THE OTHER HANGMAN
by Carter Dickson

From The Department of Queer Complaints, by Carter Dickson,
Copyright © 1940

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-28-02 [v1.0]

Why do they electrocute 'em instead of hanging 'em in Pennsylvania? What (said my old friend, Judge Murchison, dexterously hooking the spittoon closer with his foot) do they teach you in these new-fangled law schools, anyway? Because that, son, was a murder case! It turned the Supreme Court whiskers grey to find a final ruling, and for thirty years it's been argued about by lawyers in the back room of every saloon from here to the Pacific coast. It happened right here in this county—when they hanged Fred Joliffe for the murder of Randall Fraser.
It was in '92 or '93; anyway, it was the year they put the first telephone in the courthouse, and you could talk as far as Pittsburgh except when the wires blew down. Considering it was the county seat, we were mighty proud of our town (population 3,500). The hustlers were always bragging about how thriving and growing our town was, and we had just got to the point of enthusiasm where every ten years we were certain the census-taker must have forgotten half our population. Old Mark Sturgis, who owned the Bugle Gazette then, carried on something awful in an editorial when they printed in the almanac that we had a population of only 3,263. We were all pretty riled about it.
We were proud of plenty of other things, too. We had good reason to brag about the McClellan House, which was the finest hotel in the county; and I mind when you could get room and board, with apple pie for breakfast every morning, for two a week. We were proud of our old county families, that came over the mountains when Braddock's army was scalped by the Indians in 1775, and settled down in log huts to dry their wounds. But most of all we were proud of our legal batteries.
Son, it was a grand assembly! Mind, I won't say that all of 'em were long on knowledge of the Statute Books; but they knew their Blackstone and their Greenleaf on Evidence, and they were powerful speakers. And there were some—the top-notchers, full of graces and book-knowledge and dignity—who were hell on the exact letter of the law. Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, all of us, who loved a good debate and a bottle o' whisky. There was Charley Connell, a Harvard graduate and the district attorney, who had fine hands, and wore a fine high collar, and made such pathetic addresses to the jury that people flocked for miles around to hear him; though he mostly lost his cases. There was Judge Hunt, who prided himself on his resemblance to Abe Lincoln, and in consequence always wore a frock coat and an elegant plug hat. Why, there was your own grandfather, who had over two hundred books in his library, and people used to go up nights to borrow volumes of the encyclopaedia.
You know the big stone courthouse at the top of the street, with the flowers round it, and the jail adjoining? People went there as they'd go to a picture show nowadays; it was a lot better, too. Well, from there it was only two minutes' walk across the meadow to Jim Riley's saloon. All the legal cronies gathered there—in the back room of course, where Jim had an elegant brass spittoon and a picture of George Washington on the wall to make it dignified. You could see the footpath worn across the grass until they built over that meadow. Besides the usual crowd, there was Bob Moran, the sheriff, a fine, strapping big fellow, but very nervous about doing his duty strictly. And there was poor old Nabors, a big, quiet, reddish-eyed fellow, who'd been a doctor before he took to drink. He was always broke, and he had two daughters—one of 'em consumptive—and Jim Riley pitied him so much that he gave him all he wanted to drink for nothing. Those were fine, happy days, with a power of eloquence and theorizing and solving the problems of the nation in that back room, until our wives came to fetch us home.
Then Randall Fraser was murdered and there was hell to pay.
Now if it had been anybody else but Fred Joliffe who killed him, naturally we wouldn't have convicted. You can't do it, son, not in a little community. It's all very well to talk about the power and grandeur of justice, and sounds fine in a speech. But here's somebody you've seen walking the streets about his business every day for years; and you know when his kids were born, and saw him crying when one of 'em died; and you remember how he loaned you ten dollars when you needed it ... Well, you can't take that person out in the cold light of day and string him up by the neck until he's dead. You'd always be seeing the look on his face afterwards. And you'd find excuses for him no matter what he did.
But with Fred Joliffe it was different. Fred Joliffe was the worst and nastiest customer we ever had, with the possible exception of Randall Fraser himself. Ever seen a copperhead curled up on a flat stone? And a copperhead's worse than a rattlesnake—that won't strike unless you step on it, and gives warning before it does. Fred Joliffe had the same brownish colour and sliding movements. You always remembered his cart through town—he had some sort of rag-and-bone business, you understand—you'd see him sitting up there, a skinny little man in a brown coat, peeping round the side of his nose to find something for gossip. And grinning.
It wasn't merely the things he said about people behind their backs. Or to their faces, for that matter, because he relied on the fact that he was too small to be thrashed. He was a slick customer. It was believed that he wrote those anonymous letters that caused . . . but never mind that. Anyhow, I can tell you this little smirk did drive Will Farmer crazy one time, and Will did beat him within an inch of his life. Will's livery stable was burned down one night about a month later with eleven horses inside, but nothing could ever be proved. He was too smart for us.
That brings me to Fred Joliffe's only companion—I don't mean friend. Randall Fraser had a harness-and-saddle store in Market Street, a dusty place with a big dummy horse in the window. I reckon the only thing in the world Randall liked was that dummy horse, which was a dappled mare with vicious-looking glass eyes. He used to keep its mane combed. Randall was a big man with a fine moustache, and a horseshoe pin in his tie, and sporty checked clothes. He was buttery polite, and mean as sin. He thought a dirty trick or a swindle was the funniest joke he ever heard. But the women liked him—a lot of them, it's no use denying, sneaked in at the back door of that harness store. Randall itched to tell it at the barber shop, to show what fools they were and how virile he was, but he had to be careful. He and Fred Joliffe did a lot of drinking together.
Then the news came. It was in October, I think, and I heard it in the morning when I was putting on my hat to go down to the office. Old Withers was the town constable then. He got up early in the morning, although there was no need for it, and when he was going down Market Street in the mist about five o'clock he saw the gas still burning in the back room of Randall's store. The front door was wide open. Withers went in and found Randall lying on a pile of harness in his shirt-sleeves, his forehead and face bashed in with a wedging-mallet. There wasn't much left of the face, but you could recognize him by his moustache and his horseshoe pin.
I was in my office when somebody yelled up from the street that they found Fred Joliffe drunk and asleep in the flour mill, with blood on his hands and an empty bottle of Randall Fraser's whisky in his pocket. He was still in bad shape, and couldn't walk or understand what was going on, when the sheriff—that was Bob Moran I told you about— came to take him to the lock-up. Bob had to drive him in his own rag-and-bone cart. I saw them drive up Market Street in the rain, Fred lying in the back of the cart all white with flour, and rolling and cursing. People were very quiet. They were pleased, but they couldn't show it.
That is, all except Will Farmer, who had owned the livery stable that was burnt down.
"Now they'll hang him," says Will. "Now, by God, they'll hang him."
It's a funny thing, son, I didn't realize the force of that until I heard Judge Hunt pronounce sentence after the trial. They appointed me to defend him, because I was a young man without any particular practice, and somebody had to do it. The evidence was all over town before I got a chance to speak with Fred. You could see he was done for. A scissors-grinder who lived across the street (I forget his name now) had seen Fred go into Randall's place about eleven o'clock. An old couple who lived up over the store had heard 'em drinking and yelling downstairs. At near on midnight they'd heard a noise like a fight and a fall—but they knew better than to interfere. Finally, a couple of farmers driving home from town at midnight had seen Fred stumble out of the front door, slapping his clothes and wiping his hands on his coat like a man with delirium tremens.
I went to see Fred at the jail. He was sober, although he jerked a good deal. Those pale eyes of his were as poisonous as ever. I can still see him sitting on the bunk in his cell, sucking a brown paper cigarette, wriggling his neck, and jeering at me. He wouldn't tell me anything, because he said I would go and tell the judge if he did.
"Hang me?" he says, and wrinkled his nose and jeered again. "Hang me? Don't you worry about that, mister. Them so-and-so's will never hang me. They're too much afraid of me, them so-and-so's are. Eh, mister?"
And the fool couldn't get it through his head right up until the sentence. He strutted away in court making remarks, and threatening to tell what he knew about people, and calling the judge by his first name. He wore a new dickey shirt-front he bought to look spruce in.
I was surprised how quietly everybody took it. The people who came to the trial didn't whisper or shove; they just sat still as death and looked at him. All you could hear was a kind of breathing. It's funny about a courtroom, son. It has its own particular smell, which won't bother you unless you get to thinking about what it means, but you notice worn places and cracks in the walls more than you would anywhere else. You would hear Charley Connell's voice for the prosecution, a little thin sound in a big room, and Charley's footsteps creaking. You would hear a cough in the audience, or a woman's dress rustle, or the gas-jets whistling. It was dark in the rainy season, so they lit the gas-jets by two o'clock in the afternoon.
The only defense I could make was that Fred had been too drunk to be responsible, and remembered nothing of that night (which he admitted was true). But, in addition to being no defense in law, it was a terrible frost besides. My own voice sounded wrong. I remember that six of the jury had whiskers, and six hadn't, and Judge Hunt, up on the bench with the flag draped on the wall behind his head, looked more like Abe Lincoln than ever. Even Fred Joliffe began to notice. He kept twitching round to look at the people, a little uneasy-like. Once he stuck out his neck at the jury and screeched: "Say something, cantcha? Do something, cantcha?"
They did.
When the foreman of the jury said, "Guilty of murder in the first degree," there was just a little noise from those people. Not a cheer or anything like that. It hissed out all together, only once, like breath released, but it was terrible to hear. It didn't hit Fred until Judge Hunt was halfway through pronouncing sentence. Fred stood looking round with a wild, half-witted expression until he heard Judge Hunt say, "And may God have mercy on your soul." Then he burst out, kind of pleading and kidding as though this was carrying the joke too far. He said, "Listen now, you don't mean that, do you? You can't fool me. You're only Jerry Hunt. I know who you are. You can't do that to me." All of a sudden he began pounding the table and screaming, "You ain't really a-going to hang me, are you?"
But we were.
The date of the execution was fixed for the twelfth of November. The order was all signed. ". . . within the precincts of the said county jail, between the hours of eight and nine A.M., the said Frederick Joliffe shall be hanged by the neck until he is dead; an executioner to be commissioned by the sheriff for this purpose, and the sentence . to be carried out in the presence of a qualified medical practitioner; the body to be interred . . ." And the rest of it. Everybody was nervous. There hadn't been a hanging since any of that crowd had been in office, and nobody knew how to go about it exactly. Old Doc Macdonald, the coroner, was to be there and of course they got hold of Reverend Phelps the preacher and Bob Moran's wife was going to cook pancakes and sausage for the last breakfast. Maybe you think that's fool talk. But think for a minute of taking somebody you've known all your life, and binding his arms one cold morning, and walking him out in your own back yard to crack his neck on a rope—all religious and legal, with not a soul to interfere. Then you begin to get scared of the powers of life and death, and the thin partition between.
Bob Moran was scared white for fear things wouldn't go off properly. He had appointed big, slow-moving, tipsy Ed Nabors as hangman. This was partly because Ed Nabors needed the fifty dollars and partly because Bob had a vague idea that an ex-medical man would be better able to manage an execution. Ed had sworn to keep sober. Bob Moran said he wouldn't get a dime unless he was sober, but you couldn't always tell.
Nabors seemed in earnest. He had studied up the matter of scientific hanging in an old book he borrowed from your grandfather, and he and the carpenter had knocked together a big, shaky-looking contraption in the jail yard. It worked all right in practice, with sacks of meal. The trap went down with a boom that brought your heart up in your throat. But once they allowed for too much spring in the rope, and it tore a sack apart. Then old Doc Macdonald chipped in about that fellow John Lee, in England—and it nearly finished Bob Moran.
That was late on the night before the execution. We were sitting round the lamp in Bob's office, trying to play stud poker. There were tops and skipping-ropes, all kinds of toys, all over that office. Bob let his kids play in there— which he shouldn't have done, because the door out of it led to a corridor of cells with Fred Joliffe in the last one. Of course the few other prisoners, disorderlies and chicken-thieves and the like, had been moved upstairs. Somebody had told Bob that the scent of an execution affects 'em like a cage of wild animals. Whoever it was, he was right. We could hear 'em shifting and stamping over our heads, and one colored boy singing hymns all night long.
Well, it was raining hard on the thin roof. Maybe that was what put Doc Macdonald in mind of it. Doc was a cynical old devil. When he saw that Bob couldn't sit still, and would throw in his hand without even looking at the buried card, Doc says:
"Yes, I hope it'll go off all right. But you want to be careful about that rain. Did you read about that fellow they tried to hang in England—and the rain had swelled the boards so's the trap wouldn't fall? They stuck him on it three times, but still it wouldn't work."
Ed Nabors slammed his hand down on the table. I reckon he felt bad enough as it was, because one of his daughters had run away and left him, and the other was dying of consumption. But he was twitchy and reddish about the eyes. He hadn't had a drink for two days, although there was a bottle on the table. He says:
"You shut up or I'll kill you. Damn you, Macdonald," he says, and grabs the edge of the table. "I tell you nothing can go wrong. I'll go out and test the thing again, if you'll let me put the rope round your neck."
And Bob Moran says, "What do you want to talk like that for anyway, Doc. Ain't it bad enough as it is?" he says. "Now you've got me worrying about something else," he says. "I went down there a while ago to look at him, and he said the funniest thing I ever heard Fred Joliffe say. He's crazy. He giggled and said God wouldn't let them so-and-so's hang him. It was terrible, hearing Fred Joliffe talk like that. What time is it, somebody?"
It was cold that night. I dozed off in a chair, hearing the rain, and that animal-cage shuffling upstairs. The colored boy was singing that part of the hymn about while the nearer waters roll, while the tempest still is high.
They woke me about half past eight to say that Judge Hunt and all the witnesses were out in the jail yard, and they were ready to start the march. Then I realized that they were really going to hang him after all. I had to join behind the procession as I was sworn, but I didn't see Fred Joliffe's face and I didn't want to see it. They had given him a good wash, and a clean flannel shirt that they tucked under at the neck. He stumbled coming out of the cell, and started to go in the wrong direction, but Bob Moran and the constable each had him by one arm. It was a cold, dark, windy morning. His hands were tied behind.
The preacher was saying something I couldn't catch, and everything went off smoothly enough until they got halfway across the jail yard. It's a pretty big yard. I didn't look at the contraption in the middle, but at the witnesses standing over against the wall with their hats off. But Fred Joliffe did look at it, and went down flat on his knees. They hauled him up again. I heard them keep on walking, and go up the steps, which were creaky.
I didn't look at the contraption until I heard a thumping sound, and we all knew something was wrong.
Fred Joliffe was not standing on the trap, nor was the bag pulled over his head, although his legs were strapped.
He stood with his eyes closed and his face toward the pink sky. Ed Nabors was clinging with both hands to the rope, twirling round a little and stamping on the trap. It didn't budge. Just as I heard Ed crying something about the rain having swelled the boards, Judge Hunt ran past me to the foot of the contraption.
Bob Moran started cursing pretty obscenely. "Put him on and try it, anyway," he says, and grabs Fred's arm. "Stick that bag over his head and give the thing a chance."
"In His name," says the preacher pretty steadily, "you'll not do it if I can help it."
Bob ran over like a crazy man and jumped on the trap with both feet. It was stuck fast. Then Bob turned round and pulled an Ivor-Johnson .45 out of his hip-pocket. Judge Hunt got in front of Fred, whose lips were moving a little.
"He'll have the law, and nothing but the law," says Judge Hunt. "Put that gun away, you lunatic, and take him back to the cell until you can make the thing work. Easy with him, now."
To this day I don't think Fred Joliffe had realized what happened. I believe he only had his belief confirmed that they never meant to hang him after all. When he found himself going down the steps again, he opened his eyes. His face looked shrunken and dazed-like, but all of a sudden it came to him in a blaze.
"I knew them so-and-so's would never hang me," says he. His throat was so dry he couldn't spit at Judge Hunt, as he tried to do, but he marched straight and giggling across the yard. "I knew them so-and-so's would never hang me," he says.
We all had to sit down a minute, and we had to give Ed Nabors a drink. Bob made him hurry up, although we didn't say much, and he was leaving to fix the trap again when the courthouse janitor came bustling into Bob's office.
"Call," says he, "on the new machine over there. Telephone."
"Lemme out of here!" yells Bob. "I can't listen to no telephone calls now. Come out and give us a hand."
"But it's from Harrisburg," says the janitor. "It's from the Governor's office. You got to go."
"Stay here, Bob." says Judge Hunt. He beckons to me. "Stay here, and I'll answer it," he says. We looked at each other in a queer way when we went across the Bridge of Sighs. The courthouse clock was striking nine, and I could look down into the yard and see people hammering at the trap. After Judge Hunt had listened to that telephone call he had a hard time putting the receiver back on the hook.
"I always believed in Providence, in a way," says he, "but I never thought it was so person-like. Fred Joliffe is innocent. We're to call off this business," says he, "and wait for a messenger from the Governor. He's got the evidence of a woman . . . Anyway, we'll hear it later."
Now, I'm not much of a hand at describing mental states, so I can't tell you exactly what we felt then. Most of all was a fever and horror for fear they had already whisked Fred out and strung him up. But when we looked down into the yard from the Bridge of Sighs we saw Ed Nabors and the carpenter arguing over a crosscut saw on the trap itself, and the blessed morning light coming up in glory to show us we could knock that ugly contraption to pieces and burn it.
The corridor downstairs was deserted. Judge Hunt had got his wind back, and, being one of those stern elocutionists who like to make complimentary remarks about God, he was going on something powerful. He sobered up when he saw that the door to Fred Joliffe's cell was open.
"Even Joliffe," says the judge, "deserves to get this news first."
But Fred never did get the news, unless his ghost was listening. I told you he was very small and light. His heels were a good eighteen inches off the floor as he hung by the neck from an iron peg in the wall of the cell. He was hanging from a noose made in a child's skipping-rope; black-faced dead already, with the whites of his eyes showing in slits, and his heels swinging over a kicked-away stool.
No, son, we didn't think it was suicide for long. For a little while we were stunned, half crazy, naturally. It was like thinking about your troubles at three o'clock in the morning.
But you see, Fred's hands were still tied behind him. There was a bump on the back of his head, from a hammer that lay beside the stool. Somebody had walked in there with the hammer concealed behind his back, had stunned Fred when he wasn't looking, had run a slip-knot in that skipping-rope, and jerked him up a-flapping to strangle there. It was the creepiest part of the business, when we'd got that through our heads, and we all began loudly to tell each other where we'd been during the confusion. Nobody had noticed much. I was scared green.
When we gathered round the table in Bob's office, Judge Hunt took hold of his nerve with both hands. He looked at Bob Moran, at Ed Nabors, at Doc Macdonald, and at me. One of us was the other hangman.
"This is a bad business, gentlemen," says he, clearing his throat a couple of times like a nervous orator before he starts. "What I want to know is, who under sanity would strangle a man when he thought we intended to do it anyway, on a gallows?"
Then Doc Macdonald turned nasty. "Well," says he, "if it comes to that, you might inquire where that skipping-rope came from to begin with."
"I don't get you," says Bob Moran, bewildered-like. 
"Oh, don't you," says Doc, and sticks out his whiskers. "Well, then, who was so dead set on this execution going through as scheduled that he wanted to use a gun when the trap wouldn't drop?"
Bob made a noise as though he'd been hit in the stomach. He stood looking at Doc for a minute, with his hands hanging down—and then he went for him. He had Doc back across the table, banging his head on the edge, when people began to crowd into the room at the yells. Funny, too; the first one in was the jail carpenter, who was pretty sore at not being told that the hanging had been called off. 
"What do you want to start fighting for?" he says, fretful-like. He was bigger than Bob, and had him off Doc with a couple of heaves. "Why didn't you tell me what was going on? They say there ain't going to be any hanging. Is that right?"
Judge Hunt nodded, and the carpenter—Barney Hicks, that's who it was; I remember now—Barney Hicks looked pretty peevish, and says:
"All right, all right, but you hadn't ought to go fighting all over the joint like that." Then he looks at Ed Nabors. "What I want is my hammer. Where's my hammer, Ed? I been looking all over the place for it. What did you do with it?"
Ed Nabors sits up, pours himself four fingers of rye, and swallows it.
"Beg pardon, Barney," says he in the coolest voice I ever heard. "I must have left it in the cell," he says, "when I hanged Fred Joliffe."
Talk about silences! It was like one of those silences when the magician at the Opera House fires a gun and six doves fly out of an empty box. I couldn't believe it. But I remember Ed Nabors sitting big in the corner by the barred window, and his shiny black coat and string tie. His hands were on his knees, and he was looking from one to the other of us, smiling a little. He looked as old as the prophets then, and he'd got enough liquor to keep the nerve from twitching beside his eye. So he just sat there, very quietly, shifting the plug of tobacco around in his cheek, and smiling.
"Judge," he says in a reflective way, "you got a call from the Governor at Harrisburg, didn't you? Uh-huh. I knew what it would be. A woman had come forward, hadn't she, to confess Fred Joliffe was innocent and she had killed Randall Fraser? Uh-huh. The woman was my daughter. Jessie couldn't face telling it here, you see. That was why she ran away from me and went to the Governor. She'd have kept quiet if you hadn't convicted Fred." 
"But why? ..." shouts the judge. "Why? . . ." 
"It was like this," Ed goes on in that slow way of his. "She'd been on pretty intimate terms with Randall Fraser, Jessie had. And both Randall and Fred were having a whooping lot of fun threatening to tell the whole town about it. She was pretty near crazy, I think. And, you see, on the night of the murder Fred Joliffe was too drunk to remember anything that happened. He thought he had killed Randall, I suppose, when he woke up and found Randall dead and blood on his hands.
"It's all got to come out now, I suppose," says he, nodding. "What did happen was that the three of 'em were in that back room, which Fred didn't remember. He and Randall had a fight while they were baiting Jessie. Fred whacked him hard enough with that mallet to lay him out, but all the blood he got was from a big splash over Randall's eye. Jessie . . . Well, Jessie finished the job when Fred ran away, that's all."
"But, you damned fool," cries Bob Moran, and begins to pound the table, "why did you have to go and kill Fred when Jessie had confessed?"
"You fellows wouldn't have convicted Jessie, would you?" says Ed, blinking at us. "No. But, if Fred had lived after her confession, you'd have had to, boys. That was how I figured it out. Once Fred learned what did happen, that he wasn't guilty and she was, he'd never have let up until he'd carried that case to the Superior Court out of your hands. He'd have screamed all over the state until they either had to hang her or send her up for life. I couldn't stand that. As I say, that was how I figured it out, although my brain's not so clear these days. So," says he, nodding and leaning over to take aim at the cuspidor, "when I heard about that telephone call, I went into Fred's cell and finished my job."
"But don't you understand," says Judge Hunt, in the way you'd reason with a lunatic, "that Bob Moran will have to arrest you for murder, and . . ."
It was the peacefulness of Ed's expression that scared us then. He got up from his chair, and dusted his shiny black coat, and smiled at us.
"Oh no," says he very clearly. "That's what you don't understand. You can't do a single damned thing to me. You can't even arrest me."
"He's bughouse," says Bob Moran.
"Am I?" says Ed affably. "Listen to me. I've committed what you might call a perfect murder, because I've done it legally . . . Judge, what time did you talk to the Governor's office, and get the order for the execution to be called off? Be careful now."
And I said, with the whole idea of the business suddenly hitting me:
"It was maybe five minutes past nine, wasn't it, Judge? I remember the courthouse clock striking."
"I remember it too," says Ed Nabors. "And Doc Macdonald will tell you Fred Joliffe was dead before ever that clock struck nine. I have in my pocket," says he, unbuttoning his coat, "a court order which authorizes me to kill Fred Joliffe, by means of hanging by the neck—which I did—between the hours of eight and nine in the morning— which I also did. And I did it in full legal style before the order was countermanded. Well?"
Judge Hunt took off his stovepipe hat and wiped his face with a bandana. We all looked at him.
"You can't get away with this," says the judge, and grabs the sheriff's order off the table. "You can't trifle with the law in that way. And you can't execute sentence alone. Look here! 'In the presence of a qualified medical practitioner.' What do you say to that?"
"Well, I can produce my medical diploma," says Ed, nodding again. "I may be a booze hoister, and mighty unreliable, but they haven't struck me off the register yet . . . You lawyers are hell on the wording of the law," says he admiringly, "and it's the wording that's done for you this time. Until you get the law altered with some fancy words, there's nothing in that document to say that the doctor and the hangman can't be the same person."
After a while Bob Moran turned round to the judge with a funny expression on his face. It might have been a grin.
"This ain't according to morals," says he. "A fine citizen like Fred shouldn't get murdered like that. It's awful. Something's got to be done about it. As you said yourself this morning, Judge, he ought to have the law and nothing but law. Is Ed right, Judge?"
"Frankly, I don't know," says Judge Hunt, wiping his face again. "But, so far as I know, he is. What are you doing, Robert?"
"I'm writing him out a check for fifty dollars," says Bob Moran, surprised-like. "We got to have it all nice and legal, haven't we?"

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