There were fewer people this way, and presently, as if by magic carpet, he had left all that sunlight and glitter and cheerful noise and stood alone in the shadowy, narrow street of a frontier town.

There was no bustle here, only an intense stillness.

The street was deserted, the shop doors closed.

There was a ghostlike, chilling effect that left him uneasy.

He called upon himself to remember that he was not actually in a remote and desolate frontier town from which the inhabitants had fled; that back of him but a few steps was abounding life, that outside was the prosaic world passing and repassing a gate hard to enter.