The proprietor led Scott upstairs into a room large enough for a banquet hall. It looked even more desolate, if possible, than the outside of the house. It contained a bed covered with an old patch-work quilt and two boxes—one to serve as a chair and the other as a washstand (you could tell which was the washstand by the old tin basin half full of dirty water).
Scott looked around the room in dismay, but he had made up his mind that he would have to put up with it when he caught a sickening odor, as of a dead mouse, that apparently came from the closet. That he could not stand. He had heard of the touchiness of these people, and he did not want to offend them, especially as he would probably have to make the place his headquarters for some time. But he had to get out of there by some means.
“You haven’t any bedroom on the first floor, have you?” he asked, trying to conceal the disgust he actually felt. “I may be here a long time, and there may be a great many people coming to see me, and a ground-floor room would be much more convenient.”
“Shore, I reckon we can accommodate you,” the man said, and he led the way apathetically downstairs again.
He opened a door off the long back porch and stepped back to let Scott enter. It was a palace compared with the upstairs room. The furniture was old, but everything was there down to a rag carpet on the floor, and, moreover, everything looked clean.
“This will be fine,” Scott said as he glanced quickly about. “What time do you have dinner?”
“Twelve o’clock, most times, but there ain’t anything certain about it.” He paused at the door on his way out. “It ain’t none of my business, but you ain’t a U. S. marshal, be you?”
“No,” Scott laughed, “nothing like that. Why, are there many moonshiners around here?”
“I ain’t saying anything about moonshiners,” the man replied in the same dull tone. “I was just going to tell you that this was a mighty unhealthy country around here for the U. S. marshal.”
Scott did not know whether this was meant as a friendly warning or as a threat, and before he could ask anything more about it the man was gone. As he was not in any way connected with the United States marshal, he thought no more about it.