“I’ll wait up a while longer. If he comes I can warm up the coffee for him,” Joe offered.
“Then I’ll go to bed, too,” she yawned wearily.
“Yes, you’d better go,” said he.
Ollie’s room, which was Isom’s also when he was there, was in the front of the house, upstairs. Joe heard her feet along the hall, and her door close after her. Morgan was still tramping about in the room next to Joe’s, where he slept. It was the best room in the house, better than the one shared by Isom and his wife, and in the end of the house opposite to it. Joe sat quietly at the table until Morgan’s complaining bed-springs told him that the guest had retired. Then he mounted the narrow kitchen stairs to his own chamber.
Joe sat on the edge of his bed and pulled off his boots, dropping them noisily on the floor. Then, with shirt and trousers on, he drew the quilt from his bed, took his pillow under his arm, and opened the door into the hall which divided the house from end to end.
The moon was shining in through the double window in the 89 end toward Ollie’s room; it lay on the white floor, almost as bright as the sun. Within five feet of that splash of moonlight Joe spread his quilt. There he set his pillow and stretched his long body diagonally across the narrow hall, blocking it like a gate.
Joe roused Morgan next morning at dawn, and busied himself with making a fire in the kitchen stove and bringing water from the well until the guest came down to feed his horse. Morgan was in a crusty humor. He had very little to say, and Joe did not feel that the world was any poorer for his silence.
“This will be my last meal with you,” announced Morgan at breakfast. “I’ll not be back tonight.”
Ollie was paler than usual, Joe noticed, and a cloud of dejection seemed to have settled over her during the night. She did not appear to be greatly interested in Morgan’s statement, although she looked up from her breakfast with a little show of friendly politeness. Joe thought that she did not seem to care for the agent; the tightness in his breast was suddenly and gratefully eased.
“You haven’t finished out your week, there’ll be something coming to you on what you’ve paid in advance,” said she.