A deep voice boomed, stunning me.
“The Queen, the Queen! Bath for every room. 55 Individual towels. The Queen, the Queen, she’s clean, she’s clean.”
It was a magnificent bass, full toned as an organ, issuing, likewise as out of a reed, from a swart dwarf scarcely higher than my waist. The word “bath,” with the promise of “individual towels,” won me over. Something must be done, anyway, to get rid of these importunate runners. Thereupon I acquiesced, “All right, my man. The Queen,” and surrendering my bag to his hairy paw I trudged by his guidance. The solicitations instantly ceased as if in agreement with some code.
We left the station platform and went ploughing up a street over shoetops with the impalpable dust and denoted by tents and white-coated shacks sparsely bordering. The air was breezeless and suffocatingly loaded with that dust not yet deposited. The noises as from a great city swelled strident: shouts, hammerings, laughter, rumble of vehicles, cracking of lashes, barkings of dogs innumerable—betokening a thriving mart of industry. But although pedestrians streamed to and fro, the men in motley of complexions and costumes, the women, some of them fashionably dressed, with skirts eddying furiously; and wagons rolled, horses cantered, and from right and left merchants and hawksters seemed to be calling their wares, of city itself I could see only the veriest husk.
The majority of the buildings were mere 56 canvas-faced up for a few feet, perhaps, with sheet iron or flimsy boards; interspersed there were a few wooden structures, rough and unpainted; and whereas several of the housings were large, none was more than two stories—and when now and again I thought that I had glimpsed a substantial stone front a closer inspection told me that the stones were imitation, forming a veneer of the sheet iron or of stenciled pine. Indeed, not a few of the upper stories, viewed from an unfavorable angle, proved to be only thin parapets upstanding for a pretense of well-being. Behind them, nothing at all!
In the confusion of that which I took to be the main street because of the stores and piles of goods and the medley of signs, what with the hubbub from the many barkers for saloons and gambling games, the constant dodging among the pedestrians, vehicles and horses and dogs, in a thoroughfare that was innocent of sidewalk, I really had scant opportunity to gaze; certainly no opportunity as yet to get my bearings. My squat guide shuttled aside; a group of loafers gave us passage, with sundry stares at me and quips for him; and I was ushered into a widely-open tent-building whose canvas sign depending above a narrow veranda declared: “The Queen Hotel. Beds $3. Meals $1 each.”
Now as whitely powdered as any of the natives I stumbled across a single large room bordered at one side by a bar and a number of small tables (all well 57 patronized), and was brought up at the counter, under the alert eyes of a clerk coatless, silk-shirted, diamond-scarfed, pomaded and slick-haired, waiting with register turned and pen extended.
My gnome heavily dropped my bag.
“Gent for you,” he presented.
“I wish a room and bath,” I said, as I signed.