“What in thunder does this mean--” he began, and then stopped short, being daunted by the face which Sheriff Giles Birdsong turned upon him. “Look here, mister,” counseled the sheriff, “you art now in the presence of the presidin' judge of the first judicial district of Kintucky, settin' in chambers, or what amounts to the same thing, and you air liable to git yourself into contempt of cote any minute.” Baffled, Silver started to swear again, but in a lower key. “You better shut up your mouth,” said the sheriff with a shifting forward of his body to free his limbs for action, “and listen to whut His Honor has to say. You act like you was actually anxious to git yourself lamed up.” “Sheriff,” said the judge, “obeyin' your orders you have, I observe, attached certain properties--to wit, a band wagon and team of horses--and still obeyin' orders, have produced said articles before me for my inspection. You will continue in personal possession of same until said attachment is adjudicated, not allowin' any person whatsoever to remove them from your custody. Do I make myself sufficiently plain?” “Yes, suh, Your Honor,” said the sheriff. “You do.” “In the meanwhile, pendin' the termination of the litigation, if the recent possessor of this property desires to use it for exhibition or paradin' purposes, you will permit him to do so, always within proper bounds,” went on the judge. “I would suggest that you could cut through that lane yonder in order to reach the business section of our city, if such should be the desire of the recent possessor.” The heavy wheels of the band wagon began turning; the parade started moving on again. But in that precious half-minute's halt something else had happened, only this happened in front of the little brown house halfway down Clay Street. The clown's gaze was roving this way and that, as if looking for the crowd that should have been there and that was only just beginning to appear, breathless and panting, and his eyes fell upon a wasted, wizened little face looking straight out at him from a nest of bedclothes in a window not thirty feet away; and--be it remembered among that clown's good deeds in the hereafter--he stood up and bowed, and stretched his painted, powdered face in a wide and gorgeous grin, just as another and a greater Grimaldi once did for just such another audience of a grieving mother and a dying child. Then he yelled “Whoa, January,” three separate times, and each time he poked January in his long-suffering flanks and each time January kicked up his small quick hoofs right alongside the clown's floury ears.