id not quite
see the force of the other man's argument.

"Just so. Any man who sleeps very sound has no right to keep a loaded
revolver by him. He seldom, if ever, wakes up thoroughly if he hears
a noise, and he's mighty apt to blaze away at the first one he sees,
even if it's his best friend. No, it is not safe."

"I don't think it's very safe myself," said Albion, in a relieved
tone. "Miss Hart is always prowling around the house. She doesn't
sleep very well, and she's always smelling smoke or hearing burglars.
She's timid, like most women. I might shoot her if I was only half
awake and she came opposite my door."

"Exactly," said Sidney Meeks. When Albion went away he stared after
his bulky, retreating back with a puzzled expression. He shook his
head. Fear was the hardest thing in the world for him to understand.
"That great, able-bodied man must feel mighty queer," he muttered, as
he stowed away the pile of greasy bank-notes and the nickels
collected at the soda-fountain in a pile of disordered linen in a
bureau drawer. He chuckled to himself at the eagerness with which
Albion had seized upon the fancy of his shooting Miss Hart.

Lucinda Hart kept the hotel. She had succeeded to its proprietorship
when her father died. She was a middle-aged woman who had been pretty
in a tense, nervous fashion. Now the prettiness had disappeared under
the strain of her daily life. It was a hard struggle to keep the East
Westland House and make both ends meet. She had very few regular
boarders, and transients were not as numerous as they had been in the
days of the stage-coaches. Now commercial travellers and business men
went to Alford overnight instead of remaining at East Westland. Miss
Hart used the same feather-beds which had once been esteemed so
luxurious. She kept them clean, well aired, and shaken, and she would
not have a spring-bed or a hair mattress in the house. She was
conservatism itself. She could no more change and be correct to her
own understanding than the multiplication table.

"Feather-beds are good enough for anybody who stays in this hotel, I
don't care who it is," she said. She would not make an exception,
even for Miss Eliza Farrel, the assistant teacher in the high school,
although she had, with a distrust of the teacher's personality, a
great respect for her position. She was inexorable even when the
teacher proposed furnishing a spring-bed and mattress at her own
expense. "I'd be willing to accommo