Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 11 (1949).pdf/6

 aware of his existence, and he only when an upraised finger signaled orders for a fresh mug of old musty.

“New feller here?” The booming challenge at his elbow startled him. “Didn’t remember seein’ you before. My name’s Crumpacker, judge Lucius Q. Crumpacker. What’s yours? Mind if I sit by you?”

The big man dropped into the vacant hickory chair between Harrigan and the fire-warmed hearth and beckoned to the waiter. “Double Scotch and soda, Jake,” he ordered. “You know my brand—and no ice, remember. When I want ice-water with a little whisky in it I’ll tell you.”

He lit a cigar which seemed almost half a yard in length, blew a series of quick, angry smoke rings like the pompoms of exploding shrapnel, and turned again to Harrigan, bushy eyebrows working up and down like agitated caterpillars.

“Had a dev’lish mean experience this evenin’,” he confided in a voice that sounded somehow like an angry mastiff’s growl. “Ordered off an old hag’s land. ’Pon my word, I was. We ought to run the old hadrian out o’ the county. She has no business here, ought to be in the poorhouse, or jail. Devilish old virago.“ He worried at the end of his cigar until it flattened and unraveled like a frayed-out rope, then flung the ruin in the fire and lit another stogie. “Umph. Land wasn’t posted, either.“

“But I thought all that was taken care of,” ventured Harrigan as the silence lengthened. “I was told the club had made arrangements with the local land owners to let us shoot on their land for a stipulated yearly fee and a guarantee to reimburse them for any damages they might sustain.”

“Right. Quite right. There is such an arrangement, and by its terms the yokels have a right to post their land whenever they get tired of takin’ money from us, but that old scold down by Gunpowder Creek refuses either to post her land or sign a contract with us. She’s got nothing but a weedpatch and a flock o’ moultin’ hens. You could ride a regiment o’ cavalry across her place, and all you’d trample would be goldenrod and ragweed, but the old she-devil won’t let one of us set foot across her line. She’s the last one of a family that settled here in 1635, and though there’s nothing but the cellar and chimneys of the old mansion left she still puts on the high and mighty air with us and treats us like a lot o’ trespassers and interlopers.

“Her place adjoins the Spellman farm. Spellman’s glad enough to collect from us for the shootin’-rights, I’d flushed up a covey his side of the line. Must have been a dozen birds in it. I knocked down four of ’em and saw ’em take covert in the next field. That would be her briar-patch.

“Maybe I had no business trespassin’, for after all we’ve no agreement with her, but she’d not posted signs, either. So Xerxes—that’s my wirehaired setter—and I just kept on goin’. We’d walked two-three hundred yards across her mangy patch o’ crab-grass when Xerxes started actin’ queerly. First he’d run around in circles, as if he had the scent o’ something; then he’d come lopin’ back to me with his tail down, and look up in my face with that peculiar questionin’ way dogs have, and when I’d tell him to go smell ’em out he’d run off for a little distance, then start circlin’ back again. 4