“You—you wretch!” she cried, stamping her foot. “I hate you!”

Her little hands were tightly clenched. She turned away to hide the tears which welled again into her eyes; but now they were tears of exasperation, shame, and rage.

He got quickly to his feet. “Please, Bessie!” he said. “You don’t understand. Not for the world would I——”

He stopped short, staring across at the road, down which a touring car containing two men was speeding toward the village.

“Great Caesar!” he cried. “There goes the governor! Hitchens must have got the engine running somehow. They’ll expect to find me in town.” With all the strength of a good pair of lungs, he shouted, waving his hands above his head. The automobile sped on. Its occupants neither saw nor heard him.

“I guess I’m left for the time being,” he said. “They’ll go ripping straight through to catch that train at Albion.”

“They won’t rip through very far,” Miss Wiggin flung at him. “There’s a trap just outside the village, watched by a deputy sheriff and two constables. Your old governor will be nabbed and pulled up before my father, who will soak him with a fine. And I hope dad soaks him good,” she finished, laughing, and doing so with a vindictiveness that seemed to afford her untold relief and satisfaction.

 CHAPTER IVTHE TRAPPERS. 

CHAPTER IV

Jeremiah Small, constable of the town of Greenbush, sat on the top rail of the roadside fence and wedged a load of fine cut into the bowl of a burned, blackened, odorous corncob pipe, packing it down with a decidedly dirty thumb. From his perch he could look over the top of a cluster of low sumacs and keep watch upon a point on the hillside where the highway wound into view. He could also see, somewhat nearer, a tall and lonely elm tree, past which the road ran in a broadside curve.

“Weeping” Buzzell, another constable, was sitting on the ground in the shade of the sumacs, leaning against the fence, and occasionally wiping his red-rimmed and watery eyes with a faded and mussed bandanna handkerchief. His jaws worked wearily at a quid of tobacco, the presence of which was further advertised by the unmistakable stains at the corners of his doleful and flabby mouth. He had chosen his lowly position for comfort, and because his companion was far better adapted to the task of outlook.

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