Penny of Top Hill Trail

by Belle Kanaris Maniates

With a queer little catch of expectancy in his throat, he held the letter for a moment pressed tight in his hand. Then he opened it.

“TO KURT WALTERS, EX-ACTING SHERIFF.

“In taking French leave, I feel that it is due you to inform you who your prisoner really is.

“I was to the stage born. In fact, nearly stage-born, as my mother played her part almost up to the night I made my debut in the great game of Life. My childhood was spent mostly in the flies, and my earliest memories are of being propped up on an impromptu, triangular divan formed by a piece of wood stuck between two joists and covered with cushions; of watching my mother use lip stick and other make-up things; of hearing the warning knock and admonition: ‘Thirty minutes, Miss Lamont;’ (No ‘Mrs.’ in stage lore, you know) and later, ‘Fifteen minutes Miss Lamont;’ of her cheery response, ‘Yes, Parks,’ and of her never hurrying or being flustered by the flight of time; of her giving me a sticky kiss as the final peremptory call came. Everyone in the company mothered me, so I was not neglected—doubtless received too much attention. I was a very nimble kidlet, and at an early age the stage carpenter, who had once been in a circus, taught me to walk a taut rope and to perform acrobatic feats.

“In due course I played juvenile leads. When I attained the young and tender grass age, I was sent away to school, my mother having been a shrewd manager and investor. The school was equipped with a fine gymnasium; riding and dancing academies were attached. In all of these institutions I excelled.

“When I was sixteen, my mother died, and I went on the stage. I didn’t inherit her talent as an actress, having only mediocre ability, but I had a carrying voice, personality, and could dance, so I soon left the legitimate stage for vaudeville where I made something like a hit.

“Bruce Hebler, who is a motion picture man, persuaded me to come into film land, and if you didn’t live at the end of the trail and forego all things that make good cheer, you might have recognized me from billboard pictures and magazine pages as the star of certain woolly West productions. Jo recognized me at once as Bobbie Burr.

“This spring I was a bit under the weather, because we really have to work like dogs and some of our daring stunts—which are not always faked—do get on our nerves, you see. I had to have a vacation, after which I needed another, and was advised to seek recuperation in your hills. My objective point was one hundred or more miles from here at a sort of little isolated inn. En route I missed connections, and having no enthusiasm about my destination, I stayed over in the town nearest Top Hill. In a local paper I read of the arrest of a ‘hardened young criminal.’ I was curious to see what species of my sex that might be, and followed my impulse to visit her at the jail. Your friend, Bender, gave me permission to visit the ‘hardened young criminal.’ She was a girl of my own age, size, and altogether what I or any girl could easily have been had it not been for the accident of birth, conditions and environment.

“Fortunately she was an admirer of Bobbie Burr, and I won her confidence and story—Marta’s story, which you already know. Things and people had made her put up a bluff of being hardened, but there had come, as you know, the newly awakened desire to ‘live straight—like folks who didn’t get caught.’ To use her own words, ‘she wasn’t going to let a grand man like him wish himself on such as me.’ I felt, then, that thief or no thief, she was the real thing. I only knew one way to get her release and I was rather keen for adventure. We exchanged dress skirts, shoes, hats and coats. I gave her some money, the key to my hotel room, trunk and suitcase and told her to take the next train out while the going was good, and not to show up at the hotel until the night clerk, who had not seen me, came on. I also gave her a letter to some good friends of mine in a town farther west, I knew they would be kind to her, ask no questions and let her stay until she was squared about.

“It was done on an impulse—in a flash—one of those kaleidoscopic impulses we have, but back of it was the wish to help some one, and the curiosity to see if her love, aided by the opportunity, would suffice to reform the kind of girl she was supposed to be.