Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER III A ROW Down the quiet street went the young man with shoulders back, head up, and brisk step, swinging the heavy grip as if it weighed nothing. Storekeepers and clerks in short sleeves or alpaca coats, lounging in the doors of their modest emporiums, glanced curiously at him, and whispered inquiringly. Two young and rather pretty girls in white dresses and white tennis shoes, sipping from their glasses at the soda fountain of a drug store, gazed admiringly at him as he passed. He crossed the street at the lower bridge and walked rapidly towards the Columbian House. This modest hotel stood but a few hundred feet from the office, and its large and showy but somewhat faded sign announced that "Entertainment for Man and Beast" could be obtained of Alvin Dole for a moderate stipend. Beyond this large rambling building, with its three short nights of steps leading to three small piazzas, was a passageway leading to stables, at the entrance to which passageway a swinging and gaudily painted sign displayed an impossible charger with flyingmane and tail, foaming mouth and crimson dilated nostrils, and the lurid information that somewhere in the rear, following the direction of the index finger of a pointing hand, was a "Livery, Sale, Boarding and Baiting Stable." Under this lucid statement hung a smaller and more recent sign eulogistic of a certain "Wm. J. Bluffin, Emperor of Equine surgeons Bar None." Beyond was a long, two-storied building, the lower half an open shed for the storage of large four-horse barges and hacks, the upper half a billiard hall, suitably emblazoned in scarlet letters on a blue sanded sign informing an anxious and waiting public that "Billiards and Pool" were presumably for sale. The public was also informed in smaller and bright yellow letters, in a corner of this ...