a long, long while. A month, at
least!--and dad knows it, and has thought it was perfectly all right.
I told him just this afternoon that I intended to marry Johnny. He has
no right to tell everybody in the country that I am not old enough.
Why didn't he tell me, if he thought I should wait until after my
birthday?"

"If that's my father you're talking to," she attacked the sheriff who
was attempting to carry on a conversation and listen to Mary V also,
"I'd just like to say a few things to him myself!"

The sheriff waved her off and spoke into the mouthpiece. "Your girl,
here, says she wants to say a few things . . . What's that? . . . Oh.
All right, Mr. Selmer, you're the doctor."

He turned to Mary V with that exasperating chuckle of his. "Your
father says he'd rather not talk to you. He says you can't get
married, because you're under age, and you can't marry without his
consent. So if I was you I'd just wait like a good girl and not make
any trouble. Your father is coming after you, and in the meantime I'll
take charge of you myself."

"You will like hell," gritted Johnny, and hit the sheriff on the jaw,
sending him full tilt against the clerk, who fell over a chair so that
the two sprawled on the floor.

For that, the third man, who was a deputy sheriff as it happened,
grappled with Johnny from behind, and slipped a pair of handcuffs on
his wrists. The deadly finality of the smooth steel against his skin
froze Johnny into a semblance of calm. He stood white and very still
until the deputy took him away down a corridor into another building
and up a steep flight of dirty stairs to a barren, sweltering little
room under the roof.

Baffled, stunned with the humiliation of his plight, he had not even
spoken a good-by to Mary V, who had looked upon him strangely when he
stood manacled before her.

"Now you've made a nice mess of things!" she had exclaimed, half
crying. And Johnny had inwardly agreed with her more sweepingly than
Mary V suspected. A nice mess he had made of things, truly!
Everything was a muddle, and like the fool he was, he went right on
muddling things worse. Even Mary V could see it, he told himself
bitterly, and forgot that Mary V had said other things,--tender,
pitying things,--before they had led him away from her.

He had no delusions regarding the seriousness of his plight.
Assaulting an officer was a madness he should have avoided above all
else, and because he had yie