reat
deal more about horseback riding and cattle and range dances. She
would have known a great deal less about the romance of the West,
however, and she would probably never have seen a sheriff's posse
riding twenty strong and bunched like bird-shot when it leaves the
muzzle of the gun. Indeed, I am very sure she would not. Killings
such as her father heard of with his lips drawn tight and the cords
standing out on the sides of his skinny neck she would have considered
the grim tragedies they were, without once thinking of the "picture
value" of the crime.

As it was, her West was filled with men who died suddenly in gobs of
red paint and girls who rode loose-haired and panting with hand 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 the 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,