be glad to ride on with you. The
Corners is only about a dozen mile from there on."

CHAPTER XII

RATTLESNAKE POLLARD

IT was barely noon, the air clear, the sky cloudless, when Winifred
Waverly rode into Hill's Corners. She had shaken her head at the
suggestion of further escort. Here, in the open country and in the full
sunlight, she was grateful for the opportunity of being alone.

At the foot of a gentle eminence she entered the narrow, winding street
of the town, a crooked little town physically both in the matter of this
meandering alley-like thoroughfare and in the matter of the hastily
builded, unprepossessing houses; a crooked town in its innermost
character, it was easy to believe. On either hand as she rode forward
were low, squat, ugly shacks jammed tight together or with narrow
passageways between their unlovely walls, these spaces more often than
not cluttered and further disfigured by piles of rusty tins, old
clothing and shoes and other discarded refuse. As she rode farther she
saw now and then the more pretentious buildings, some with the false
fronts which deceived nobody, the houses appearing shoddy and aged and
sinister, one here and there deserted and given over to ruin,
disintegration and spiders spinning unmolested in dark corners.

The next peculiar impression created upon her was that some evil charm
was over the place, that in the sweet sunlight it lay drugged, that in
those rows of slatternly shacks where the sunlight did not enter men
either hid in dark secrecy or lay in some unnatural stupour. The whole
settlement seemed preternaturally quiet; the fancy came to her that the
town had died long ago and that she merely looked on its ghost.

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