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.
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