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“What’s that you got in your pocket?” demanded Anderson, indicating the bulging sides of the deacon’s overcoat.

“None of your business!”

“Now, don’t you get hot. I ask you again, civil as possible,–what you got in your pocket?”

“I’m a respectable, tax-paying, church-going citizen of this here town, and I won’t put up with any of your cussed insinuations,” snapped the deacon. “You act as if I’d stole something. You–“

“I ain’t accusin’ you of stealin’ anything. I’m only accusin’ you of havin’ something in your pocket. No harm in that, is there?”

The deacon hesitated for a minute. Then he made a determined effort to temporize.

“And what’s more,” he said, “my wife’s hat’s comin’ back into style before long, anyhow. It’s just as I keep on tellin’ her. The styles kinder go in circles, an’ if she waits long enough they’ll get back to the kind she’s wearin’, and then she’ll be the first woman in Tinkletown to have the very up-to-datest style in hats,–‘way ahead of anybody else,–and it will be as good as new, too, you bet, after the way she’s been savin’ it.”

“Now I know why you got your pockets stuffed full of things,–eggs, maybe, or hick’ry nuts, or–whatever it is you got in ’em. It’s because you’re tryin’ to save a piece of wrappin’ paper or a bag, or the wear and tear on a basket. No wonder you got so much money you don’t know how to spend it.”

“And as for me gettin’ a new suit of clothes,” pursued the deacon, doggedly, “if times don’t get better the chances are I’ll have to be buried in the suit I got on this minute. I never knowed times to be so hard–“

The marshal interrupted him. “You go in an’ pay up what you owe fer the Banner an’ I’ll wait here till you come out.”

Deacon Rank appeared to reflect. “Come to think of it, I guess I’ll stop in on my way back from the post office. Ten or fifteen minutes–“

He stopped short, a fixed intent look in his sharp little eyes. His gaze was directed past Anderson’s head at some object down the street. Then, quite abruptly and without even the ceremony of a hasty “good-bye,” he bolted into the Banner office, slamming the door in the marshal’s face.

“Well, I’ll be dog-goned!” burst from the lips of the astonished Mr. Crow. “I never knowed him to change his mind so quick as that in all my life,–or so often. What the dickens–“

Indignation succeeded wonder at this instant, cutting off his audible reflections. Snapping his jaws together, he laid a resolute hand on the doorknob. Just as he turned it and was on the point of stamping in after the deacon, his eye fell upon an approaching figure–the figure of a woman. If it had not been for the hat she was wearing, he would have failed to recognize her at once. But there was no mistaking the hat.

“Hi!” called out the wearer of the too familiar object. Marshal Crow let go of the door knob and stared at the lady in sheer stupefaction.

Mrs. Rank’s well-preserved hat was perched rakishly at a perilous angle over one ear. A subsequent shifting to an even more precarious position over the other ear, as the result of a swift, inaccurate sweep of the lady’s hand, created an instant impression that it was attached to her drab, disordered hair by means of a new-fangled but absolutely dependable magnet. Never before had Marshal Crow seen that ancient hat so much as the fraction of an inch out of “plumb” with the bridge of Mrs. Rank’s undeviating nose.

She approached airily. Her forlorn little person was erect, even soldierly. Indeed, if anything, she was a shade too erect at times. At such times she appeared to be in some danger of completely forgetting her equilibrium. She stepped high, as the saying is, and without her usual precision. In a word, the meek and retiring wife of Deacon Rank was hilariously drunk!