Something prompted him to stop outside and look in through the dirty window glass. It was so light outside, and the lamp inside furnished such a meager illumination, that Mrs. Moody saw him at the window; and she took him for some wandering ne’er-do-well, and came scolding to the door. “Be off,” she cried, before she saw who it was. “Get away from there.” Muldoon snarled at her; and Wint said: “Quiet, boy,” and to the woman: “It’s me. Wint Chase.” She came out and peered up at him; and he saw her horribly even teeth shine like silver between her cracked old lips. “You, is it?” she exclaimed aggressively. “Well, and you don’t need to come a-snooping around here. We’re lawful folks, here. And you know it. So you can just go along.” He said: “I came for lodging;” and she backed away. “Eh?” she asked. “For lodging,” he repeated. “Can you give me a room?” “What’s the matter with you, anyhow?” she demanded. “You had a fight with your paw again?” She was still aggressively and suspiciously on guard. He laughed, and said whimsically: “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.