RED HARVEST by Dashiell Hammett I. A Woman in Green and a Man in Gray I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.He also called his shirt a shoit. I didnt think anything of what he had done to the citys name. Later I heardmen who could manage their rs give it the same pronunciation. I still didnt see anything in it but themeaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves word for dictionary. A few years later Iwent to Personville and learned better. Using one of the phones in the station I called the Herald asked for Donald Willsson and told him I hadarrived. quotWill you come out to my house at ten this eveningquot He had a pleasantly crisp voice. quotIts 2101 MountainBoulevard. Take a Broadway car get off at Laurel Avenue and walk two blocks west.quot I promised to do that. Then I rode up to the Great Western Hotel dumped my bags and went out to look at thecity. The city wasnt pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first.Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smokedeverything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people set in an ugly notchbetween two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked asif it had come out of the smelters stacks. The first policeman I saw needed