She had shrunk before now at the thought of men coming to the doors to stare after her, and perhaps even to call coarsely after her; now it seemed the dreariest thing in all the world to ride down this dirty, muddy street and see no man or woman or child, not so much as a saddled horse at a hitching pole.  She came abreast of the most pretentious building of Hill’s Corners; its swing doors were closed, but from within she heard a low, monotonous hum of languid voices.  Upon the crazy false front, a thing to draw the wondering eye of a stranger, was a gigantic and remarkably poorly painted picture of a bear holding a glass in one deformed paw, a bottle in the other, while the drunken letters of the superfluous sign spelled:  “The Brown Bear Saloon.”  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.”