We still haven't figured out how Moejy did it. In fact, we have no proof that it was Moejy who did it. I just know that it was.
Our stout, olive-skinned helper, Mrs. Clark, began working for us fulltime when the winter season got well under way--seven days a week, three or four hours a day, cleaning the cabins and getting them ready to be occupied again. Every cabin was cleaned every day, including those whose occupants were staying over, except that the sheets weren't changed daily in a cabin which a customer rented for more than one night. I have never spent much time cleaning cabins since that first bad summer, except when people don't vacate their cabins before Mrs. Clark is through with all the others and ready to go home.
Grant kept busy every day for five or six hours making repairs, redecorating, keeping up the grounds, and figuring out ways to make more money and pay off our debt faster.
The first year we were at the motel, he decided to try selling Christmas trees. We had heard of several acquaintances who had made four or five thousand dollars a season with them. He wasn't going into it in a very big way, though; he was too cautious to do that until he found out if it were really as profitable a seasonal business as he had heard. If it were, he planned, he'd go into it more thoroughly the following year.
He ordered a small batch of trees from a firm in Oregon. While he was waiting for them to be delivered, he cleared off part of the land behind the cabins, where he would put the trees, and started painting the big sign that would, he hoped, lure purchasers off the highway.
He discussed his order with Mr. Bertram, the chubby man who owned the service station, grocery store, and small adjacent cabins across the street. Mr. Bertram, too, had ordered a few trees to sell, but he declared that he had never heard of the firm from which Grant had ordered his trees. And he had had to pay nearly twice as much for the trees he ordered. "It looks like I got a bargain," Grant remarked.
"Or else you got stung," Mr. Bertram said, rolling a wad of snuff around in his mouth. "Maybe they're running some kind of a racket, and your trees won't come at all!"
The trees came, though. They came at the time we had expected them, and in the number we had expected. But in appearance they weren't what we had expected at all.
"Something's wrong with them," Grant stated unnecessarily, when the truck had gone.
"They aren't even green. They're sort of--sort of--yellow", I said.