Calico Palace by Gwen Bristow Page A

Kendra asked how Marny had boarded the ship.
    Leaning back comfortably in one of Eva’s rocking chairs, Loren gave her a good-natured smile as he answered, “She came aboard like anybody else.”
    Kendra frowned. “Then she didn’t—sort of— slip out of Honolulu?”
    Laughing, Loren shook his head. He was such a cheerful fellow, thought Kendra, so easy to be with. “Nobody can ‘slip’ out of Honolulu,” said Loren.
    He explained. Honolulu, halfway between Asia and North America, was the central Pacific trading point. People were always coming and going. But this made it an inviting spot for drifters who wandered in and then wandered out, leaving debts and other obligations piled up behind them.
    To stop this, the Hawaiian government had decreed that when a person wished to leave the country, he must get an exit permit. Any sea captain who took a passenger without this would find himself in rich trouble if he ever came to Honolulu again. When you applied for a permit, notice was published in the Honolulu papers. Thus, if you were running away from anything, your creditors could notify the passport office, and your permit would be refused until your affairs were settled.
    Shortly before the Cynthia reached Honolulu, Marny’s partners had left for California to look over the territory, leaving her to close the gambling rooms and follow them. Marny had applied for and received an exit permit, to be ready for the first California-bound vessel that had good accommodations. When she read in the papers that the Cynthia was in port and would take passengers on her return voyage to San Francisco, Marny asked for passage.
    She did not do so in person. A man named Galloway, a merchant who had been doing business in Honolulu for years, was planning a business trip to San Francisco with his wife. As Marny had a lot to do before the ship sailed, she asked him to buy her ticket when he bought his. Mr. Galloway had reason to be grateful to Marny. Once when he had been playing vingt-et-un at her place she had observed the dealer using a daubed card. The players had not seen it and might have gone on losing money, but Marny had promptly stopped the game and returned all they had lost that evening, while the dealer was thrown out by two burly employees known as the Blackbeards. Remembering this, Mr. Galloway was glad to do her a favor now. His wife was too young and pretty to be jealous, and he did not know Captain Pollock well enough to be aware of his scruples.
    All this Loren had learned after the ship sailed. In Honolulu, Mr. Galloway came into his office and said he would like to take one of the Cynthia ’s staterooms for his wife and himself, and the other for a friend. He presented the exit permits, all in order. But Marny’s permit had been issued in her full legal name: “Miss Marcia Roxana Randolph, native of Philadelphia, U.S.A.” It did not occur to Loren that this meant the red-headed enchantress of the gambling parlor.
    It did not occur to Captain Pollock either. Loren submitted the names of Mr. and Mrs. Galloway and their friend Miss Randolph, and received the captain’s approval. Pollock knew Mr. Galloway was a respectable man of business. He did not know Miss Randolph, but he assumed that the three of them were traveling as a party, since it was hardly proper for an unmarried woman to take a journey unchaperoned.
    Here Kendra interrupted the story. “If Captain Pollock meant to be so proper himself, he shouldn’t have ‘assumed’ anything.”
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have either,” Loren said, laughing a little, “but I was working so hard with the cargo I didn’t have much time for the passengers. When Marny came on board I checked her ticket, showed her the stateroom, and didn’t think of her again.”
    “You didn’t recognize her?” asked Kendra.
    “How could I? I’d never seen her before.”
    “You had never been to her gambling place?”
    “Never. I don’t mean I’m righteous, I just don’t