The Girl from Hollywood, Edgar Rice Burroughs [i love reading .TXT] 📗
- Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs
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He reined the Apache in behind the burros in the darkness of the tree’s shade, and there he waited for the coming of the men. He did not like the look of things at all. What could those boxes contain?
As he sat there waiting, he had ample time to think. He speculated upon the identity and purpose of the mysterious informant who had called him up from Los Angeles. He speculated again upon the contents of the packs. He recalled the whisky that Guy had sold him from time to time, and wondered if the packs might not contain liquor. He had gathered from Guy that his supply came from Los Angeles, and he had never given the matter a second thought; but now he recalled the fact, and concluded that if this was whisky, it was not from the same source as Guy’s.
Then from the mouth of Jackknife he heard the sound of horses’ hoofs. The Apache pricked up his ears, and Custer leaned forward and laid a hand upon his nostrils. “Quiet boy!” he admonished, in a low whisper.
The sounds approached slowly, halting occasionally. Presently two horsemen rode directly past him on the far side of the canyon. They rode at a brisk trot. Apparently they did not see the pack train, or, if they saw it, they paid no attention to it. They disappeared in the darkness, and the sounds of their horses’ hoofs ceased. Pennington knew that they had halted. Who could they be? Certainly not the drivers of the pack train, else they would have stopped with the burros.
He listened intently. Presently he heard horses walking slowly toward him from up the canyon. The two who had passed were coming back-stealthily.
“I sure have got myself in a pretty trap!” he soliloquized a moment later, when he heard the movement of mounted men in the canyon below him. He drew his gun and sat waiting. It was not long that he had to wait. A voice coming from a short distance down the canyon addressed him.
“Ride out into the open and hold up your hands!” it said. “We got you surrounded and covered. If you make a break, we’ll bore you. Come on, now, step lively-and keep your hands up!”
It was the voice of an American.
“Who in thunder are you?” demanded Pennington.
“I am a United States marshal,” was the quick reply.
Pennington laughed. There was something convincing in the very tone of the man’s voice-possibly because Custer had been expecting to meet Mexicans. Here was a hoax indeed; but evidently as much on the newcomers as on himself. They had expected to find a lawbreaker. They would doubtless be angry when they discover that they had been duped.
Custer rode slowly out from beneath the tree.
“Hold up your hands, Mr. Pennington!” snapped the marshal.
Custer Pennington was nonplussed. They knew who he was, yet they demanded that he should hold up his hands like a common criminal.
“Hold on there!” he cried. “What’s the joke? If you know who I am, what do you want me to hold up my hands for? How do I know you’re a marshal?”
“You don’t know it; but I know that you’re armed, and that you’re in a mighty bad hole. I don’t know what you might do, and I ain’t taking no chances. So stick ‘em up, and do it quick. If anybody’s going to get bored around here it’ll be you, and not none of my men!”
“You’re a damned fool,” said Pennington succinctly; but he held his hands before his shoulders, as he had been directed. Five men rode from the shadows and surrounded him. One of them dismounted and disarmed him. He lowered his hands and looked about at them.
“Would you mind,” he said, “showing me your authority for this, and telling me what in hell it’s all about?”
One of the men threw back his coat, revealing a silver shield. “That’s my authority,” he said; “that, and the goods we got on you.”
“What goods?”
“Well, we expect to get ‘em when we examine those packs.”
“Look here!” said Custer. “You’re all wrong. I have nothing to do with that pack train or what it’s packing. I came up here to catch the fellows who have been bringing it down through Ganado every Friday night, and who cut our fence last week. I don’t know any more about what’s in those packs than you do-evidently not as much.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Pennington. You’ll probably get a chance to tell all that to a jury. We been laying for you since last spring. We didn’t know it was you until one of your gang squealed; but we knew that stuff was somewhere in the hills above L. A., and we aimed to get it and you sooner or later.”
“Me?”
“Well, not you particularly, but whoever was bootlegging it. To tell you the truth, I’m plumb surprised to find who it is. I thought all along it was some gang of cheap greasers; but it don’t make no difference who it is to your Uncle Sam.”
“You say some one told you it was I?” asked Custer.
“Sure! How else would we know it? It don’t pay to double-cross your pals, Mr. Pennington.”
“What are you going to do with me?” he asked.
“We’re going to take you back to L. A. and get you held to the Federal grand jury.”
“Tonight?”
“We’re going to take you back tonight.”
“Can I stop at the house first?”
“No, We got a warrant to search the place, and we’re going to leave a couple of my men here to do it the first thing in the morning. I got an idea you ain’t the only one around there that knows something about this business.”
THEY took Custer down to the village of Ganado, where they had left their cars and obtained horses. Here they left the animals, including the Apache, with instructions that he should be returned to the Rancho del Ganado in the morning.
The inhabitants of the village, almost to a man, had grown up in neighbourly friendship with the Penningtons. When he from whom the officers had obtained their mounts discovered the identity of the prisoner, his surprise was exceeded only by his anger.
“If I’d known who you was after,” he said, “you’d never have got no horses from me. I’d a’ hamstrung ‘em first! I’ve known Cus Pennington since he was knee high to a grasshopper, and whatever you took him for he never done it. Wait till the colonel hears of this. You won’t have no more job than a jack rabbit!”
The marshal turned threateningly toward the speaker.
“Shut up!” he advised. “If Colonel Pennington hears of this before morning, you’ll wish to God you was a jack rabbit, and could get out of the country in two jumps! Now you get what I’m telling you-you’re to keep your trap closed until morning. Hear me?”
The officers and their prisoner were in the car ready to start. The marshal pointed a finger at Jim.
“Don’t forget what I told you about keeping your mouth shut until morning,” he admonished.
They drove off toward Los Angeles. Jim watched them for a moment, as the red tail light diminished in the distance. Then he turned into the office of his feed barn and took the telephone receiver from its hook. “Gimme Ganado No. 1,” he said to the sleepy night operator.
It was five minutes before continuous ringing brought the colonel to the extension telephone in his bedroom. He seemed unable to comprehend the meaning of what Jim was trying to tell him, so sure was he that Custer was in bed and asleep in a near-by room; but at last he was half convinced, for he had known Jim for many years, and well knew his stability and his friendship.
He hung up the receiver. While he dressed hastily, he explained to his wife the purport of the message he had just received.
“What are you going to do, Custer? she asked.
“I’m going to Los Angeles, Julia. Unless that marshal’s driving a racing car, I’ll be waiting for him when he gets there!”
Shortly before breakfast the following morning two officers, armed with a warrant, searched the castle on the hill. In Custer Pennington’s closet they found something which seemed to fill them with elation-two full bottles of whisky and an empty bottle, each bearing a label identical with those on the bottles they had found in the cases borne by the burros. With this evidence and the laden pack train, they started off toward the village.
Shannon Burke had put in an almost sleepless night. For hours she had lain watching the black silhouette of the cupola against the clear sky, waiting for the light which would announce that Custer had returned home in safety: but no light shone to relieve her anxiety.
She was up early in the morning, and in the saddle at the first streak of dawn, riding directly to the stables of the Rancho del Ganado. The stableman was there, saddling the horses while they fed.
“No one has come down yet?” she asked.
“The Apache’s gone,” he replied. “I don’t understand it. He hasn’t been in his box all night. I was just thinkin’ of goin’ up to the house to see if Custer was there. Don’t seem likely he’d be ridin’ all night, does it.”
“No,” she said. Her heart was in her mouth. She could scarcely speak. “I’ll ride up for you.” she managed to say.
Wheeling Baldy, she put him up the steep hill to the house. The iron gate that closed the patio arch at night was still down, so she rode around to the north side of the house and coo-hooed to attract the attention of some one within. Mrs. Pennington followed by Eva, came to the door. Both were fully dressed. When they saw who it was, they came out and told Shannon what had happened.
He was not injured, then. The sudden sense of relief left her weak, and for a moment she did not consider the other danger that confronted him. He was safe! That was all she cared about just then. Later she commenced to realize the gravity of his situation, and the innocent part that she had taken in involving him in the toils of the scheme which her interference must have suggested to those actually responsible for the traffic in stolen liquor, the guilt of which they had now cleverly shifted to the shoulders of an innocent man.
But there was something that she could do. When she turned Baldy down the hill from the Pennington’s, she took the road home that led past the Evan’s ranch, and, turning in, dismounted and tied Baldy at the fence. Her knock was answered by Mrs. Evans.
“Is Guy here?” asked Shannon. Hearing her voice, Guy came from his room, drawing on his coat. “You’re getting as bad as the Pennington’s, ” he said, laughing. “They have no respect for Christian hours!”
“Something has happened,” she said, “that I thought you should know about. Custer was arrested last night by government officers and taken to Los Angeles. He was out on the Apache at the time. No one seems to know where he was arrested, or why; but the supposition is that they found him in the hills, for the man who runs the feed barn in the village-Jim-told the colonel that the officers got horses from him and rode up toward the ranch, and that it was a couple of hours later that they brought Custer back on the Apache. The stablemen just told me that the Apache
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