." Almost directly
across the street from the Brown Bear was a rival edifice which though
slightly smaller was no less squat and ugly and which bore its own
highly ambitious sign: a monster hand clutching a monster whiskey glass,
with the illuminating words beneath, "The Here's How Saloon." That the
two works of art were from the same brain and hand there was no
doubting. In the inscriptions the n's and s's were all made backwards,
presenting an interesting and entirely suitable air of maudlin
drunkenness.

The girl hurried by. There were other saloons, so many, so close
together that, used as she was to frontier towns, she wondered at it;
she saw other buildings whose signs informed her they were store and
post-office, drug store, blacksmith shop and restaurant. And now the
first visible token of life, a thin spiral of smoke from "Dick's Oyster
House." She passed it, pushing her horse to a gallop. She had seen the
two or three men upon the high stools at the counter taking their coffee
and bacon. They had swung about quickly, like one man, at the cook's
grin and quiet word. One of them even called out something as she
passed; another laughed.

As she rode down the tortuous street, fairly racing now, the blood
whipped into her face, she caught a glimpse of a man standing by his
horse, preparing to swing up into the saddle. His eyes followed her with
a look in them easy to read and unpleasant; something too ardently
admiring to be trusted. She had seen the man's face. He was a big man,
broad and straight and powerful, builded like a Vulcan. He was branded
unmistakably as a rowdy; his very carriage, a sort of conscious swagger,
the bold impudence of his face told that. The laughing face stood out
before her eyes as she rode on, evil and reckless and handsome, with
very bright blue eyes and hair curling in little yellow rings about the
forehead from which the hat was pushed back. It was her first glimpse of
the youngest of the Bedloe boys, the worst of them the "Kid."

She knew that she would find her uncle's house at the end of the street.
Mr. Templeton had told her that, and had described it so that she could
have no trouble in knowing it. And as she rode on, making the curve of
the long, crooked lane which had come to be known as Dead Man's Alley,
she found time to wonder that such a town could be so silent and
deserted with the sun so high in the sky. For she had not learned that
here men did in their way what men d