Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1919)

Moonshine and Shado^v THE shadow stretched its gaunt lengtli over the sunny slopes of the mountain and across the fragrant laurel bushes un . til it almost enveloped the figures of two women seated on a rock which overhung the canon. Their heads were bent so closely over a letter that they seemed unconscious of its presence although there was a hint of its sombre touch in the lined, plaintive face of the older woman. The other's face, however, was all sunshine and dimples — hardly a woman's face at all for in her simple homespun of the mountaineer folk and with her c.rls tossed about by the summer breeze she seemed the very symbol of elusive, transitory girlhood. "Do hurry and read it, mom," she was pleading. '■Vou"re so slow. And there's something else in the envelope. I can feel it. It's pasteboard." The older woman adjusted her old-fashioned "specs" and bent closer over the letter; it was that rarest of rare events, a message from the great maelstrom of danger and delight which they knew as New York. She spelled out in her painful drawling uncertainty: "After all these years and after all we have both suffered, I feel that it is time we both should be together again as we were in the old days. I have a home now in the city — not pretentious, but with room enough for you and your dear little daughter, until you can find a nest of your own. "How long ago it seems since we were children together, romping over your wonderful mountains. We never dreamed then of the years ahead of us. My boy has grown almost to a man and you have lived through your bitter tragedy. My heart goes out to you in your suffering, dear girlhood friend. I can only hope that you will write at once and tell me you are coming to let me help you forget. "As ever, lovingly yours, "Lucy Ashford." The letter dropped from the mother's hand but the quick eyes of Cynthia had caught something else. "It's a postscript, Mom," she cried. "You missed something." And she read aloud in her high, girlish treble: "P. S. I am enclosing a photograph of my boy, Phillip. They say he looks like his mother. I believe he has my eyes." Cynthia snatched up the envelope, tore out the "piece of pasteboard" and then nearly fell off the rock as the bright, handsome face of Anna's son laughed back at her from the photograph. "Mom, darling, i.sn't he grand," she cried, throwing her young arm"^ over the slim stooped shoulders of her smiling; mother. "If those are his mother's eyes, she must have been like the princess in the fairy tale. When do we stirt. Mom? I'm going right into the cabin to pack the old hair-trunk." The mother laid a thin restraining hatid on the girl's impetuous arms which were fairly rocking in their eagerness to start for the journey. "It's a long, long trail, honey." she said softly, "and it means leaving everything I ha%c known for twenty years." How two young people blot' ted out the misery bequeathed them by the late J. Barleycorn By Dorothy Allison Moonshine and ShaJow N.\RR.ATED, by permission from the scenario by J. Stuart Blackton and Stanley Olmstcad, produced by The J. Stuart Blackton Feature Pictures Inc., with the following cast: Cynthia Sylvia Breamer Cynthia's Mother Marsarct Barry Cynthia's Father Robert Milasch Phillip Ashford Robert Gordon Mrs. Ashford. .. .]u\i2i Swaync Gordon Eddie Cassidy Eddie Dunn "But there's nothing left," exclaimed the girl with the unconscious brutality of youth. "There are memories, dear," the other answ'ered, and, instantly sobered, the child slipped her hand into that of her mother, and the two sat silently gazing into the caiion far beneath. Long after her mother had left, the girl mused on. These memories, called up by the mother's rebulie, seemed to be alive down there in the mountain mist. It had been the old story, so cruelly common to those who have bent all their energies toward the worship of alcohol in the shrines they have built in the secret places of the mountains. Cynthia's father and her two brothers had been moonshiners, guarding their still in the ravine with the ferocity of tigers and boasting that the Government would never take them alive. And they made good their threat, for when the two revenue officers tracked them down in the mountain passes, they had fought like demons until the revenue men could give no quarter but were forced to shoot them down under the very eyes of the desperate wife and the terrified child. "I've deserved it all, mother," the old mountaineer had gasped as he lay dying with his head on his wife's lap. "It was moonshine that did it. I made it and I taught the boys to drink it. It's done for me. But I'm leaving with my boots on," and with a final effort to push back the shadow descending upon him, so died the mountain tiger whose boast had been that the revenue men should never take him alive. These thoughts surged through the mind of Cynthia until the silence grew too painful for her young hopefulness and she ran after her mother. "Aren't we the stupid things," she cried, "sitting here, brooding over the past, with New York waiting for us? There won't be any shadows there. Mom; we're leaving them all behind." So it happened that a few weeks later, one ver\' scared young girl and her equally bewildered mother stood, helplessly clutching their baggage in the tumult of Grand Central Station. It seemed to them that all New York had burst through the doors of that vast hall and was struggling to find its way through to the din outside. Suddenly, through the confusion of strangers' faces, Cynthia glimpsed one which brought back a hidden memory. It was the eager, peering face of a young man who was evidently searching for some one. Cynthia caught her mother's arm with an excited grasp. "Look, Mom, the man standing by the clock," she cried. "It's the boy in the photograph Anna sent us. It's Phillip." Phillip it was and he recognized the strangers at the same moment and came rushing forward with the smile that had flashed out of Cynthia's picture. There was an excited tumult of greetings and then a sudden shyness fell upon the young people who stood gazing at each other as if lost in new discoveries. Cynthia's mother finally broke the silence. "If we're not going to stay here all Leftv Jones Lefty Alexander ■■•,,, i -j <it i u i »*„ Mickev and Nora Jones. . "'f^^ she said, "I reckon you d be ter Charles and Violet Blackton Roger Hampton Louis Dean take us wherever we're going, Phillip. Your mother might want to see us."