She was in the Collinsons’ hands now. They had come to Quesada for her as soon as the newspapers put out their first extra accusing Fitzstephan of Eric’s murder. The Collinsons hadn’t had to be crude about it—to admit that they’d ever suspected her of anything: when Andrews had surrendered his letters testamentary, and another administrator—Walter Fielding—had been appointed, the Collinsons had simply seemed to pick her up, as was their right as her closest relations, where Andrews had put her down.
Two months in the mountains topped off her cure, and she came back to the city looking like nothing that she had been. The difference was not only in appearance.
“I can’t really make myself believe that all that actually happened to me,” she told me one noon when she, Laurence Collinson, and I were lunching together between morning and afternoon court-sessions. “Is it, do you think, because there was so much of it that I became callous?”
“No. Remember you were going around coked-up most of the time. That saved you from the sharp edge. Lucky for you you were. Stay away from the morphine now and it’ll always be a hazy sort of dream. Any time you want to bring it back clear and vivid, take a jolt.”
“I won’t, I won’t, ever,” she said; “not even to give you the—the fun of bullying me through a cure again. He enjoyed himself awfully,” she told Laurence Collinson. “He used to curse me, ridicule me, threaten me with the most terrible things, and then, at the last, I think he tried to seduce me. And if I’m uncouth at times, Laurence, you’ll have to blame him: he positively hadn’t a refining influence.”
She seemed to have come back far enough.
Laurence Collinson laughed with us, but not from any farther down than his chin. I had an idea he thought I hadn’t a refining influence.
Colophon
The Dain Curse
was published in 1929 by
Dashiell Hammett.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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Robin Whittleton,
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Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, and The Online Distributed Proofreaders Canada Team
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and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Down Where the Glades Begin,
a painting completed in 1926 by
Anonymous.
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League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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