"You're arrested," the marshal replied.
With the word Simpson swung his rather sizable foot and kicked the gun out of the marshal's hand. It would have required a quick eye to tell whether the gun hit the ground before the marshal, Simpson following up the kick with such a wallop as the officer never had stood in front of in his life.
"Wrong again, my man," said Tom.
He grabbed the marshal's gun, yanked the little chap to his groggy legs and ordered him to put the seat into the wagon. This the marshal accomplished with considerable effort, for his jawbone had been all but driven through his spinal cord and he was a dazed, dim-seeing, giddy little man.
Tom went up by the front hub as the marshal got aboard the old freight wagon amidships by means of the brake block. After the marshal, under the cold order of Simpson's eye and no word out of his tightly closed mouth, had arranged the spring seat in its proper place, Tom indicated that he was to lie down in the front of the wagon, like a dog, face to the dashboard. With a foot on the prostrate officer, Tom buckled on his gun, then took the lines and headed for home, nobody the wiser for the marshal's attempted bit of heroism to redeem himself in the eyes of his constituents.
Simpson did not say another word to the man cringing on the floor of the wagon bed; just kept him there under foot for a good five miles of about the hardest driving and the roughest riding that city marshal had experienced in many a day. At last Tom pulled up and told the officer they were out of town.
