Sinopsis

Judge Brender had a wooden leg. That was why he refused to let his wife get up and answer the knock at the front door of the ranch house; he always wanted to show that in spite of a wooden leg he was about as active and agile as ever. So he waved his wife back to her newspaper—it was the idle hour of a mid-morning on Sunday—and he swung himself on his crutches and his sound leg into the hallway. The judge was a big man, but he found himself scowling through the screen door and the blinding light of the day at a man fully as tall as himself. The visitor was big and brown and handsome, and he wore a faint and amiable smile as he took off his hat. "Are you Judge Brender?" he asked. The judge, now that the man's hat was off, could see a pair of gray spots in the hair of the stranger above the temples. They looked like horns pushing out through the hair. He never had seen a more peculiar or characteristic marking.