arrying voice, personality, and could dance, so
I soon left the legitimate stage for vaudeville where I made
something like a hit.

"Bruce Hebler, who is a motion picture man, persuaded me to come into
film land, and if you didn't live at the end of the trail and forego
all things that make good cheer, you might have recognized me from
billboard pictures and magazine pages as the star of certain woolly
West productions. Jo recognized me at once as Bobbie Burr.

"This spring I was a bit under the weather, because we really have to
work like dogs and some of our daring stunts--which are not always
faked--do get on our nerves, you see. I had to have a vacation, after
which I needed another, and was advised to seek recuperation in your
hills. My objective point was one hundred or more miles from here at
a sort of little isolated inn. En route I missed connections, and
having no enthusiasm about my destination, I stayed over in the town
nearest Top Hill. In a local paper I read of the arrest of a
'hardened young criminal.' I was curious to see what species of my
sex that might be, and followed my impulse to visit her at the jail.
Your friend, Bender, gave me permission to visit the 'hardened young
criminal.' She was a girl of my own age, size, and altogether what I
or any girl could easily have been had it not been for the accident
of birth, conditions and environment.

"Fortunately she was an admirer of Bobbie Burr, and I won her
confidence and story--Marta's story, which you already know. Things
and people had made her put up a bluff of being hardened, but there
had come, as you know, the newly awakened desire to 'live
straight--like folks who didn't get caught.' To use her own words,
'she wasn't going to let a grand man like _him_ wish himself on such
as me.' I felt, then, that thief or no thief, she was the real thing.
I only knew one way to get her release and I was rather keen for
adventure. We exchanged dress skirts, shoes, hats and coats. I gave
her some money, the key to my hotel room, trunk and suitcase and told
her to take the next train out while the going was good, and not to
show up at the hotel until the night clerk, who had not seen me, came
on. I also gave her a letter to some good friends of mine in a town
farther west, I knew they would be kind to her, ask no questions and
let her stay until she was squared about.

"It was done o