"If it was seven hundred thousand dollars, I'd take it with a calmness that would surprise you. Pay up, or we'll turn off your gas."
"Turn it off and be hanged," I exclaimed as I emerged from the office, tearing the bill to fragments. Then I went home; and grasping that too lavish poker, I approached the meter. It had registered another million feet since the bill was made out; it was running up a score of a hundred feet a minute; in a month I would have owed the gas company more than the United States Government owes its creditors. So I beat the meter into a shapeless mass, tossed it into the street and turned off the gas inside the cellar.
Then I went down to the Patriot office to persuade Major Slott to denounce the fraud practiced by the company. While I was in the editorial room two or three visitors came in. The first one behaved in a violent and somewhat mysterious manner. He saluted the major by throwing a chair at him. Then he seized the editor by the hair, bumped his head against the table three or four times and kicked him. When this exhilarating exercise was over, the visitor shook his fist very close to the major's nose and said, "You idiot and outcast, if you don't put that notice in to-morrow, I'll come round here and murder you! Do you hear me?" Then he cuffed the major's ears a couple of times, kicked him some more, emptied the ink-stand over his head, poured the sand from the sand-box in the same place, knocked over the table and went out. During all this time the major sat still with a sickly kind of a smile upon his face and never uttered a word. When the man left, the major picked up the table, wiped the ink and sand from his face, and turning to me said,
"Harry will have his little fun, you see."
[Illustration: THE SHERIFF IS MAD]
"He is a somewhat exuberant humorist," I replied. "What was the object of the joke?"
"Well, he's going to sell his furniture at auction, and I promised to notice the fact in to-day's Patriot, but I forgot it, and he called to remind me of it."
"Do all of your friends refresh your memory in that vivid manner? If
I'd been in your place, I'd have knocked him down."
"No, you wouldn't," said Slott—"no, you wouldn't. Harry is the sheriff, and he controls two thousand dollars' worth of official advertising. I'd sooner he'd kick me from here to Borneo and back again than to take that advertising away from the Patriot. What are a few bumps and a sore shin or two compared with all that fatness? No, sir; he can have all the fun he wants out of me."
The next visitor was less demonstrative. He was tall and slender and clad in the habiliments of woe. He entered the office and took a chair. Removing his hat, he wiped the moisture from his eyes, rubbed his nose thoughtfully for a moment, put his handkerchief in his hat, his hat upon the floor, and said,