had us down and out. In five minutes more he'd
have a two-hundred-pound wife and a fifty-thousand-dollar income.

"It strikes me," says he, over his shoulder, "that if I had got hold of
a fortune in the way you got yours, young woman, I wouldn't make any
comments about mercenary marriages."

Well, say, up to that time I had a half-baked idea that maybe I wasn't
called on to block his little game, but when he begins to rub it into
Sadie I sours on Doc right away. And it always does take one or two good
punches to warm me up to a scrap. I begins to do some swift thinkin'.

"Hold on there, Doc," says I. "I'll give in that you've got our case
quashed as it stood. But maybe there's someone else that's got an
interest in these doin's."

"Ah!" says he. "And who might that be?"

"Mrs. Montgomery Smith," says I.

It was a chance shot, but it rung the bell. Doc goes as limp as a straw
hat that's been hooked up after a dip in the bay, and his eyes took on
that shifty look they had the first time I ever saw him.

"Why," says he, swallowin' hard, and doing his best to get back the
stiff front he'd been puttin' up--"why, there's no such person."

"No?" says I. "How about the one that calls you Monty and runs you under
the couch?"

"It's a lie!" says he. "She's nothing to me, nothing at all."

"Oh, well," says I, "that's between you and her. She says different.
Anyway, she's come clear up here to put in her bid; so it's no more'n
fair to give her a show. I'll just bring her in."

As I starts towards the front door Doc gives me one look, to see if I
mean business. Then, Sadie says, he turns the color of pie-crust, drops
Aunt Tillie as if she was a live wire, and jumps through the back door
like he'd been kicked by a mule. I got back just in time to see him
hurdle a five-foot hedge without stirrin' a leaf, and the last glimpse
we got of him he was headin' for a stretch of woods up Connecticut way.

"Looks like you'd just missed assistin' at a case of bigamy," says I to
the young preacher, as we was bringin' Aunt Tillie out of her faint.

"Shocking!" says he. "Shocking!" as he fans himself with a hymn book. He
was takin' it hard.

Aunt Tillie wouldn't speak to any of us, and as we bundled her into her
carriage and sent her home she looked as mad as a settin' hen with her
feet tied.

"Shorty," says Sadie, on the way back, "that was an elegant bluff you
put up."

"Lucky my hand wa'n't called," says I. "But it was rough