It consisted of a blacksmith's shop, with which was combined the Post Office, a little school, which did for church--the farthest outpost of civilization--and a manse, simple, neat and tiny, but with a wondrous air of comfort about it, and very like the little Nova Scotian woman inside, who made it a very vestibule of heaven for many a cowboy and rancher in the district, and last, the Stopping Place run by a man who had won the distinction of being well known to the Mounted Police and who bore the suggestive name of Hell Gleeson, which appeared, however, in the old English Registry as Hellmuth Raymond Gleeson.

The Mounted Police thought it worth while often to run in upon Hell at unexpected times, and more than once they had found it necessary to invite him to contribute to Her Majesty's revenue as compensation for Hell's objectionable habit of having in possession and of retailing to his friends bad whisky without attending to the little formality of a permit.
The Stopping Place was a rambling shack, or rather a series of shacks, loosely joined together, whose ramifications were found by Hell and his friends to be useful in an emergency.

The largest room in the building was the bar, as it was called.

Behind the counter, however, instead of the array of bottles and glasses usually found in rooms bearing this name, the shelf was filled with patent medicines, chiefly various brands of pain-killer.

Off the bar was the dining-room, and behind the dining-room another and smaller room, while the room most retired in the collection of shacks constituting the Stopping Place was known in the neighborhood as the "snake room," a room devoted to those unhappy wretches who, under the influence of prolonged indulgence in Hell's bad whisky, were reduced to such a mental and nervous condition that the landscape of their dreams became alive with snakes of various sizes, shapes and hues.
To Mandy familiarity had hardened her sensibilities to endurance of all the grimy uncleanness of the place, but to Moira the appearance of the house and especially of the dining-room filled her with loathing unspeakable.
"Oh, Mandy," she groaned, "can we not eat outside somewhere?
This is terrible." Mandy thought for a moment.
"No," she cried, "but we will do better.