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A jug of wine, a pound of flesh, and three brass halls . . .
. A^e Pawnshop Style
by JAMES L. HARTE
THE auto of ancient vintage, bearing Georgia license plates, moved over the bridge that spans the Potomac River between Dahlgren, Virginia, and Newburg, Maryland. It came to a halt at the toll gate on the Maryland side. A smartly uniformed young woman stepped out of the boxlike booth at the gate and extended a hand toward the driver of the car.
"Gee, Sister," said the motorist, after a fruitless search of his pockets, "I've used up all my cash. But I can write a check." The last hopefully.
"Sorry," said the attendant, and her manner indicated the story was not new.
"What am I going to do?" asked the nonplussed driver.
Patiently the toll-collector explained. "Since you have no money, you have a choice. You can turn around and go back, or you can let us have something as collateral for your toll. The State of Maryland insists upon being paid for each crossing here, and my job is to collect, one way or another. There isn't anything else I can do about it."
The autoist searched his pockets. He found nothing. He opened the glove compartment of the car and
drew out a long, three-celled flashlight. "Will this do?" he asked.
"If it works," replied the polite lady attendant.
It did. The flashlight changed hands. The woman wrote the name and address of the motorist on a tag and tied the tag to the flashlight. "You can come back and redeem this in person," she advised, "or you can mail us the amount of your toll and we'll ship the light to you." She pencilled a receipt, gave it to the Georgian, and he went happily on his way.
The comely toll-collector, one of three women who work the job in shifts, turned the searchHght over to Bridge Superintendent Elwood Schafer. He opened his office safe to deposit it along with a goodly store of other flashlights, fountain pens, rings, watches, and other bits of jewelry left by motorists who had reached the toll gate as unprepared as the driver of the Georgia-tagged Ford.
"It happens with surprising frequency," says the bridge superintendent. "You should see the storage room behind my office."
The storage room looks like a cross between an old-fashioned country store and a big-city pawnshop. Its