LITMIR.BIZ

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      “By gary!” he grunted. “I’ll stop him afore he gits killed or thar’ll be a dead jedge in these here parts!”

      The punt touched mud. Deak leaped through muck and slime, split the cat­tail jungle, and sprinted across plowed land to the scene of campaign.

      Just this side of the big gate into the Chase pasture the Lake Road swerved to the left to clear a broad arm of the pond. This arm, shallow and still, fur­nished the village ice crop, as the ram­shackle building there attested.

      Down toward the icehouse ran a road, tangenting off from the main highway which was now functioning as the judge’s amphitheater, whereon he was being speeded to make a rural holiday.

      To the water this straight, ice-haul­ing road descended at a passably sharp grade. It terminated in a kind of near-wharf, to which a few boards, though rotten, still adhered.

      Heroic as Horatius at the bridge, Deak sprang to the pasture gate.

      From its hinges he wrenched it. His strength was as the strength of ten, because—

      “Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!”

      A slatch of wind brought for a sec­ond a vicious purring to his ears.

      “Jumpin’ jews-harps! Comin’ a’-ready!” he gulped.

      Across the road he dragged the heavy gate.

      “He either takes th’ water or he stops right here!”

      Bracing the barrier erect, he stood there with wide and staring eyes, blanched face, white lips, directly in the path of the on-roaring avalanche.

      “Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!”

      Deak felt very ill, but stood his ground;

      Then, a quarter-mile up the road, a clattering rocket leaped over a crest. Instantly it spun the distance down, trailing dust-banners.

      Deak, yelling like a maniac, waved one arm and held the gate up with the other.

      The rocket took the tangent. Past Deak flicked a streak of blue, flame spitting.

      Then, even as Deak dropped the gate and bolted for the wharf, a high-pitched, rising yell was choked in the middle, and a geyser belched.

      White water flung aloft in frothing sheaves. These slapped back into the center of wide-spreading circles, where flailed a dazed and frantic object.

      Deak dived.

      The rest was just a clinching and a dragging.

      “Saved yer life, jedge! Saved yer life!” rose Deak’s voice, triumphant, from the mélée.

      * * * *

      Twenty-five minutes later the judge, with dry clothes on him and hot drinks in him, was nigh himself again, in Deak’s kitchen. When Mrs. Saunders had dug the mud out of his ears he felt better. After all, he was still alive.

      The motorcycle, intact, stood drying against Deak’s barn. On the barn floor Deak was harnessing Kit, his other horse, into the Democrat wagon.

      A growing crowd gawked along the fence; but Deak was answering no questions. There was still time to get the judge to court, provided no time was frittered in trivialities.

      Suddenly Jeff Brooks, the defend­ant, drove into the yard. His horse showed signs of hard usage. With Jeff was Sheriff Titus. Both men leaped out and advanced toward the barn.

      Deak’s heart sank. The newcomers looked alarmingly in earnest. But Deak paid no heed. He wanted no speech with them.

      They, however, harshly invaded the barn.

      “Where’s th’ jedge?” demanded Brooks.

      “What’s that to you?”

      “Nemmind! Where is he?”

      “None o’ your damn business! He’s my company now. He’s all right ’thout none o’ your buttin’ in, Jeff Brooks!”

      “What you hookin’ up fer?”

      “Well, I reckon I ain’t got no call t’ inform you, but, between you an’ me, I’m gittin’ ready t’ carry him daown to th’ courthouse. Any objections?”

      Hotly Deak faced the pair. Brooks grinned, eying the harness that de­pended from Deak’s vigorous hand.

      “No, I can’t say as I’ve got any real objections t’ your hookin’ up, as sech,” he answered. “Only, it wun’t do ye no good. They ain’t goin’ to be no land case heard, that’s all. It’s goin’ by default, an’ I win!”

      “No case?” stammered Deak.

      “Why not? Who’s goin’ t’ stop me, or him?”

      “Titus here is, I reckon!”

      “Haow? Consarn ye!”

      “Do yer duty, officer!” cried Brooks.

      “I got a warrant here fer th’ jedge’s arrest,” announced Sheriff Titus. “An’ one fer you, too, Deak Saunders.”

      “A— Why—wha-what fer?” And Deak’s jaw dropped.

      “You, malicious mischief, destruc­tion o’ property, an’ ob­structin’ the public highway. Him—”

      “Huh?”

      “Him, exceedin’ the legal speed limit of ten miles per hour in this here township. An’—”

      Just then the assault and battery took place!

      The rest was sheer “propaganda of the deed” all over the barn floor, out into the hen-yard, and ending after some fifteen minutes in the far corner of the pigpen.

      This new case, of resisting an officer, is still in court, and has been put over till the March term. Much depends on the status of the set of harness as a dangerous weapon.

      There is also Deak’s counter-suit against Brooks for attempted may­hem. But the fact that Brooks, though he undeniably bit Deak on the right leg and essayed to chew off one thumb, did no material damage because of a total lack of teeth, has a vital bearing on the matter.

      It is a complex case.

      Judge Bartlett resolutely declines to discuss it.

A FLYER IN JUNK

      Originally published in All Story, March 9, 1918.

      I.

      The stout, expansive man with the pompadour lighted still another cigar, leaned back against the leather cushion of the Pullman, smiling.

      “As a deal, it was some deal, believe me!” he remarked, contemplating the ser­ious-looking man with the horn spectacles, who sat opposite. “It ain’t every day o’ the week you can pull off a stunt like that, an’ get away with it!”

      “You say the guy that fell for it, and that you wished the old boat off onto, claimed to be wise to cars?” asked the young fellow in the striped suit, inhaling a lungful of Egyptian smoke.

      “An’ then some!” chuckled the stout man. “He wasn’t after it, for himself. No, he was buyin’ for another guy—man by the name of Robinson, from Boston. The way he put it to me, this Robinson didn’t claim to be no Solomon in the buzz-buggy-business. Didn’t trust his own judg­ment in buyin’ no second-hand wagon, an’ so got him to O.K. the machine. That’s what makes me laugh, even now, when I think of it!”

      The stout man cachinnated, and blew smoke. He of the horn spectacles fixed an interested gaze upon him.

      “‘I know ’em from tires to top,’ says this duck, when he comes to give Liz the once-over. Liz was her name. Just Liz. ‘What I say to Robinson, goes. I have cart blonk,’ says he. Well, when I got through with him, it wasn’t cart blonk he had, but cart junk. Say! They don’t slip anything much over on Jimmy Dill—that’s

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