Guestward Ho! Read Online Free PDF Page A

even a genuine defeat—it only felt like one. We lost our first, our one and only guest.
    Bess Huntinghouse had had one woman who had come for a single night and who had stayed and stayed and stayed until her visit had lasted more than a year. There had been all kinds of merry jokes about the Woman Who Came to Dinner, and she was almost as permanent a fixture at Rancho del Monte as the lounge itself. But the minute we stepped in and Bess stepped out, our guest began packing.
    It was ridiculous for us to have been sensitive about her departure. Even before we left New York we had been told clearly that this guest was planning to drive to Las Vegas on March 17 and she had talked gaily about the night clubs and gambling halls of the benighted oasis quite openly at dinner every night. But when we put her in her car and watched her drive off, we both felt that we had failed; that we had been gauche or rude or offensive or lacking in personal daintiness or something. It was as though Bill and I had driven her away from her spiritual home.
    Bill skulked out to the corral to mend fences and I wandered lonely as a cloud to unmake her bedroom. And, believe me, without a single guest in that rambling ranch house I nearly went stir-crazy during the day.
    I looked like a thundercloud when Bill came in for dinner that night.
    "Well, here we are. Just the two of us, as you put it," I snarled. "No guests, no money, and a giant, all-time-high deficit of fifty dollars for today. It's certainly nice to have a place we can spread out in! There was our guest and now she's gone."
    "Oh, don't worry, love," Bill said. "She'll be back."
    "Oh, sure she'll be back—and dragging the WACs be hind her!" I fumed. "She just loved us! Stayed here, more than a year with Bess, but one look at you and me as the gracious host and hostess and she was out of here so fast you couldn't see her for dust."
    "But, Barbara, we knew all along that she was planning to go. She liked it here. She'll be back. Mark my words."
    "Well, mark my words, she won't. And if you'd like to lay a little wager on it, I'd be willing to bet you our hundred-and-seventy-dollar deficit that . . ." At that moment there was the sound of a horn in the driveway. She w as back! Having misread the road signs, our parting guest had gone straight for Las Vegas, New Mexico, instead of Las Vegas, Nevada, and there she was on the doorstep, gay as grig about her mistake, just in time for dinner and just in time to save me one hundred and seventy dollars.
    Bill was right. We weren't exactly social lepers. The guest came back to Rancho del Monte— and to Bill and me—instead of going to any of a hundred other places along the way to spend the night. And she came back to del Monte again to spend Christmas with us. We were vastly cheered. With a song on my lips, I readjusted the deficit down to one-six-oh. Dinner that night was down right festive.
    But the next morning she left us again—this time in the right direction—and we were guestless once more.
    Helen and Bill Delano were still on hand. They were the resident managers who worked at the ranch for Bess, but they weren't going to be there long. In fact, at the end of March they were leaving to go into business for themselves down in the valley, which was just as well, since Bill and I couldn't possibly have paid them what they were worth.
    However, for the remainder of the month it was their unhappy task to try to initiate Bill and me into the Delphic mysteries of guest ranching. And I must say for them that they were able to hide their scorn and contempt for us like the lady and gentleman they are, but it must have been a Herculean task. My Bill is as bright as a button, but he goes about learning in an awfully funny way and has so many ideas of his own that he could drive the most saintly of instructors to the madhouse before he arrives at the proper answer. But at least Bill was willing. I wasn't. If Helen Delano thought I was the dumbest,