The skinny man edged forward, clutching his badly drooping leaves. He flushed embarrassedly.
"I suppose I am, your honor," he said weakly.
The judge eyed him without pleasure. "Why are you crouched down like that? Got a bellyache?"
"No, sir," the skinny man said. "It's just that I can't stand up--the way my leaves are. It wouldn't look right."
"It doesn't look right now," the judge said tersely. "It looks perfectly dreadful."
The skinny man flushed a still deeper shade of red and agitated his leaves. "I'm sorry, your honor."
"It's too late to be sorry," the judge said. "Now, suppose you just tell me what you people were doing, running around indecently exposed."
"Well, your honor," the skinny man said hopefully, "we were having a picnic."
The judge blanched a mottled grey. "So I've heard," he said. "There's no need to be defiant about it, you know."
"It was all very nice and orderly," the man offered, "until Mr. Pillsworth showed up."
The judge's gaze swiveled toward Marc with gloomy speculation. "This fellow Pillsworth must exert a powerful influence everywhere he goes," he said. He turned back to the nudist.
"Just how out of hand did everything get, would you say?"
"I don't know exactly," the skinny man said. "Everyone was leaping about and running. It got pretty hard to follow. I don't think there were any broken bones, though."
"Broken bones!" the judge wheezed. He closed his eyes, as though to blot out a vision too awful for observation. When he opened them again, they were fixed on Hotstuff Harold.
"And how did you and your disreputable friends get mixed up in this?" he asked malevolently.
"We weren't mixed up in it," Hotstuff Harold said innocently. "We didn't know anything about these nudists until close to the end. We were very shocked at them."
"I dare say," the judge said dryly. "And may I ask, since you were out merely sniffing the flowers, how you all happened to be armed with guns?"
"Well," Hotstuff said vaguely, "we botanists can't be too careful, you know. There might be snakes."
"There _are_ snakes," the judge said evenly, "and this courtroom is fairly crawling with them. Don't tell me that you were shooting up the countryside just to be on the safe side. Don't tell me that!"