The Girl from Hollywood - Edgar Rice Burroughs (accelerated reader books .txt) 📗

“Crumb had been the means of sending Allen to the county jail, after robbing him of several thousand dollars. The day before Crumb was killed, Allen’s sentence expired. The first thing he did was to search for Crumb, with the intention of killing the man. He learned at the studio where Crumb was, and he followed him immediately. He was hanging around the camp out of sight, waiting for Crumb, when he heard the shot that killed him. His investigation led him to Crumb’s body. He was instantly overcome by the fear, induced by his guilty conscience, that the crime would be laid at his door. In casting about for some plan by which he might divert suspicion from himself, he discovered an opportunity to turn it against a man whom he hated. The fact that he had been a stableman on Ganado, and was familiar with the customs of the ranch made it an easy thing for him to go to the stables, saddle the Apache, and ride him up Sycamore to Crumb’s body. Here he deliberately pulled the off fore shoe from the horse and hit it under Crumb’s body. Then he rode back to the stable, unsaddled the Apache, and made his way to the village.

“The district attorney said that we need have no fear but that Custer will be exonerated and freed. And, Eva”—she turned to the girl with a happy smile—“I have it very confidentially that there is small likelihood that any jury in southern California will convict Guy, if he bases his defence upon a plea of insanity.”

Eva smiled bravely and said:

“One thing I don’t understand, Shannon, is what you were doing brushing the road with a bough from a tree, on the morning after the killing of Crumb, if you weren’t trying to obliterate some one’s tracks.”

“That’s just what I was trying to do,” said Shannon. “Ever since Custer taught me something about tracking, it has held a certain fascination for me, so that I often try to interpret the tracks I see along the trails in the hills. It was because of this, I suppose, that I immediately recognized the Apache’s tracks around the body of Crumb. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Custer had killed him, and I did what I could to remove this evidence. As it turned out, my efforts did more harm than good, until Allen’s explanation cleared up the matter.”

“And why,” asked the colonel, “did Allen undergo this sudden change of heart?”

Shannon turned toward him, her face slightly flushed, though she looked him straight in the eyes as she spoke.

“It is a hard thing for me to tell you,” she said.

“Allen is a bad man—a very bad man; yet in the worst of men there is a spark of good. Allen told me this morning, in the district attorney’s office, what it was that had kindled to life the spark of good in him. He is my father.”