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and resetting it, choosing this room and then that room and then this room again. We had four head-on collisions with one another at the kitchen door and three more at the front door watching for the Binders' car.
    We waited all day and nothing happened. Lunch came and went without the Binders. We smiled bravely at one another, waited as long as we dared, and then put on dinner—a leg of lamb with all the trimmings. Then we moved some more furniture, made up some different bed rooms, scoured more bathrooms, and waited with our noses pressed against the window. The dinner smelled wonderful, but there wasn't a single soul around Rancho del Monte, except Bill and me, to sniff it.
    Around five o'clock, I decided Carroll Binder was a perfect beast. By five thirty I decided he wasn't so bad after all, but that he and his wife and daughter had been killed on the road. At six I felt that both the Binders and the Hootons had been the victims of some depraved prac tical joker who obviously had nothing better to do with his life than to spend all day making phony reservations in other people's names. At six thirty I decided we ought to be glad the Binders weren't really coming at all, because we'd never be able to cope with anyone, let alone anyone famous, and that dinner would be ruined—either stone cold or burned to a cinder—anyway. At six thirty-one, the Binders appeared.
    We learned many things from our first guests, the first of which was that nothing out West ever happened when you expected it to. Things just didn't run on that tried and true schedule in New Mexico. Cars and buses and even trains and planes were usually late or—even worse—early, in the Land of Relaxed Living.
    And we learned some other things, too, when we simply collared the whole Binder family, rushed them to their r ooms, told them sternly not to bathe but to get right down to dinner, and marched crossly out to the kitchen to dish the meal up. No sooner had we sat down to a dinner which, though snatched from the oven in the nick of time, was good, than both Bill and I realized that we had treated guests—and paying guests—as though they were rather naughty children and not as though they were the lifeblood of our newly acquired career.
    But another thing we learned from the Binders was that the more important and influential people were in their own home towns, the more easygoing they were away. Of course, Mother had always told me this when I was a girl, but who ever pays any attention to what mothers have to say? Yet it was perfectly true, and Bill and I noticed almost immediately that the guests who were really Somebody simply adored living like a pack of cowhands when they stayed with us, while those few who used the broad "A" fifty per cent of the time and the broad hint two hundred percent of the time were the very ones whose checks were the least likely to succeed. We were cursed with mighty few prize phonies, but it got so that we could spot them even before they stepped out of their brand new chromium cars. They always talked the most, dropped the biggest names, made the most gigantic faux pas, and, when they checked out—which was almost immediately after they checked in, since our place wasn't nearly pretentious enough for them—t hey haggled the most about the bill. But of course Rancho del Monte just wasn't for them, not when Bess had it and not when we had it.
    The Binders, inadvertently, practically established the way of life at Rancho del Monte under Hooton manager ship. Well, I won't say quite that, but on their first night, When Bill and I rushed them to the table without giving them so much as a chance to wash their hands, we did establish one hard and fast rule without even realizing it. That rule was: Treat the customers just as though they are guests in our own house.
    And it was a pretty good rule at that. If they had wanted a hotel with express elevators and bellboys and sixty dishes on the menu, they could have gone to a