Dowd's Tavern had few transient guests. "Drummers" from the city hard-by dropped in occasionally for a midday meal, but they never stayed the night. The guests were what the Misses Dowd called "regulars." They included Hatch, the photographer; an old and indigent couple, parents of a farmer whose wife objected so vehemently to their well-meant efforts to "run" her house for her that he was obliged to "board 'em" with the Dowd girls, an arrangement that seemed to satisfy every one concerned except the farmer himself, who never missed an opportunity to praise the food and the comforts to be enjoyed at the county "poorhouse" when he paid his semi-annual visit to the venerable dependents; Mr. Charlie Webster, the rotund manager of the grain elevator, who spent every Saturday night and Sunday in the city and showed up for duty on Monday with pinkish eyes and a rather tremulous whistle that was supposed to be reminiscent of ecclesiastical associations; Miss Flora Grady, the dress-maker; Doctor Simpson, the dentist, a pale young man with extremely bad teeth and a habit of smiling, even at funerals; Miss Miller, the principal of the school, who was content with a small room over the kitchen at ten dollars a week, thereby permitting her to save something out of her salary, which was fifty dollars a month; A. Lincoln Pollock, the editor, owner and printer of the Weekly Sun, and his wife, Maude Baggs Pollock, who besides contributing a poem to each and every issue of the paper, (over her own signature), collected news and society items, ran the postoffice for her husband, (he being the postmaster), and taught the Bible Class in the Presbyterian Sunday-school, as well as officiating as president and secretary of the Literary Society, secretary to the town board, secretary of the W. C. T. U., secretary of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, secretary of the American Soldiers' and Sailors' Relief Fund, secretary of the Windomville Improvement Association, secretary of the Lady Maccabees, and, last but far from least, secretary of the local branch of the Society for the Preservation of the Redwood Forests of California. She was a born secretary. A. Lincoln Pollock, being a good democrat and holding office under a democratic administration, had deemed it wise to abbreviate his first name, thereby removing all taint of republicanism. He reduced Abraham to an initial, but, despite his supreme struggle for dignity, was forced by public indolence to submit to a sharp curtailment of his middle name. He was known as Link.