Excerpt: "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 nearby 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.”
