Free Guestward Ho! by Patrick Dennis

satisfaction and pleasure from our guests.
    There had been people like the Binders who had resolutely shut their eyes to the horrible mistakes we were making and people like the Easter crowd who had pitched right in and helped make beds and dust the stairs and peel potatoes when they should have been waited on hand and foot. A Mr. Tom Power from Minneapolis even found some old lumber lying about and made an enormous bar becue table for us that we still love and cherish and use. And none of these people actually had to do anything but lie in bed, complain, and drive on to a better-organized es tablishment run by a couple who knew what they were doing.
    And why did they help us? Well, it wasn't because of my peaches and cream complexion or that I scintillated with charm—which I certainly did not! They just did it because they were exceptionally nice people. In fact, Bill and I have been blessed with such a wonderful succession of guests— and only a very few stinkers —that to list them all would turn my story into a small but rather substantial directory of charming people. It would read like the tele phone book of Utopia.
    And as more nice people came and went, Bill and I were able to make up an impromptu set of rules and regulations for the ranch. That sounds terribly forbidding, doesn't it? But the rules and regulations were very elastic and they weren't laid down by Bill and me but by the guests themselves. We let them establish the pattern of life at Rancho del Monte and then we followed suit. That may have been crazy, but it worked out very well.
    Rule Number One was established with the arrival of the Carroll Binders, when we practically dragged them out of their rooms and flung them upon the dinner table so that the meal wouldn't be ruined. The rule was: Treat 'Em Rough. Treat them like your guests and not your cus tomers—ugly word! If they really are guests, they'll respond correctly. If they're customers, they'd never like Rancho del Monte anyhow.
    We tried old Rule Number One on Bob and Polly Walker and it worked with them, too.
    Before the season officially began that first year, a large and impressive Cadillac from California rolled up to dis gorge two of the nicest people you ever met anywhere— the Walkers. They had no reservations, they had never heard of us, and we had never heard of them. Like fairy godparents, they simply dropped in from nowhere and stayed on and on for two months.
    As far as Bill and I were concerned, the Walkers couldn't have picked a worse time to arrive because we were painting the dining room. And as far as the Walkers were concerned, Bill and I couldn't have picked a worse time to paint the dining room because they were arriving— and they were arriving sick. While motoring around the Southwest, Bob Walker had come down with pneumonia, a severe case of it, in one of those unheard-of little towns that really seemed like the end of the world. It had been days before Polly Walker could get to a real doctor for her—husband and Bob had had to make do with an osteopath. He'd nearly died, and just when they thought they'd found a place where he could recuperate in the high, dry sunlight, the main floor of Rancho del Monte was a mare's nest of ladders, buckets, scaffolds, and drop cloths, damp and pungent with wet paint.
    If I had been in their Cadillac, I'd have driven right on to St. Vincent's Hospital in Santa Fe, called for an oxygen tent, and crawled in. But the Walkers were made of sterner stuff. Until the dining room was finished they took their meals with us at a card table in front of the fireplace and claimed that it was a picnic, even if everything did taste faintly of turpentine. When new draperies went upthey oh-ed and ah-ed over them as though they had selected just that pattern to live with for the rest of their lives.
    Polly and Bob were in their sixties with grown children and grandchildren and they made Bill and me feel just as though we were a part of their large