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best?”
    “One of ’em ain’t rightly a hotel.”
    “I’ll start out at the other.”
    “The near one, then. Miz Appleton, now, she
feeds.”
The old man colored his information by casting his eyes upward most devoutly.
    “Now, you know I ain’t et since my last meal?” Chuckling, Younger Macleish humped his saddlebags and stepped out into the street. It was only a step to the hotel porch, barely time enough to say howdy twice to passers-by. Macleish mounted the steps and thudded inside. It was small in there, but it had a stairway with a landing up the left and across the back, and under the landing, just likein the city but littler, a regular hotel kind of desk. He knew something was cooking right now, somewhere in the place, with onions and butter both, and he knew that not long ago something had been baked with vanilla in it. Everything was so clean he wanted to go out and shine his boots and come in again. Behind the desk was a doorway covered by nothing at all but red and blue beads. These moved and fell to again behind a little lady fat as the old livery man, but half his age and not the least bit bald. Her face was soft and plump as a sofa pillow and she had a regular homecoming smile.
    “You’ll be Miz Appleton.”
    “Come in. Put down those bags. You’ve come a ways, the looks of you. You hungry?”
    Macleish looked around him, at the snowy antimacassars and the doilies under the vases of dried ferns and bright paper flowers, all of it spotless. “I feel dirtier’n I do hongry, but if I git any hongrier I’ll be dead of it. My name’s Younger Macleish.”
    “You hurry and wash,” she ordered him like kinfolk, “while I set another something on the stove. You’ll find water and soap on the stand in your room, first right at the head of the stairs.” She gave him a glad smile and was gone through the wall of beads before he could grin back.
    He shouldered his saddlebags and climbed the stairs, finding the room just where she had said, and just what the immaculate downstairs had led him to expect. He stood a moment in it shyly, feeling that a quick move would coat the walls with his personal grime, then shrugged off the feeling and turned to the washstand.
    He had no plan to get all that fancied up; he just wanted to be clean. But clean or not, just plain shirtsleeves didn’t feel right to him in that place, and all he had to put over it was his Santiago vest. It had on it some gold-braid curlicues and a couple extra pockets and real wild satin lapels that a puncher might call Divin’ W if it was a brand. He put it on after he’d shaved till it hurt and reamed out his ears; he had half an idea Miz Appleton would send him back upstairs if they weren’t clean. He took off his pants and whacked off what dust he could, and put them on again and did his best to prettify the boots. When he was done he cleaned up from his cleaning up,setting the saddlebags in a corner and folding away his dirty shirt. He hung up his gunbelt, never giving it a second thought, or much of the first one either, bent to look in the mirror and paste down a lock of hair which sprang up again like a willow sapling, and went downstairs.
    Miz Appleton clasped her hands together and cried out when she saw him: “Glo-ry! Don’t he look nice!” and Younger Macleish looked behind him and all around to see who she was talking about, until he saw there was no one there but himself and the lady. “It ain’t me, honest, ma’am,” he said. “It’s only this here gold braid.”
    “Nonsense! You’re a fine-looking, clean-cut youngster. Wherever did you get that curly hair?”
    He felt his ears get hot. He never had figured an answer to that. Women were always asking him that. Next thing you know she’d be saying he’d ought to be an actor. But she was asking him if he was ready to eat. He grinned his answer and she led him through a door at the end of the little lobby into the restaurant.
    The restaurant had a door also into