Gelett Burgess

The Heart Line


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       Gelett Burgess

      The Heart Line

      A Drama of San Francisco

      Published by Good Press, 2021

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066095918

       PROLOGUE

       CHAPTER I

       THE PALMIST AND FANCY GRAY

       CHAPTER II

       TUITION AND INTUITION

       CHAPTER III

       THE SPIDER'S NEST

       CHAPTER IV

       THE PAYSONS

       CHAPTER V

       THE RISE AND FALL OF GAY P. SUMMER

       CHAPTER VI

       SIDE LIGHTS

       CHAPTER VII

       THE WEAVING OF THE WEB

       CHAPTER VIII

       ILLUMINATION

       CHAPTER IX

       COMING ON

       CHAPTER X

       A LOOK INTO THE MIRROR

       CHAPTER XI

       THE FIRST TURNING TO THE LEFT

       CHAPTER XII

       THE FIRST TURNING TO THE RIGHT

       CHAPTER XIII

       THE BLOODSUCKER

       CHAPTER XIV

       THE FORE-HONEYMOON

       CHAPTER XV

       THE REËNTRANT ANGLE

       CHAPTER XVI

       TIT FOR TAT

       CHAPTER XVII

       THE MATERIALIZING SÉANCE

       CHAPTER XVIII

       A RETURN TO INSTINCT

       CHAPTER XIX

       FANCY GRAY ACCEPTS

       CHAPTER XX

       MASTERSON'S MANOEUVRES

       CHAPTER XXI

       THE SUNRISE

      "

       Table of Contents

      In the year 1877 the Siskiyou House, originally a third-class hotel patronized chiefly by mining men, had fallen into such disrepute that it was scarcely more than a cheap tenement. Its office was now frankly a bar-room; beside it, a narrow hallway plunged into the shabby, shadowy interior; here a steep stairway rose. Above were disconsolate rooms known to the police of San Francisco as the occasional resort of counterfeiters, confidence workers and lesser knaves; to the neighborhood the Siskiyou Hotel had a local reputation as being the home of Madam Grant, who occupied two rooms on the second floor.

      Her rooms were slovenly and squalid—almost barbarous in the extremity of their neglect. Upon the floor was a matted carpet of dirt and rubbish inches deep, piled higher at the corners, uneven with lumps of refuse, bizarre with scraps of paper, cloth and tangled strings.

      In the rear room an unclean length of burlap was stretched across a string, half concealing a disordered, ramshackle cot, whose coverings were ragged, soiled and moth-eaten. A broken chair or two leaned crazily against the wall. The dusty windows looked point-blank upon the damp wall of an abutting wooden house. There had once been paper upon the walls; it was now torn, scratched and rubbed by grimy shoulders into a harlequin pattern of dun and greasy tones.

      The front room, through the open rolling doors, was, if possible, in a still worse state of decay, and here wooden and paper boxes, tin cans, sacks of rags