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And he had no lack of comrades willing to join him in his ritual of self-therapy for forgetting: getting drunk. But the day came when there was a reckoning.
Ha-Ha and a very good friend of his (Let’s ckll him Judd) took their last fifth to a semi-secluded grassy spot under some trees not far from town. There they enjoyed passing the bottle back and forth between them until they both fell asleep on the grass.
It was a long, deep sleep they had, while a few yellow-jackets buzzed around. Three inquisitive beagles left a rabbit trail to come by and sniff at the figures, sprawled mouth-open and odorous. Then they moved on, after appropriately marking the tree as territory for future investigation.
Later, as fate would have it, Ha-Ha was the first to awake. He blinked a.t the sky for a while as consciousness returned. Then he looked around to discover his companion still out cold, cold as any fighter that Joe Lewis had laid on the canvas!
Ha-Ha reached for the bottle, but that was empty and a yellow-jacket had crawled inside. He smashed it against the tree. Still, Judd continued his strange little sleeping sounds after lifting one hand ever so slightly and letting it plop again beside him. So Ha-Ha did what almost any other man would have done under the circumstances: he frisked his friend, discovered one last bill in the wallet, and took off to hitch-hike to Front Royal before the ABC store closed.
Ha-Ha was well under way before Judd came to. But when Judd found himself alone and minus that last bill of “folding money”, he regained enough of his sensibility to put two and two together and to conclude that he had been robbed and who the lowdown skunk was that “done it.” To say that he was mad just isn’t (ain’t) putting it strong enough. He w'as spittin; mad, furious and about to bust with the urge to kill!
He visited the tree, then took off in a rapid stumble on the crooked-mile back to the village. There he rounded up a couple of his cronies sitting by the curb at the Corner Store. He told them of the heinous crime of which he had been the victim. And he deputized them on the spot to assist him in bringing the perpetrator to justice (or else it would never again be safe to get drunk with your neighbors). Their duty was clear: they had to make an example of Ha-Ha.
So they carefully plotted the capture, the sentencing, and the hanging by the neck of one Ha-Ha_, thief and robber. Taking a length of extra-heavy tow rope, the three men in an old Chevy headed in the direction of Front Royal to take the law into their own hands. Sure
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