Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/23

Rh from me, and left me half pagan again. Across two long years of respectability came some ghostly call of the wild, vaguely unsettling me, as the sudden beat of tomtoms might disturb the stateliest porter who ever wore the uniform of the Pullman Company. It took me back to the old manner of thought and speech and made me ask if it wouldn't be better to slip down to Slim Totten's hang-out and inquire if he wasn't in need of a gun-moll to gay-cat for him in his established profession of bank-sneak? Or swing in with Trigger Lennygan on his annual migration to the Pacific Coast as a hotel-beat? For I had a sudden hunger to put space between me and the scene of my humiliation. I had a feeling that San Francisco and Los Angeles would seem more home-like than this sodden Great White Way that was no more white than the flue of a smoke-stack is white.

But I knew, once I'd thought it over, that there could be no going back. I hadn't the courage, for courage is the first thing that civilization seems to take away from us. I hadn't climbed far, on that upward trail, but to get even where I had got had cost me too much to let me think of slipping back into that Black Valley behind me. When a girl is fighting for a lost position, I'd found, it's almost