The Judge nodded. Then a slow smile crept into his eyes. “Matter of fact, Mary,” he said, “this affair has its funny side.”
“Funny?” she echoed.
“Yeah.”
“Why....”
“I’d written my decision before he came upstairs,” he explained. “I’d already decided the way he wanted me to.”
THE COWARD
I
Little old Bob Dungan, his coat off, his sleeves rolled to the elbow so that they revealed the red-woolen underwear which he habitually wore, sat at his typewriter in the furthest corner of the noisy City Room and rattled off a cryptic sentence. He wrote:
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
Now this is not a piece of information calculated to interest more than a baker’s dozen of the half million readers of a metropolitan daily such as that which Bob served. The sentence as a sentence has but one virtue; it contains all of the letters of the alphabet. That is all you can say for it. Nevertheless, having written the words, Bob studied them profoundly, ticking off with his pencil each letter, from A to Izzard, and when he was done, counted those that still remained.