Talk:The Girl from Hollywood (Munsey's Magazine 1922)/Chapter 15

(Synopsis of the preceding chapters:)
 * In the foothills of the southern California mountains are the Rancho del Ganado, owned by Colonel Pennington, a Virginian of wealth and good family, and a smaller ranch on which Mrs. Evans, a widow, lives with her daughter Grace and her son Guy. Custer Pennington, the colonel's son, is engaged to Grace Evans, but the girl feels that she has dramatic talent, and before settling down to married life in the country she decides to go to Hollywood and make a bid for fame as a motion picture actress.


 * There is also a boy and girl engagement between Eva Pennington, Custer's sister, and Guy Evans. In his eagerness for money to enable him to marry, young Evans becomes involved in the schemes of Slick Allen, a discharged employee of the Ganado ranch, who is selling whisky stolen from a government warehouse. The liquor is hidden in the hills, and every Friday night thirty-six cases are brought down by a burro train to a barn on the Evans ranch, from which they are shipped to Los Angeles concealed in a truck load of hay.


 * Another neighbor of the Penningtons is Mrs. Burke, whose daughter Shannon, known professionally as Gaza de Lure, is in Hollywood, playing small parts in film dramas. A clever and beautiful girl, Shannon Burke attracts the attention of Wilson Crumb, an actor-director of some prominence, who tricks her into the morphine habit. Crumb is also a partner of Slick Allen, to whom he owes several thousand dollars received for drugs. To avoid paying the debt, he treacherously informs on Allen, who is arrested and imprisoned as a drug peddler.


 * Summoned to her mother's bedside owing to Mrs. Burke's serious illness, Shannon takes with her a week's supply of morphine. Her mother is dead when she arrives, and the hospitable Penningtons take the grief-stricken girl into their home. Here, impressed by the beauty of the life led by her hosts, she battles desperately, but with little hope of success, against the terrible habit she has formed.