why how do you do? I never saw you."
The young man nodded glumly.
"How are you, Eva?" he said.
"Mrs. Evans is here, too, dear," her mother reminded her.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

The girl curtsied before her mother's guest, and then threw her arm about the older woman's neck.
"Oh, Aunt Mae!" she cried. "I'm so excited; but you should have seen him, and, momsie, I got the cutest riding hat!" They were moving toward the living room door, which Guy was holding open. "Guy, I got you the splendiferousest Christmas present!"
"Help!" cried her brother, collapsing into a porch chair. "Don't you know that I have a weak heart? Do your Christmas shopping early--do it in April! Oh, Lord, can you beat it?" he demanded of the others. "Can you beat it?"
The colonel was glancing over the headlines of an afternoon paper that Eva had brought from the city.
"What's new?" asked Custer.
"Same old rot," replied his father. "Murders, divorces, kidnappers, bootleggers, and they haven't even the originality to make them interesting by evolving new methods. Oh, hold on--this isn't so bad! 'Two hundred thousand dollars' worth of stolen whisky landed on coast," he read. 'Prohibition enforcement agents, together with special agents from the Treasury Department, are working on a unique theory that may reveal the whereabouts of the fortune in bonded whisky stolen from a government warehouse in New York a year ago.

[Dark Saint Alaick]

All that was known until recently was that the whisky was removed from the warehouse in trucks in broad daylight, compassing one of the boldest robberies ever committed in New York. Now, from a source which they refuse to divulge, the government sleuths have received information which leads them to believe that the liquid loot was loaded aboard a sailing vessel, and after a long trip around the Horn, is lying somewhere off the coast of southern California. That it is being lightered ashore in launches and transported to some hiding place in the mountains is one theory upon which the government is working. The whisky is eleven years old, was bottled in bond three years ago, just before the Eighteenth Amendment became a harrowing reality. It will go hard with the traffickers in this particular parcel of wet goods if they are apprehended, since the theft was directly from a government bonded warehouse, and all government officials concerned in the search are anxious to make an example of the guilty parties.'
"Eleven years old!" sighed the colonel. "It makes my mouth water! I've been subsisting on home-made grape wine for over a year. Think of it--a Pennington! Why my ancestors must be writhing in their Virginia graves!"
"On the contrary, they're probably laughing in their sleeves. They died before July 1, 1919," interposed Custer." "Eleven years old--eight years in the wood," he mused aloud, shooting a quick glance in the direction of Guy Evans, who suddenly became deeply interested in a novel lying on a table beside his chair, notwithstanding the fact that he had read it six months before and hadn't liked it. "And it will go hard with the traffickers, too," continued young Pennington. "Well, I should hope it would. They'll probably hang 'em, the vile miscreants!"

[Dark Saint Alaick]

Guy had risen and walked to the doorway opening upon the patio.
"I wonder what is keeping Eva," he remarked.
"Getting hungry?" asked Mrs. Pennington. "Well, I guess we all are. Suppose we don't wait any longer? Eva won't mind."
They had finished their soup before Eva joined them, and after the men were reseated they took up the conversation where it had been interrupted.
During a brief moment when she was not engaged in conversation, Guy seized the opportunity to whisper to Eva, who sat next to him.
"Who was that bird you met in L. A.?" he asked.
"Which one?"
"Which one! How many did you meet?"
"Oodles of them."
"I mean the one you were ranting about."
"Which one was I ranting about? I don't remember."