“Whenever I find an inn-sign permitted by the police, I may go in and ask for a glass of beer—also permitted by the police.”
“If you find any such, yes,” answered Ivywood, quite temperately. “But we hope soon to have removed them altogether.”
Captain Patrick Dalroy rose enormously from his seat with a sort of stretch and yawn.
“Well, Hump,” he said to his friend, “the best thing, it seems to me, is to take the important things with us.”
“With two sight-staggering kicks he sent the keg of rum and the round cheese flying over the fence, in such a direction that they bounded on the descending road and rolled more and more rapidly down toward the dark woods into which the path disappeared. Then he gripped the pole of the inn-sign, shook it twice and plucked it out of the turf like a tuft of grass.
It had all happened before anyone could move, but as he strode out into the road the policeman ran forward. Dalroy smote him flat across face and chest with the wooden sign-board, so as to send him flying into the ditch on the other side of the road. Then turning on the man in the fez he poked him with the end of the pole so sharply in his new white waistcoat and watch-chain as to cause him to sit down suddenly in the road, looking very serious and thoughtful.
The dark secretary made a movement of rescue, but Humphrey Pump, with a cry, caught up his gun from the table and pointed it at him, which so alarmed J. Leveson, Secretary, as to cause him almost “to double up with his emotions. The next moment Pump, with his gun under his arm, was scampering down the hill after the Captain, who was scampering after the barrel and the cheese.”
G. K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn
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