"A Cathcart or a Riggs?"

By Roy Norton
Author of “A Reformed Reformer,” “Swords Out for Spain,” Etc.
Just who was that Pearl Brown woman, who was so darned snappy and defiant in that hard-boiled Western mining town? “Circumlocutory” Smith and his friend, Fosdike, were curious enough to make a bet on it, but their speculations had to be abandoned for a time in deference to the amazing developments when Horace Ring, fighting editor of the Weekly Star , carried his reforming campaign into the neighboring town of Placer City.
Shortly after that pleasant and profitable day on which Mrs. Pearl Brown knocked out Mr. Patrick Sheedy with a pair of brass knuckles, called Mr. Horace Ring, “The Reformer,” a chump, and satirically expressed her opinion of Mr. “Trigger” Smith’s celerity and prowess with a gun, she, too, caught the mania for reformation that had contagiously divided the mountain town of Murdock into numerous more or less violent factions.
Pearl Brown wasn’t in the habit of preannouncing her intentions. She was distinctly sudden. She never apologized for her acts, nor explained the reasons therefor. As John Fosdike, the blasé proprietor of the Miners’ Emporium once said: “That Pearl person just does something and then turns the talking part over to other folks. All she does is do.”
When Pearl Brown bought the Alamo Amusement Hall from the sheriff, the purchase included a small row of flimsy, one-story buildings that had the distinction of being appreciably removed from any near-by neighbors. Pearl Brown did not buy the tenants, but she sniffed when they were mentioned in the columns of Mr. Ring’s Weekly Star . He considered the tenants undesirable. As long as the Reformer bestowed printing ink on the row of shacks, Pearl Brown appeared unconcerned; but when Mr. Ring turned his reformatory abilities in other directions, Pearl Brown, as usual, did the unexpected.
She sallied forth to the row shortly after dusk on one calm summer’s evening, and notified her alarmed tenants that they had just one hour in which to pack their small belongings and vacate. Enlightened by previous experience, they bandied no words. They merely got industrious, some of them for the first time in their lives, and packed. Promptly with the turn of the hands of a clock, precisely on time, Pearl Brown set a match to a wad of cotton and kerosene in the first house, did the same to the next, and calmly burned out the whole flimsy row.