e retraced his steps, this time ignoring the long
row of offices for the opposite line of stages. From one dark interior
came the slow, dulled strains of an orchestra and from another shots
rang out. He met or passed strangely attired people, bandits, priests,
choir boys, gentlemen in evening dress with blue-black eyebrows and
careful hair. And he observed many beautiful young women, variously
attired, hurrying to or from the stages. One lovely thing was in bridal
dress of dazzling white, a veil of lace floating from her blonde head,
her long train held up by a coloured maid. She chatted amiably, as she
crossed the street, with an evil-looking Mexican in a silver-corded
hat--a veritable Snake de Vasquez.

But the stages could wait. He must see more streets. Again reaching the
office that had been his secret gateway to these delights, he turned to
the right, still with the air of having business at a certain spot to
which there was really no need for him to hurry. There were fewer people
this way, and presently, as if by magic carpet, he had left all that
sunlight and glitter and cheerful noise and stood alone in the shadowy,
narrow street of a frontier town. There was no bustle here, only an
intense stillness. The street was deserted, the shop doors closed. There
was a ghostlike, chilling effect that left him uneasy. He called upon
himself to remember that he was not actually in a remote and desolate
frontier town from which the inhabitants had fled; that back of him
but a few steps was abounding life, that outside was the prosaic world
passing and repassing a gate hard to enter. He whistled the fragment
of a tune and went farther along this street of uncanny silence and
vacancy, noting, as he went, the signs on the shop windows. There was
the Busy Bee Restaurant, Jim's Place, the Hotel Renown, the Last Dollar
Dance Hall, Hank's Pool Room. Upon one window was painted the terse
announcement, "Joe--Buy or Sell." The Happy Days Bar adjoined the
General Store.

He moved rapidly through this street. It was no place to linger. At the
lower end it gave insanely upon a row of three-story brownstone houses
which any picture patron would recognize as being wholly of New York.
There were the imposing steps, the double-doored entrances, the broad
windows, the massive lines of the whole. And beyond this he came to a
many-coloured little street out of Bagdad, overhung with gay balconies,
vivacious with spindled towers and minarets,