Unknown - "The Fall of the Niebelungs"

John McElroy - "The Red Acorn"

Jane Austen - "Pride and Prejudice"

Annie Roe Carr - "Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Long Chance

P >> Peter B. Kyne >> The Long Chance




We are informed that the _good_ people lived west of the tracks.
East of the tracks it was different. The past tense is used with a full
appreciation of the necessity for grammatical construction, for times
have changed in San Pasqual, since it is no longer encumbered with the
incubus that made this story possible--Harley P. Hennage, the town
gambler and the worst man in San Pasqual.

Close to the main-line tracks and midway between both strata of society
stood San Pasqual's limited social and civic center--the railroad hotel
and eating-house. Here, between the arrival and departure of all
through trains, the San Pasqualians met on neutral ground, experiencing
mild mental relaxation watching the waitresses ministering to the
gastronomic necessities of the day-coach tourists from the Middle West.
At the period in which the action of this story takes place, however,
most people preferred to find relief from the aching desolation of San
Pasqual and its environs in the calm, restful, spiritual face of Donna
Corblay.

Donna was the young lady cashier at the combination news stand, cigar
and tobacco emporium and pay-as-you-leave counter in the eating-house.
She was more than that. She was an institution. She was the day hotel
clerk; the joy and despair of traveling salesmen who made it a point of
duty to get off at San Pasqual and eat whether they were hungry or not;
information clerk for rates and methods of transportation for all
desert points north, south, east and west. She was the recipient of
confidences from waitresses engaged in the innocent pastime of across-
the-counter flirtations with conductors and brakemen. She was the joy
of the men and the envy of the women. In fact, Donna was an exemplified
copy of that distinctive personality with which we unconsciously invest
any young woman upon whose capable shoulders must fall such
multifarious duties as those already described; particularly when, as
in Donna's case, they are accepted and disposed of with the gentle,
kindly, interested yet impersonal manner of one who loves her little
world enough to be a very distinct part of it; yet, seeing it in its
true light, manages to hold herself aloof from it; unconsciously
conveying to one meeting her for the first time the impression that she
was in San Pasqual on her own sufferance--a sort of strayling from
another world who had picked upon the lonely little desert town as the
scene of her sphere of action for something of the same reason that
prompts other people to collect postage stamps or rare butterflies.

It has already been stated that Donna Corblay was an institution. That
is quite true. She was the mistress of the Hat Ranch.

This last statement requires elucidation. Just what is a hat ranch? you
ask. It is--a hat ranch. There is only one Hat Ranch on earth and it
may be found a half mile south of San Pasqual, a hundred yards back
from the tracks. Donna Corblay owned it, worked it in her spare moments
and made it pay.

You see, San Pasqual lies just south of Tehachapi pass, and about five
days in every week, the year round, the north wind comes whistling down
the pass. When it strikes the open desert it appears to become
possessed of an almost human disposition to spurt and get by San
Pasqual as quickly as possible. Hence, when the tourist approaching the
station sticks his head out of the window or unwisely remains on the
platform of the observation car, this forty-mile "zephyr," as they term
it in San Pasqual, sighs joyously past him, snatches his headgear,
whirls it down the tracks and deposits it at the western boundary of
Donna's "ranch." This boundary happens to be a seven-foot adobe wall--
so the hat sticks there.

In the days when Donna lived at the Hat Ranch she would pause at this
wall every evening on her way home from work long enough to gather up
the orphaned hats. Later, after cleaning and brushing them, she would
sell them to the boys up in San Pasqual. There was a wide variety of
style, size and color in Donna's stock of hats, and fastidious indeed
was he who could not select from the lot a hat to match his peculiar
style of masculine beauty. And, furthermore: damned was he who so far
forgot tradition and local custom as to purchase his "every-day" hat
elsewhere. He might buy his Sunday hat in Bakersfield or Los Angeles
and still retain caste, but his every-day hat--never! Such a
proceeding would have been construed by Donna's admirers as a direct
attack on home industry. In fact, one made money by purchasing his hats
of Donna Corblay. If she never accepted less than one dollar for a hat,
regardless of age, color, original price and previous condition of
servitude, she never charged more. Hence, everybody was satisfied--or,
if not satisfied at the time, all they had to do was to await the
arrival of the next train. The "zephyrs" were steady and reliable and
in San Pasqual it is an ill wind that doesn't blow somebody a hat.

In San Pasqual stray hats were not looked upon as flotsam and jetsam
and subject to a too liberal interpretation of the "Losers-weepers-
finders-keepers" rule. There was a dead-line for hats beyond which no
gentleman would venture, for, after a hat had once blown beyond the
town limits it was no longer a maverick and subject to branding, but
on the other hand was the absolute, undeniable and legal property of
Donna Corblay.

So much for the hats. As for the ranch itself, it wasn't, properly
speaking, a ranch at all. It was a low, four-room adobe house with a
lean-to kitchen built of boards. It had a dirt roof and iron-barred
windows and in the rear there was a long rectangular patio with a
fountain and a flower garden. In fact, the ranch was more of a fortress
than a dwelling-place and was surrounded by an adobe wall which
enclosed about an acre of the Mojave desert. Originally it had been the
habitation of a visionary who wandered into San Pasqual, established
the ranch and sunk an artesian well. With irrigation the rich alluvial
soil of the desert will grow anything, and the original owner planned
to raise garden-truck and cater to the local trade. He prospered, but
being of that vast majority of humankind to whom prosperity proves a
sort of mental hobble, he made up his mind one day to go prospecting.
So he wrote out a notice, advertising the property for sale, and tacked
it to a telegraph pole in front of the eating-house.

Alas for the frailty and suspicion of human nature! The self-centered
and self-satisfied citizens of San Pasqual had condemned the vegetable
venture from the start. It had been too radical a departure from the
desert order of things, and the fact that a mere stranger had conceived
the idea sufficed to damn the enterprise even with those who gloried in
the convenience of fresh vegetables; while the fact that the vegetable
culturist was now about to leave branded the experiment a failure and
was productive of a chorus of "I told you so's." The announcement of
the proprietor of the ranch that he would entertain offers on a
property to which he had no title other than that entailed in the God-
given right of every American citizen to squat on a piece of land until
he is driven off, was received as a rare piece of humor. In disgust the
founder of the Hat Ranch abandoned his vegetable business, loaded his
worldly effects on two burros and departed, leaving the kitchen door
wide open. He never returned.

In the course of time a young woman with a two-months-old daughter came
to San Pasqual to accept the position of cashier in the eating-house.
The old adobe ranch was still deserted--the kitchen door still wide
open. It was the only vacant dwelling in San Pasqual, and the woman
with the baby decided to move in. She hired a Mexican woman to clean
the house, sent to Bakersfield for some installment furniture and to
Los Angeles for some assorted seeds. About a week later a Cahuilla buck
with his squaw alighted from a north-bound train and were met by the
woman with the baby girl. That night the entire party took possession
of the Hat Ranch.

That first mistress of the Hat Ranch was Donna Corblay's mother, so
before we plunge into the heart of our story and present to the reader
Donna Corblay as she appeared at twenty years of age behind the counter
at the eating-house on the night that Bob McGraw rode into her life on
his Roman-nosed mustang, Friar Tuck, a short history of those earlier
years at the Hat Ranch will be found to repay the time given to its
perusal.

For more than sixteen years after her arrival in San Pasqual, Donna's
mother had presided behind the eating-house pay counter. She was quiet
and uncommunicative--a handsome woman whose chief beauty lay in her
eyes--wonderful for their brilliance and color and the shadows that
lurked in them, like the ghosts of a sorrow ineffable. Up to the day
she died nobody in San Pasqual knew very much about her--where she came
from or why she came. She gave no confidences and invited none. In a
general way it was known that she was a widow. Her husband had gone
away and never returned, and it was a moot question in San Pasqual
whether the Widow Corblay was grass or natural. Be that as it may, the
fact remains that the absent one was missed and that his wife remained
faithful to his memory, as several frontier gentlemen, who had sought
her hand in marriage, might have testified had they so desired.

Mrs. Corblay lived for her child, and was accused of being wantonly and
sinfully extravagant in her manner of dressing this child. She
maintained and supported two Indian servants, which fact alone raised
her a notch or two socially above the wives, sisters and daughters of
the railroad men and local business men who lived in the cottages west
of the tracks. A great many of these estimable females disliked her
accordingly and charged her with "'puttin' on airs." Indeed, more than
one of them had ventured the suggestion that Mrs. Corblay had a past,
and that her child was its outward expression. Of course, they couldn't
prove anything, but--and there the matter rested, abruptly. That "but"
ended it, even as the tracks end at the bumper in a roundhouse. One
felt the jar just the same.

Some hint of this provincial interest in her and her affairs must have
reached Mrs. Corblay shortly after her arrival, so with true feminine
obstinacy she declined to alleviate the abnormal curiosity which gnawed
at the heart of the little community. She died as she had lived,
considerable of a mystery, and San Pasqual, retaining its resentment of
this mystery, visited its resentment upon Donna Corblay when Donna, in
the course of time, gave evidence that she, also, possessed an ultra-
feminine, almost heroic capacity for attending strictly to her own
business and permitting others to attend to theirs.

Early in her occupation of the adobe ranch house Mrs. Corblay had
inaugurated the hat industry, with fresh vegetables as a side line. The
garden was presided over by a dolorous squaw who responded to the
rather fanciful appellation of Soft Wind. Sam Singer, her buck, was a
stolid, stodgy savage, with eyes like the slits in a blackberry pie.
Originally the San Pasqualians had christened him "Psalm Singer,"
because of the fact that once, during a revival held by an itinerant
evangelist in a tent next door to the Silver Dollar saloon, the buck
had attended regularly, attracted by the melody of a little portable
organ, the plaintive strains of which appeared to charm his heathen
soul. An unorthodox citizen, in the sheer riot of his imagination, had
saddled the buck with his new name. It had stuck to him, and since in
the vernacular psalm singer was pronounced "sam singer," the Indian
came in time to be known by that name and would answer to none other.

Donna grew up slightly different from the other little girls in San
Pasqual. For instance: she was never allowed to play in the dirt of the
main street with other children; she wore white dresses that were
always clean, new ribbons in her hair; she always carried a
handkerchief; she attended the little public school with the belfry but
no bell, and her mother trained her in domestic science and the
precepts of religion, which, lacking definite direction perhaps by
reason of the fact that there was no church in San Pasqual, served,
nevertheless, as a bulwark against the assaults of vice and vulgarity
which, in a frontier town, are very thinly veiled. As a child she was
neither precocious nor shy. From a rather homely, long-legged gangling
girl of fourteen she emerged apparently by a series of swift
transitions into a young lady at sixteen, giving promise of a beauty
which lay, not so much in her physical attractions, which were
generous, but in that easily discernible nobility of character which
indicates beauty of soul--that superlative beauty which entitles its
possessor to be alluded to as "sweet," rather than pretty or handsome.
At the dawn of womanhood she was a lovely little girl, kind,
affectionate, imaginative, distinctly virginal,

--a flower... born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

When Donna was nearly seventeen years old her mother died. It was the
consensus of opinion that heart trouble had something to do with it. In
fact, Mrs. Corblay had often complained of pains in her heart and was
subject to fainting spells; besides which, there was that in her eyes
which seemed to predicate a heartache of many years' standing. At any
rate, she fainted at the eating-house one day and they carried her
home. She passed away very quietly the same night, leaving an estate
which consisted of Donna, the two Indian servants, and a quantity of
coin in a teapot in the cupboard at the Hat Ranch which upon
investigation was found to total the stupendous sum of two hundred and
twenty-eight dollars and ninety-five cents.

There was no one except Donna to attend to the funeral arrangements,
and for eight hours following her mother's death she was too distracted
to think of anything but her great grief. Soft Wind prepared her
mistress for the grave after a well-meant but primitive fashion, while
Sam Singer squatted all morning in the sand in front of the compound
and smoked innumerable cigarettes. Presently he got up, went to his own
little cabin within the enclosure and was invisible for ten minutes.
When he emerged he was clad in a new pair of "bull breeches," a white
stiff-bosomed shirt without a collar but with a brass collar button
doing duty nevertheless, while a red silk handkerchief, with the ends
drawn through a ring fashioned from a horseshoe nail, enveloped his
swarthy neck. He had rummaged through the stock of hats and
appropriated a Grand Army hat with cord and tassels, and arrayed thus
Sam Singer walked up the tracks to San Pasqual.

Arrived here Sam's very appearance heralded news of grave importance at
the Hat Ranch. Such extraordinary and unwonted attention to dress could
portend but one of two things--a journey or a funeral. Inasmuch,
however, as Sam was coatless and Mrs. Corblay had been carried home ill
the day before, San Pasqual allowed itself one guess and won.

To those who sought to question him, however, Sam Singer had nothing
more polite than a tribal grunt. He proceeded directly to the Silver
Dollar saloon, where he held converse with a man who seemed much
interested in the news which Sam had to impart, for he nodded gravely
several times, gave Sam fifty cents and a cigar and then hurried around
to the public telephone station in "Doc" Taylor's drug store.

Five minutes later, by some mysterious person, Mrs. Daniel Pennycook,
wife of the yardmaster, was informed over the telephone that Donnie
Corblay's mother was dead.

"So I understand" replied Mrs. Pennycook volubly. "Poor thing! There
was always somethin' so mysterious like about--"

The use of the word "like" was habit with Mrs. Pennycook. She rarely
took a decided stand in anything except Mr. Pennycook, and always
modified her modifying adjective with the word "like"; an annoying
practice which had always rendered her an object of terror to Mrs.
Corblay. To the latter it always seemed as if Mrs. Pennycook was
desirous of saying something nasty, but lacked the courage to come out
flatfooted with it.

Her unknown informant interrupted, or attempted to interrupt, but Mrs.
Pennycook was now started on her favorite topic, in such haste that she
failed to give the customary telephonic challenge:

"Who's speaking, please?"

She continued. "Yes, she was kinder quiet like any kept to herself
like--"

"Well," said the unknown, "she's dead now, and that little daughter o'
hers is all alone down there with her Indian woman. If you knew Mrs.
Corblay was dead, why in blue blazes didn't you or some other woman in
this heartless village go down there and comfort that child? I've asked
three of your neighbors already, but they're washin' or dustin' or
cookin' or somethin'."

"I was so terrible shocked like when I heard it--"

"Well, if the shock's over, for decency's sake, Mrs. Pennycook, go down
to the Hat Ranch and keep that little girl comp'ny till this
afternoon."

"Who's talkin'?" demanded Mrs. Pennycook belligerently.

"I am."

"Who are you?"

"Nobody!"

For several seconds Mrs. Pennycook shot questions into the transmitter,
but receiving no response she hung up, furious at having been denied
the inalienable right of her sex to the last word. Shortly thereafter
her worthy spouse, Dan Pennycook, came in for his lunch. To him Mrs.
Pennycook imparted the tale of the strange man who had rung her up,
demanding that she go down to the Hat Ranch and see Donnie Corblay.
Pennycook's stupid good-natured face clouded.

"Then," he demanded, "why don't you do it? I've been workin' with that
string of empties below town all mornin', an' if any woman in this
charitable community passed me goin' to the Hat Ranch I didn't see her.
It's a shame. Put on your other things right after lunch, Arabella, an'
go down. I'll go with you."

"But the gall o' the man, askin' me to do this! I intended goin'
anyhow, but him ringin' me up so sudden like, I--"

"My dear," said Mr. Pennycook, "he paid you a compliment."

"Humph" responded Mrs. Pennycook. Then she sniffed. She continued to
sniff at intervals during the meal; she was still sniffing when later
she joined her husband at the front gate and set off with him down the
tracks to the Hat Ranch.

Arrived at the Hat Ranch Mrs. Pennycook saw at once that Donna was "too
upset like" to have any of the details of her mother's funeral thrust
upon her. Here was a situation which required the supervision of a
calm, executive person--Mrs. Daniel Pennycook, for instance. At any
rate Mrs. Pennycook decided to take charge. She was first on the scene
and naturally the task was hers, not only as a matter of principle but
also by right of discovery.

Now, under the combined attentions of Donna, Mrs. Corblay and Soft
Wind, the house, while primitive, had, nevertheless, been made
comfortable and kept immaculate. But there is a superstition rampant in
all provincial communities which dictates that the first line of action
to be pursued when there is a death in the family is to scrub the house
thoroughly from cellar to garret, and Mrs. Pennycook had been
inoculated with the virus of this superstition very early in life. She
tucked up her skirts, seized a broom and a mop, rounded up Soft Wind
and proceeded to produce chaos where neatness and order had always
reigned.

It was at this juncture that Donna Corblay first gave evidence of
having a mind of her own. She dried her tears and gently but firmly
informed Mrs. Pennycook that the house had been thoroughly cleaned and
scrubbed three days previous. She begged Mrs. Pennycook to desist. Mrs.
Pennycook desisted, for if Donna couched her request in the language of
entreaty, her young eyes flashed a stern command, and Mrs. Pennycook
was not deficient in the intuition of her sex. So she composed herself
in a rocking chair and by blunt brutal questioning presently
ascertained that Mrs. Corblay had left her daughter two hundred and
twenty-eight dollars and ninety-five cents.

This decided Mrs. Pennycook. She dilated upon the importance of having
a clergyman come down from Bakersfield for the funeral, and suggested
the services (at the metropolitan rates usually accorded such
functionaries) of the local alleged quartette, which regularly made
night hideous in San Pasqual's lone barber shop.

"It'll be kinder nice like, don't you think, Donna?" she queried.

Donna nodded dubiously.

"An' what was your poor dear mamma's church?" continued Mrs. Pennycook.

"She didn't have any" Donna answered, truthfully enough.

Again Mrs. Pennycook sniffed. "Well, then, I suppose Mr. Tillingham, of
the Universal Church--"

Donna interrupted. "Mamma always knew she would be taken from me
without warning, and she often told me not to give her an expensive
funeral. I think she would have liked some services but I can't afford
them."

"But, dearie, that's so barbarous like!" exclaimed the dismayed
Samaritan. "There ought to be some one to say some prayers an' sing a
hymn or two."

"Mamma always said she wanted to be buried simply. She thought it was
sweet and beautiful to have services, but not essential. She was always
skimping and saving for me, Mrs. Pennycook. She said I wasn't to wear
mourning; that the--living needed more prayers than--the--dead. She--
she said that when she was gone God would be good to her and that--I--
she said I would need all the money we had."

"A-a-h-h-h!" breathed Mrs. Pennycook. She understood now. What a
baggage the girl was! How heartless, begrudging her poor dead mother
the poor comfort of a Christian burial, because she wanted the money
for herself! Privately Mrs. Pennycook prophesied a bad ending for
Donnie Corblay. She winked knowingly at her husband, then with truly
feminine sarcasm:

"Well, at _least,_ Donna, you'll _have_ to buy a coffin an'
a _grave_ an' have the grave _dug_--"

"Sam Singer will attend to that. I'm going to bury mamma among the
flowers at the end of our garden. I'll have a nice plain coffin made in
San Pasqual--"

"Oh!" Mrs. Pennycook trembled.

"Mamma always said," Donna continued, "that undertakers preyed on the
dead and traded in human grief, and for me not to engage one for her
funeral. I'm going to do just what she told me to do, Mrs. Pennycook."

"Quite right, Donnie, quite right" interjected Mr. Pennycook. He was an
impulsive creature and even under the hypnotic eye of Mrs. P. he
sometimes broke out of bounds.

"Daniel! Come!"

_Daniel!_ At the mention of his Christian name Mr. Pennycook
quivered. He knew he was in for it now, but he didn't care. It occurred
to him that he might as well, to quote a homely proverb, "be hanged for
a sheep as a lamb." He had visited the Hat Ranch to tender aid and
sympathy, and despite the impending visitation of his wife's wrath he
resolved to be reckless for once and deliver the goods in bulk.

"Your poor mother was a sensible woman, Donnie girl," he told the
orphan, "an' you're a dutiful daughter to follow out her last wishes
under these--er--deplorable circumstances--er--er--I mean it's a
terrible hard thing to lose your mother, Donnie, an'--damme, Donnie,
I'm sorry. 'Pon my word, I'm sorry."

Mrs. Pennycook's lips moved, and while no sound issued therefrom, yet
did Dan Pennycook, out of his many years of marital submission,
comprehend the unspoken sentence:

"_Dan Pennycook, you're a fool!_"

"Ya-a-h" growled Mr. Pennycook, thoroughly aroused now and striving to
appear belligerent. His wife silenced him with a look; then turned to
Donna. She had a duty to perform. She was a great woman for "principle"
and the performance of what she conceived to be her duty. She was a
well-meaning but misguided person ordinarily, who loved a fight with
her own family on the broad general ground that it denoted firmness of
character. Mrs. Pennycook was so long on virtue and character herself
that half her life was spent disposing of a portion of these attributes
to the less fortunate members of her household.

She entered now upon a calm yet stern discussion of the perfectly
impossible proceeding of making a private cemetery out of one's back
yard; but Mr. Pennycook had recovered his poise and decided that here
was one of those rare occasions when it behooved him to declare
himself--by the way, a very rare proceeding with Mr. Pennycook, he
being known in San Pasqual as the original Mr. Henpeck.

"Mrs. Pennycook," he thundered, "you will please 'tend to your own
business, ma'am. Donnie, my dear, I'm goin' to wire Los Angeles an'
order up a heap o' big red roses on 25--damme, Mrs. Pennycook, what the
devil are _you_ lookin' at, ma'am?"

"Nothing" she retorted, although it is a fact that had she been Medusa
a singularly life-like replica of Dan Pennycook in concrete might have
been produced, upon which the posterity of San Pasqual might gaze and
be warned of the dangers attendant upon mating with the Mrs. Pennycooks
of this world.