Page:World Fiction 1922–1923.djvu/582

 him. “Have you seen to it that nothing was removed?”

“Both the stakes lie just where they fell on the ground.”

“The point is that the commission at its local investigation must find an undisturbed picture of the act of trespass.”

“But there’s another snag to it, Mr. Attorney.’

“What sort of snag?”

“Through that opening in the fence—you understand—her chickens are flocking into my garden and are causing all kinds of damage. My poor dead wife used to like to keep chickens and I myself enjoy seeing a brood of fine golden goslings or speckled chicks cheeping around a bustling mother-hen. But Mrs. Vrchcabova even in that line passes all limits. Her yard is a regular poultry barracks. It fairly swarms with roosters, hens, ducks, turkeys and geese. She doesn’t keep them for profit or for pleasure, God knows; only to torment me from morning till night with their crowing, clucking, peeping and chattering, and to fly over the fence into my garden and cause destruction until my heart fairly aches. Even before this, it kept me busy driving them away, but since those two stakes in the fence are missing, they stay in my garden as if they were at home. But I’m going to put an end to that sort of thing. I’m going to buy myself, you understand, a double barrelled shot-gun, and I’ll shoot anything that comes through the fence, even if it’s her finest turkey.”

“You’d certainly not do yourself any good by that. I advise a different method. Just help yourself to several of her hens and other poultry as security for the damage you have suffered. It is a special kind of security—or pledge-right—that the law in this instance allows.”

A few days after this advice Prochazka again entered the office in very apparent excitement.