Page:The Girl from Hollywood.djvu/30
26 The Girl from Hollywood
“Young Pennington just canned me,” said Allen, with no other return of Evans’s greeting.
“I’m sorry,” said Evans,
“You may be sorrier!” growled Allen, continuing on his way toward the cabin to get his blankets and clothes.
For a moment Guy stared after the man, a puzzled ex- pression knitting his brows. Then he slowly flushed, glancing quickly about to see if any one had overheard the brief conversation between Slick Allen and himself.
A few minutes later he entered the inclosure west of the house, where the swimming pool lay. Mrs. Pennington and her guests were already in the pool, swimming vigorously to keep warm, and a moment later the colonel and Custer ran from the house and dived in simul- taneously. Though there was twenty-six years’ difference in their ages, it was not evidenced by any lesser vitality or agility on the part of the older man.
Colonel Custer Pennington had been born in Virginia fifty years before. Graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and West Point, he had taken a commission in the cavalry branch of the service. Campaigning in Cuba, he had been shot through one lung, and shortly after the close of the war he was retired for disability, with rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1900 he had come to California, on the advice of his physician in the forlorn hope that he might prolong his sufferings a few years more.
For two hundred years the Penningtons had bred fine men, women, and horses upon the same soil in the State whose very existence was inextricably interwoven with their own. A Pennington leave Virginia? Horrors! Perish the thought! But Colonel Custer Pennington had had to leave it or die, and with a young wife and a two- year-old boy he couldn’t afford to die. Deep in his heart
e meant to recover his health in distant California and then return to the land of his love; but his physician had told a mutual friend, who was also Pennington’s attorney, - that “poor old Cus” would almost undoubtedly be dead inside of a year.