“Good; I’ll keep what you have in your till every night for you, and welcome, Albion,” he had said.  “I understand how you feel, living in the hotel the way you do.”

“Nobody knows who is coming and going,” said Albion, blinking violently.

“Of course one doesn’t, and nobody would dream of coming to my house.  Everybody knows I am as poor as Job’s off ox.  You might get a revolver, but I wouldn’t recommend it.  You look to me as if you might sleep too sound to make it altogether safe.”

“I do sleep pretty sound,” admitted Albion, although he did not quite see the force of the other man’s argument.

“Just so.  Any man who sleeps very sound has no right to keep a loaded revolver by him.  He seldom, if ever, wakes up thoroughly if he hears a noise, and he’s mighty apt to blaze away at the first one he sees, even if it’s his best friend.  No, it is not safe.”

“I don’t think it’s very safe myself,” said Albion, in a relieved tone.  “Miss Hart is always prowling around the house.  She doesn’t sleep very well, and she’s always smelling smoke or hearing burglars.  She’s timid, like most women.  I might shoot her if I was only half awake and she came opposite my door.”

“Exactly,” said Sidney Meeks.  When Albion went away he stared after his bulky, retreating back with a puzzled expression.  He shook his head.  Fear was the hardest thing in the world for him to understand.  “That great, able-bodied man must feel mighty queer,” he muttered, as he stowed away the pile of greasy bank-notes and the nickels collected at the soda-fountain in a pile of disordered linen in a bureau drawer.  He chuckled to himself at the eagerness with which Albion had seized upon the fancy of his shooting Miss Hart.

Lucinda Hart kept the hotel.  She had succeeded to its proprietorship when her father died.  She was a middle-aged woman who had been pretty in a tense, nervous fashion.  Now the prettiness had disappeared under the strain of her daily life.  It was a hard struggle to keep the East Westland House and make both ends meet.  She had very few regular boarders, and transients were not as numerous as they had been in the days of the stage-coaches.  Now commercial travellers and business men went to Alford overnight instead of remaining at East Westland.  Miss Hart used the same feather-beds which had once been esteemed so luxurious.  She kept them clean, well aired, and shaken, and she would not have a spring-bed or a hair mattress in the house.  She was conservatism itself.  She could no more change and be correct to her own understanding than the multiplication table.

“Feather-beds are good enough for anybody who stays in this hotel, I don’t care who it is,” she said.  She would not make an exception, even for Miss Eliza Farrel, the assistant teacher in the high school, although she had, with a distrust of the teacher’s personality, a great respect for her position.  She was inexorable even when the teacher proposed furnishing a spring-bed and mattress at her own expense.  “I’d be willing to accommodate, and buy them myself, but it is a bad example,” she said, firmly.  “Things that were good enough for our fathers and mothers are good enough for us.  Good land! people ain’t any different from what they used to be.  We haven’t any different flesh nor any different bones.”