nks of Perkins' Creek.

It was felt that mental befuddlement and mortal folly could reach no
greater heights--or no lower depths--than on a certain hour of a certain
day, along toward the end of August, when O'Day came forth from his
quarters in Gafford's stables, wearing a pair of boots that M.
Biederman's establishment had turned out to his order and his
measure--not such boots as a sensible man might be expected to wear, but
boots that were exaggerated and monstrous counterfeits of the
red-topped, scroll-fronted, brass-toed, stub-heeled, squeaky-soled
bootees that small boys of an earlier generation possessed.

Very proudly and seemingly unconscious of, or, at least, oblivious to,
the derisive remarks that the appearance of these new belongings drew
from many persons, the owner went clumping about in them, with the
rumply legs of his trousers tucked down in them, and ballooning up and
out over the tops in folds which overlapped from his knee joints halfway
down his attenuated calves.

As Deputy Sheriff Quarles said, the combination was a sight fit to make
a horse laugh. It may be that small boys have a lesser sense of humor
than horses have, for certainly the boys who were the old man's
invariable shadows did not laugh at him, or at his boots either. Between
the whiskered senior and his small comrades there existed a freemasonry
that made them all sense a thing beyond the ken of most of their elders.
Perhaps this was because the elders, being blind in their superior
wisdom, saw neither this thing nor the communion that flourished. They
saw only the farcical joke. But His Honor, Judge Priest, to cite a
conspicuous exception, seemed not to see the lamentable comedy of it.

Indeed, it seemed to some almost as if Judge Priest were aiding and
abetting the befogged O'Day in his demented enterprises, his peculiar
excursions and his weird purchases. If he did not actually encourage him
in these constant exhibitions of witlessness, certainly there were no
evidences available to show that he sought to dissuade O'Day from his
strange course.

At the end of a fortnight one citizen, in whom patience had ceased to be
a virtue and to whose nature long-continued silence on any public topic
was intolerable, felt it his duty to speak to the Judge upon the
subject. This gentleman--his name was S. P. Escott--held, with many,
that, for the good name of the community, steps should be taken to abate
the infantile, futile activities of