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■ High in California's purple San Jacinto mountains, whose rocky steeps echo the cries of wild animals, whose stubborn wastes have long defied all civilized design, there is a valley like the crater of a vast volcano.
It is far from Hollywood, this valley — a hundred miles as the crow flies, andmore than that by Highway 99 and the tortuous trail that leaves the highway at Banning. Its desert soil is spotted with cactus and greasewood and catclaw, with greedy spines that tear at the living flesh of man and beast. Rattlers breed there and noisome insects. Monsters like the gila infest its sandy reaches. In winter, the wind is bitter and the snow comes down from the peaks like an icy shroud. In summer, the awful sun is like a devil with a pitchfork, prodding and pitiless.
Yet it is beautiful, this valley in the San Jacinto mountains. Stark, forbidding, inimical, still it is somehow magnificent. And there is a man in Hollywood who loves it. He has built a cabin there, and once or twice each year for twelve years he has sought it out in search of peace.
That man is Warner Baxter. And the ironical fact that, for all his persistence, he has not found the peace he sought in
Some of the adventures of Warner Baxter when he was "resting" before starting The Return of the Cisco Kid
By ANNE ELLIS MEYERS
his beloved wilderness is the basis for this story . . . that, and the adventures that have made his search exciting.
"I am so tired of Hollywood and all it stands for," he tells Mrs. Baxter, periodically. "I am going — "
But Winifred Baxter, after twenty years
of marriage, understands. So she
interrupts. "Yes, I know. You are going
to War-Wynne (that is the name of this
retreat. The War is for Warner;
the Wynne for Winifred) for a
'rest.' But of course what you are
really doing is jumping out of the
frying pan into the fire."
Still, Winifred Baxter is a wise wife, and so she says it with a smile as she helps Warner with his packing. Then she sends him off (accompanied, usually, by Frank McGrath, his stand-in, secretary and friend) with an affectionate farewell.
"I hope it won't be rattlesnakes this time," she says. And Warner grins and assures her that War-Wynne is now rattlesnake proof.
The episode of the rattlesnake, which upset Warner's plans for a peaceful interlude "away from it all" on one occasion, was [Continued on page 36]
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