Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/234

 Louise, she had closed the door. It seemed impossible that it ever could be opened again.

It was a time of inactivity in the county seat. The judge of the district court was away on vacation, only the clerk there to represent the judicial machinery until his return. Many of the heads of county offices were out on their ranches or farms; the court house, and the square in which it stood, the most uninteresting place for loafers in the town.

The sheriff was improving this lull in court business to push his campaign for re-election. He was at work in his large bare office, his desk slewed around out of its accustomed place, the incrustations of years on the floor marking the spot where it had stood, to bring it in line of the draft between the windows. There was a pile of mussy mimeographed letters before the sweating official, to which he was signing his name to give them the personal and intimate appeal.

It was a job for the sheriff, this going through twelve or fifteen hundred letters and attaching his name with a flourish at the end. At times he rather enjoyed taking his stub pen between his fingers and putting his signature to subpoenas, attachments, warrants; liked to see the impressive length of his name stretch out that way, swelling up with the thought that the papers wouldn't be worth a cent without that name, and the thought that it meant so much to the peace and dignity of the state. This was a different job; he regretted that she hadn't ordered a rubber stamp.

It was a hot, dry, hay-making day. Tom Laylander's