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 do in larger cities, that they turned the day topsy turvy, that the street seethed with surging life through late afternoon and night and the dark hours of the morning, that the saloons stood brightly lighted then, that their doors were filled with men coming and going, that games ran high, voices rose high, while life, as these men knew it, ran higher still. At last she came to Henry Pollard's house. It stood back from the street in a little yard notable for the extreme air of untidiness the rank weeds gave it and for its atmosphere of semi-desertion among its few stunted, twisted, unpruned pear trees. The fence about it had once been green, but that was long, long ago. The doors were closed, the shades close drawn over the windows, the house still and gloom-infested even in the sunlight.