“Come; you wouldn’t turn an old friend out. Let me have a room.”
So she thawed, became her old, meanly ingratiating self.
“Why, deary,” she protested, “you know old Mother Moody never turned a man away. You come right in now. Come right in where it’s warm. Did you say you’d had a scrap with your paw?”
Wint went before her into the office of the squalid hotel. Muldoon kept close to his heels; and Jim, Mrs. Moody’s dog, growled from beneath the table. Mrs. Moody squalled at him:
“You, Jim, be still.”
Wint looked around him; it was curious to find the place so little changed. A train clanked past on the track that flanked the hotel. He could almost hear the gurgle of the muddy waters of the creek behind. The office itself was lighted, as it had always been, by a single oil lamp. It did not seem to Wint that this lamp had been cleaned since he was here before. It stood on the square old table in the corner, where the wall benches ran along two sides. The dog slept under this table; and the boy—the same boy—was leaning his elbows on the table by the lamp and poring with mumbling lips over a tattered, paper-backed tale. This boy’s clothes were still too small; his wrists stuck out from his sleeves, his neck reared itself bare and gaunt above the collar of the coat. There was a strange and pitiful atmosphere of age and experience about him.
There was one change in the room, as Wint saw when he had persuaded Mrs. Moody to leave him to his own devices, and she had gone to her chair behind the high counter that had been a bar. This change lay in the fact that one of the two old checker players was no longer here. The other sat on the wall bench in the corner behind the table; the disused checkerboard lay before him. He was asleep, with sagging head, his occupation gone. His white beard was stained an ugly brown below his mouth. Wint wondered if the other old man were dead. Perhaps.
He did not wish to be alone, just then; he wanted companionship, friendly and impersonal. So he sat down beside the boy, and filled his pipe, and lighted it, and asked amiably:
“What are you reading, son?”
The boy was too absorbed to answer. He brushed at his ear with his hand as though a fly buzzed there, and turned a dogeared page. But the sound of Wint’s voice so near him woke the old man; he stirred, opened his eyes, looked all about. And he reached across and laid a hand like a claw on Wint’s arm.