the living room. “Where are you going?” he demanded.
“Home,” she replied.
“No, you’re not!” he cried. “You promised to stay here.”
“I promised to come,” she corrected him. “I never promised to stay, and I never shall until you are divorced, and we are married.”
“You’ll come back,” he sneered, “when you want another shot of snow!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “I guess I can buy aspirin at any drug store as well as you.”
Crumb laughed aloud.
“You little fool, you!” he cried derisively. “Aspirin! Why, it’s cocaine you’re snuffing, and you’re snuffing about three grains of it a day!”
For an instant a look of horror filled her widened eyes.
“You beast!” she cried. “You unspeakable beast!”
Slamming the door behind her, she almost ran down the narrow walk and disappeared in the shadows of the palm trees that bordered the ill-lighted street.
The man did not follow her. He only stood there laughing, for he knew that she would come back. Craftily, he had enmeshed her. It had taken months, and never had quarry been more wary or difficult to trap. A single false step earlier in the game would have frightened her away forever; but he had made no false step. He was very proud of himself, was Wilson Crumb, for he was convinced that he had done a very clever bit of work.
Rubbing his hands together, he walked toward the bathroom — he would take a shot of snow; but when he opened the receptacle, he found it empty.
“The little devil!” he ejaculated.
Frantically, he rummaged through the medicine cabinet but in vain. Then, he hastened into the living room, seized his hat, and bolted for the street.
Almost immediately, he realized the futility of search. He did not know where the girl lived. She had never told him. He did not know it, but she had never told anyone. The studio had a post office box number to which it could address communications to Gaza de Lure; the mother addressed the girl by her own name at the house where she had roomed since coming to Hollywood. The woman who rented her the room did not know her screen name. All she knew about her was that she seemed a quiet, refined girl who paid her room rent promptly in advance every week and who was always home at night, except when on location.
Crumb returned to the bungalow, searched the bathroom twice more, and went to bed. For hours, he lay awake, tossing restlessly.
“The little devil!” he muttered, over and over. “Fifty dollars’ worth of cocaine — the little devil!”
The next day, Gaza was at the studio, ready for work, when Crumb put in his belated appearance. He was nervous and irritable. Almost immediately, he called her aside and demanded an accounting; but when they were face to face, and she told him that she was through with him, he realized that her hold upon him was stronger than he had supposed. He could not give her up. He was ready to promise anything, and he would demand nothing in return, only that she would be with him as much as possible. Her nights should be her own — she could go home then. And so, the arrangement was consummated, and Gaza de Lure spent the days when she was not working at the bungalow on the Vista del Paso.
Crumb saw that she was cast for small parts that required but little of her time at the studio yet raised no question at the office as to her salary of 50 dollars a week. Twice, the girl asked why he did not star her, and, both times, he told her that he would — for a price; but the price was one that she would not pay. After a time, the drugs, which she now used habitually, deadened her ambition so that she no longer cared. She still managed to send a little money home, but not so much as formerly.
As the months passed, Crumb’s relations with the source of the supply of their narcotic became so familiar that he could obtain considerable quantities at a reduced rate, and the plan of peddling the drug occurred to him.
Gaza was induced to do her share, and so it came about that the better class “hypes” of Hollywood found it both safe and easy to obtain their supplies from the bungalow on the Vista del Paso. Cocaine, heroin, and morphine passed continually through the girl’s hands, and she came to know many of the addicts, though she seldom had further intercourse with them than was necessary to the transaction of the business that brought them to the bungalow.
From one, a woman, she learned how to use morphine, dissolving the white powder in the bowl of a spoon by passing a lighted match beneath and then drawing the liquid through a tiny piece of cotton into a hypodermic syringe and injecting it beneath the skin. Once she had experienced the sensation of well-being it induced, she fell an easy victim to this more potent drug.
One evening, Crumb brought home with him a stranger whom he had known in San Francisco — a man whom he introduced as Allen. From that evening, the fortunes of Gaza de Lure improved. Allen had just returned from the Orient as a member of the crew of a freighter, and he had succeeded in smuggling in a considerable quantity of opium. In his efforts to dispose of it, he had made the acquaintance of others in the same line of business and had joined forces with them. His partners could command a more or less steady supply of morphine and cocaine from Mexico while Allen undertook to keep up their stock of opium and to arrange a market for their drugs in Los Angeles.
If Crumb could handle it all, Allen agreed to furnish morphine at 50 dollars an ounce — Gaza to do the actual peddling. The girl agreed on one condition — that half the profits should be hers. After that, she had been able to send home more money than ever before and, at the same time, to have all the morphine she wanted at a low price. She began to put money in the bank, made a first payment on a small orchard about a hundred miles from Los Angeles, and sent for her mother.
The day before you called on her in the “art” bungalow at 1421 Vista del Paso, she had put her mother on a train bound for her new home with the promise that the daughter would visit her “as soon as we finish this picture.” It had required all the girl’s remaining willpower to hide her shame from those eager mother eyes; but she had managed to do it, though it had left her almost a wreck by the time the train pulled out of the station.
To Crumb, she had said nothing about her mother. This was a part of her life that was too sacred to be revealed to the man whom she now loathed even as she loathed the filthy habit he had tricked her into; but she could no more give up the one than the other.
There had been a time when she had fought against the domination of these twin curses that had been visited upon her, but that time was over. She knew now that she would never give up morphine — that she could not if she wanted to and that she did not want to. The little bindles of cocaine, morphine, and heroin that she wrapped so deftly with those slender fingers and marked “C,” “M,” or “H,” according to their contents, were parts of her life now. The sallow, trembling creatures who came for them, or to whom she sometimes delivered them, and who paid her two dollars and a half a bindle, were also parts of her life. Crumb, too, was a part of her life. She hated the bindles, she hated the sallow, trembling people, she hated Crumb; but still she clung to them, for how else was she to get the drug without which she could not live?
CHAPTER VI
IT WAS MAY. The rainy season was definitely over. A few April showers had concluded it. The Ganado hills showed their most brilliant greens. The March pigs were almost ready to wean. White-faced calves and black colts and gray
