A Woman at Bay; Or, A Fiend in Skirts

Author of Out of Crime's Depths, Reaping the Whirlwind, An Artful Schemer, etc.
STREET & SMITH CORPORATION PUBLISHERS 79-89 Seventh Avenue, New York
Copyright, 1907 By STREET & SMITH
A Woman at Bay
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.
Printed in the U. S. A.

Four men were seated around a camp fire made of old railroad ties, over which a kettle was boiling merrily, where it hung from an improvised crane above the blaze.
Around, on the ground, were scattered a various assortment of tin cans, some of which had been hammered more or less straight to serve for plates, and it was evident from the general appearance of things around the camp that a meal had just been disposed of, and that the four men who had consumed it were now determined to make themselves as comfortable as possible. The kettle that boiled over the fire contained nothing but water—water with which one of the four men had jocularly said he intended to bathe.
These four men were about as rough-looking specimens of humanity as can be imagined. Not one of them had been shaved in so long a time that their faces were covered with a hairy growth which suggested full beards; indeed, their faces looked as if the only shaving they had ever received, or rather the nearest approach to a shave, had been done by a pair of scissors, cropping the hair as closely as possible.
The camp they had made was located just inside the edge of a wood through which a railway had been built, and it was down in a hollow beside a brook, so that the light of their fire was effectually screened from view, save that the glow of it shone fitfully upon the drooping leaves over their heads.
The four men were tramps—hoboes, or yeggmen, of the most pronounced types, if their appearance went for anything at all.