Treasure and Trouble Therewith by Geraldine Bonner (top e book reader .txt) 📕

and then studied the penciled words, "Hello, Panchita! Ain't you the wonder. Your best beau's proud of you." In the dying light he murmured them over as if their sound delighted him and as he murmured a slight, sardonic smile broke out on his face.

His sense of humor, grim and cynical, was tickled. He, the picaroon, companion of rogues and small marauders, had seen many and diverse love affairs. On the shady bypaths he had followed, edging along the rim of the law, he had met all sorts of couples, men and women incomprehensibly attracted, ill-assorted, mysterious, picturesque. This seemed to him one of the most piquant combinations he had ever encountered--a bandit and a comic opera singer. It amused him vastly and he crooned over the paper, grinning in the dusk. The fellow had evidently marked the item and written his congratulations, intending to send it to her, then needed it to wrap round the money, and confident in the security of his cache, left it there against his return. That thought increased his amusement, and he laughed, a low, smothered chuckle.

It was dark and he rose and lit the lamp. Then he tore out the piece of the paper and put it in the pocket of his suitcase. The rest he folded and placed in the hole under the money. As he knelt, fitting the boards back, he thought of the singing woman, Pancha Lopez. The beloved of a highwayman, with a Spanish name, he pictured her as a dark, flashing creature, coarsely opulent and mature. It was evident that she too belonged to the world of rogues and social pirates, and he laughed again as he saw himself, swept back by a turn of fate, into the lives of the outlawed. He must see Pancha Lopez; she promised to be interesting.


CHAPTER VI


PANCHA

A week later, at eleven at night, a large audience was crowding out of the Albion Opera House. If you know San Francisco--the San Francisco of before the fire--you will remember the Albion. It stood on one of those thoroughfares that slant from the main stem of Market Street near Lotta's Fountain. That part of the city is of dubious repute; questionable back walls look down on the alley that leads to the stage door, and after midnight there is much light of electricity and gas and much unholy noise round its darkened bulk.

But that is not the Albion's fault. It did not plant itself in the Tenderloin; it was the Tenderloin that grew. Since it first opened its doors as a temple of light opera--fifty cents a seat and a constant change of bill--its patrons have been, if not fashionable, always respectable. Smoking was permitted, also the serving of drinks--the seat in front had a convenient shelf for the ladies' lemonade and the gentleman's beer--but even so, no one could say that a strict decorum did not prevail in the Albion's audiences even as it did in the Albion's productions.

A young man with a cheerful, ugly face stood in a side aisle, watching the crowd file out. He had a kindly blue eye, a merry thick-lipped mouth, and blonde hair sleeked back across his crown, one lock, detached from the rest, falling over his forehead. He had a way of smoothing back this lock with his palm but it always fell down again and he never seemed to resent it. Of all that pertained to his outward appearance, he was indifferent. Not only his patience with the recalcitrant lock, but his clothes showed it--dusty, carelessly fitting, his collar too large for his neck, his cravat squeezed up into a tight sailor's knot and shifted to one side. He was Charlie Crowder, not long graduated from Stanford and now a reporter on the _Despatch_, where he was regarded with interest as a promising young man.

His eye, exploring the crowd, was the journalist's, picking salient points. It noted fur collars and velvet wraps, the white gloss of shirt bosoms, women's hair, ridged with artificial ripples--more of that kind in the audience than he'd seen yet. "The Zingara" had made a hit; he'd just heard at the box office that they would extend the run through the autumn. It pleased him for it verified his prophecy on the first night and it was a bully good thing for Pancha.

He stepped out of a side entrance, edged through the throngs on the pavement, dove up an alley and reached the stage door. A single round lamp burned over it and already dark shapes were issuing forth, mostly women, Cinderellas returned to their dingy habiliments. There was a great chatter of feminine voices as they skirmished off, some in groups, some alone, some on the arms of men who emerged from the darkness with muttered greetings.

Crowder crossed the back of the large stage where supers were pulling scenery about; weights and ropes, forest edges, bits of sky and parlor ceilings, hanging in layers from the flies. The brick wall at the back was whitewashed and against it a line of men and girls passed scurrying to the exit, throwing remarks back and forth, laughing, pulling on their coats. Some of them hailed him and got a cheery word in reply. Then, skirting the wings, he turned down a passage and brought up at a door on which a small star was drawn in chalk. He knocked, and a woman's voice called from inside:

"Who is it?"

"Your faithful press agent."

The woman's voice answered:

"Enter Charlie, rear, smiling."

He opened the door, went in. The place was the Albion's best dressing room. It was small, with white-washed walls, and lighted by a gas jet inclosed in a wire shield. A mirror, its frame dotted with artificial flowers, bits of ribbon, notes and favors, surmounted the dressing table. This was a litter of paint pots, hair pins, toilet articles, powder rags, across which, like a pair of strayed snakes, lay two long braids of black hair. A powerful scent of cosmetics and stale perfumery mingled with the faint, thrilling breath of roses.

Seated in front of the glass in a soiled red satin kimono embroidered in storks, was Pancha Lopez, leading woman of the Albion. She was wiping off her make-up, a large jar of cold cream on the table before her, a grease rag in her hand. The kimono, falling richly, outlined a thin, lithe body, flat-backed, muscular and supple. The make-up still on her face turned her brown skin to a meerschaum pallor and the dusky brick-red of her cheeks to an unnatural rose. A long neck upheld a small, finely shaped head, the hair now drawn back and twisted in a tight knot to which the two long braids had been pinned. The Indian strain in her revealed itself in the flattened cheek-bones, the wide-cut, delicate nostrils and the small, high-set eyes as clearly black and white as if made of enamel. They were now outlined and elongated with lamp black which still clung to her lashes in flakes. She was twenty-two years old, and had been on the stage for six years.

After a glance over her shoulder and a flashing smile she returned to her work, pushing her hair still further off her forehead with one hand, and sweeping the greasy cloth over her face with the other.

"Well," said Crowder, standing beside her and looking at her reflection, "how's the baby-grand Patti tonight?"

"Fine!" She drew down her upper lip and slowly rubbed round her mouth, Crowder, as if fascinated, watching the process in the mirror. "Just sit down on something. Hang up my costume and take that chair if there isn't any other. I got to get this thing off before I can talk comfortably."

Her costume, a glittering heap of red and orange, lay across a chair, the pile surmounted by an open cardboard box whence the heads of roses protruded from tissue paper. He feared to touch that, and finding another chair against the wall, drew it to the side of the dressing table and sat down.

"Have you been in front?" she asked, rubbing along her jaw.

"Yes, it's packed. But I only came in just before the curtain. How was the house?"

She threw a radiant look at him.

"Ate it up, dearie. Couldn't get enough. Six encores for my Castanet song. Oh, Charlie," she dropped the hand with its rag to the edge of the table and looked at him, solemnly earnest, "you don't know how I feel--you don't know. It's hard to believe and yet it's true. I can see the future stretching up like a ladder, and me mounting, step by step, on rungs made of gold."

Pancha Lopez, unlettered, almost illiterate, child of the mountains and the ditches, wandering vagabond of the stage, would sometimes indulge in unexpected felicities of phrase. Her admirers said it was another expression of that "temperament" with which she was endowed. Crowder, who knew her better than most, set it down to the Indian blood. From that wild blend had come all that lifted her above her fellows, her flashes of deep intelligence, her instinct for beauty, her high-mettled, invincible spirit. He even maintained to his friend Mark Burrage--Mark was the only person he ever talked her over with--that it was the squaw in her which had kept her pure, made her something more than "a good girl," a proud virgin, self-sufficing, untamable, jealous of her honor as a vestal.

"That's what you ought to see," he said in answer to her serious eyes. "Haven't I always said it? Didn't I tell you so up there in Portland when we first met and you were doing a turn between six saxaphone players and a bunch of trained cockatoos?"

She nodded, laughing, and returned to her rubbing.

"You surely did, and fanned up the flame that was just a tiny spark then. Dear old press agent, I guess I'll have to change your name to the Bellows."

"A. 1. Have you read the last blast I've given out?" She shook her head and he thrust his hand into his overcoat pocket. "I've brought it along, though I thought your father might have sent it to you."

"Pa's in the mountains." Drawing down her upper lip she pressed on her cheeks with painted finger tips, scrutinizing her face in the mirror. "I haven't heard from him for weeks. He's off on the lode somewhere."

"Then he hasn't seen it. It's the best I've done yet, and it's true, every word."

He had drawn from his pocket a paper which he now opened. As he folded it back, Pancha took out her hairpins and shook down her hair. It extended to her shoulders, a thick, curly bush, through which she pulled the comb with short, quick sweeps.

"Read that," said the young man and handed her the paper. "_Sacramento Courier_--'C. C's San Francisco Letter.'"

She took it and read while he watched her with twinkling eyes. They were great pals, these two; had been since they met in Portland, five years ago. He was on his way to Stanford, and had seen her doing a singing and dancing act in a wretched vaudeville company. That vision of a girlhood, beset and embattled, the pitifulness of its acquired hardness, had called to his western chivalry and made him her champion. Ever since he had helped and encouraged, his belief and friendship a spur to the ruthless energy, the driving ambition, that had landed her in the Albion six months before.

As she read she began to smile, then squeals of delight broke from her.

"You old press agent!" she cried, hitting at him with the comb