us as well as a vociferous
eater. She fell little short of Anna in physical proportions, but his
wife assured him that it would be no time at all before she'd have her
as plump as a partridge! Mr. Loop undertook the experiment of a joke. He
asked her if _partridge_ was the Swede word for _hippopotamus_. After
that he kept his jokes to himself.

A year and a half went by. Then Miss Gertie Petersen came up from
Hoboken for a flying visit. She was a very tall and lean young woman.
Mr. Loop shuddered. The process of developing her into a partridge was
something horrible to contemplate. But Anna was not dismayed. She
insisted that the country air would do her sister a world of good. Mr.
Loop was a pained witness to the filling out of Gertrude, but something
told him that it wasn't the country air that was doing it. She weighed
in the neighbourhood of one hundred and fifty pounds when she flew in
for the visit. At the end of six months she strained the scales at two
hundred and twenty. There was a good deal of horse-sense in his
contention that if all this additional weight was country air, she'd
have to be pretty securely anchored or she'd float away like a balloon.

But he did not openly complain. He had acquired the wisdom of the
vanquished. He was surrounded by conquerors. Moreover, at
butchering-time, he had seen his wife pick up a squealing shoat with one
hand and slit its throat with the other in such a skilful and efficient
manner that gooseflesh crept out all over his body when he thought of
it.

[Illustration: _He was surrounded by conquerors_]

And during those long, solitary nights in the barn he thought of it so
constantly that everything else, including the encroachment of the
home-wrecker, slipped his mind completely. He never ceased wondering how
he screwed up the courage to institute proceedings against Anna,
notwithstanding the fact that the matter had been vicariously attended
to by his lawyer and a deputy from the county sheriff's office.

* * * * *

Marshal Crow fell into a state of profound cogitation after leaving Mr.
Loop. The old man had put a new idea into his head. Late in the
afternoon he decided to call a meeting of citizens at the town hall for
that night. He drafted the assistance of such able idlers as Alf
Reesling, Newt Spratt, Rush Applegate, Henry Plumb and Situate M. Jones,
and ordered them to impress upon all male citizens of Tinkletown between
the age