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.