She thanked the Doctor with a pretty grace, and turned her clear, hazel eyes upon the admiring group, scanning each face eagerly and wistfully. The Doctor said, "Allow me," and was about to escort her into the small den at one side known as the "Ladies' parlor," but she swept past him and walked straight into the bar-room, the Doctor, the loafers, and Scotty crowding in after her and regarding her movements with an undisguised admiration, and as much reverential curiosity as though she had been a visitant from another sphere.
The proprietor of the "Grand" was a podgy man, with an aggressively bald head and scaley eyes like an alligator's—though for that matter I may be libelling the alligator. His name was Sharpe, commonly corrupted into "Cutey" by some mysterious process.
He was pouring whiskey from a bottle into a glass, preparatory to serving himself, when the new comer walked—she walked like an angel—straight up to him and said, "Is this the landlord?"
Cutey was so astonished by the apparition that he dropped the glass—he called it a glass; it was in reality a stone-china cup about half an inch thick—and wasted the whiskey; it was only by the greatest presence of mind that he succeeded in saving the bottle.
"Ma-a-a'm?" he stammered, clutching at his bald head to see if there was a hat there.
The woman repeated her question; the crowd by the doorway, headed by the Doctor, strained their ears to listen. She had a low voice, tolerably sweet. Such music had never before been heard within those low walls, perhaps. They wished she would say more. Old "Punks" muttered that she 'minded him of his Lyddy—"jest sech a voice!" which remark brought down upon him much contumely afterward, and a threat from the Doctor to "put daylight through him." After a helpless look around him, Cutey admitted that he was the landlord, with the air of a cornered scoundrel confessing a crime.
"Then perhaps you can tell me what I wish to know," said the woman, fixing her clear, sweet eyes upon him. "I want to find a man named Wilmer—James Courtney Wilmer."
Cutey shook his head sorrowfully.
"Thar be so many names," said he: "skurce any man goes by his own name. Be he livin' in Mariposa, ma'am?"
"I do not know," was the reply, with a suggestion of tears in the voice, at which every heart in the crowd by the door was touched and unhappy.