The Quirt | Page 5

held
over the heart, hurrying for doctors, and cowboys and parsons and such.
She had seen many a man whip pistol from holster and dare a mob with
lips drawn back in a wolfish grin over his white, even teeth, and
kidnappings were the inevitable accompaniment of youth and beauty.
Lorraine learned rapidly. In three years she thrilled to more
blood-curdling adventure than all the Bad Men in all the West could
have furnished had they lived to be old and worked hard at being bad
all their lives. For in that third year she worked her way enthusiastically
through a sixteen-episode movie serial called "The Terror of the
Range." She was past mistress of romance by that time. She knew her
West.
It was just after the "Terror of the Range" was finished that a great
revulsion in the management of this particular company stopped
production with a stunning completeness that left actors and actresses
feeling very much as if the studio roof had fallen upon them. Lorraine's
West vanished. The little cow-town "set" was being torn down to make

room for something else quite different. The cowboys appeared in
tailored suits and drifted away. Lorraine went home to the Casa Grande,
hating it more than ever she had hated it in her life.
Some one up-stairs was frying liver and onions, which was in flagrant
defiance of Rule Four which mentioned cabbage, onions and fried fish
as undesirable foodstuffs. Outside, the palm leaves were dripping in the
night fog that had swept soggily in from the ocean. Her mother was
trying to collect a gas bill from the dressmaker down the hall, who
protested shrilly that she distinctly remembered having paid that gas
bill once and had no intention of paying it twice.
Lorraine opened the door marked LANDLADY, and closed it with a
slam intended to remind her mother that bickerings in the hall were less
desirable than the odor of fried onions. She had often spoken to her
mother about the vulgarity of arguing in public with the tenants, but her
mother never seemed to see things as Lorraine saw them.
In the apartment sat a man who had been too frequent a visitor, as
Lorraine judged him. He was an oldish man with the lines of failure in
his face and on his lean form the sprightly clothing of youth. He had
been a reporter,--was still, he maintained. But Lorraine suspected
shrewdly that he scarcely made a living for himself, and that he was
home-hunting in more ways than one when he came to visit her mother.
The affair had progressed appreciably in her absence, it would appear.
He greeted her with, a fatherly "Hello, kiddie," and would have kissed
her had Lorraine not evaded him skilfully.
Her mother came in then and complained intimately to the man, and
declared that the dressmaker would have to pay that bill or have her gas
turned off. He offered sympathy, assistance in the turning off of the gas,
and a kiss which was perfectly audible to Lorraine in the next room.
The affair had indeed progressed!
"L'raine, d'you know you've got a new papa?" her mother called out in
the peculiar, chirpy tone she used when she was exuberantly happy. "I
knew you'd be surprised!"

"I am," Lorraine agreed, pulling aside the cheap green portières and
looked in upon the two. Her tone was unenthusiastic. "A superfluous
gift of doubtful value. I do not feel the need of a papa, thank you. If you
want him for a husband, mother, that is entirely your own affair. I hope
you'll be very happy."
"The kid don't want a papa; husbands are what means the most in her
young life," chuckled the groom, restraining his bride when she would
have risen from his knee.
"I hope you'll both be very happy indeed," said Lorraine gravely. "Now
you won't mind, mother, when I tell you that I am going to dad's ranch
in Idaho. I really meant it for a vacation, but since you won't be alone, I
may stay with dad permanently. I'm leaving to-morrow or the next
day--just as soon as I can pack my trunk and get a Pullman berth."
She did not wait to see the relief in her mother's face contradicting the
expostulations on her lips. She went out to the telephone in the hall,
remembered suddenly that her business would be overheard by half the
tenants, and decided to use the public telephone in a hotel farther down
the street. Her decision to go to her dad had been born with the words
on her lips. But it was a lusty, full-voiced young decision, and it was
growing at an amazing rate.
Of course she would go to her dad in Idaho! She was astonished that