Once to Every Man
by Larry Evans · English · Gutenberg #29646 · 423,845 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Once to Every Man
Author: Larry Evans
Illustrator: Anton Otto Fischer
Release date: August 9, 2009 [eBook #29646]
Most recently updated: January 5, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONCE TO EVERY MAN ***
Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: "IT WAS FOR ME--YOU WENT. DON'T YOU--DIDN'T YOU KNOW IT
WAS--JUST BECAUSE OF YOU--THAT I WANTED THEM--AT--ALL?"]
ONCE TO EVERY MAN
BY
LARRY EVANS
ILLUSTRATED BY
ANTON OTTO FISCHER
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS :: NEW YORK
Copyright, 1913, by
The Metropolitan Magazine Company.
Copyright, 1914, by
The Metropolitan Magazine Company.
Copyright, 1914, by
The H. K. Fly Company.
TO
MINE OWN PEOPLE
ILLUSTRATIONS
"It Was for Me--You Went. Don't You--Didn't You Know
It Was--Just Because of You--That I Wanted
Them--At--All?" _Frontispiece_
"Hold Me Tight--Oh! Hold Me Tighter! for They Forgot
Me, Too, Denny; They Forgot Me Too!" 53
"Dryad, It's All Right--It's Always Been All
Right--With Us! They Lied--They Lied and They
Knew They Were Lying!" 85
"What You Need, Gentlemen, Is a Trifle Wider
Readin'--Just a Trifle! for You Ain't Bein' Well
Posted on Facts!" 149
ONCE TO EVERY MAN
CHAPTER I
The most remarkable thing about the boy was his eyes--that is, if any
man with his spread of shoulder and masculine grace of flat muscled
hips could be spoken of any longer as a boy, merely because his years
happened to number twenty-four.
They, however--the eyes--were gray; not a too light, off-color,
gleaming gray, but more the tone of slate, deep when one chanced
to find oneself peering deep into them. And they were old. Any
spontaneity of youth which might have flashed from them at one
time had faded entirely and left a sort of wistful sophistry
behind, an almost plaintive hunger which made the pity of his
shoulder-stoop--still mercifully only a prophecy of what the next
twenty years of toil might leave it--an even more pitiful thing. His
sheer bigness should have been still unspoiled; instead it was
already beginning to lose its rebound; it was growing imperceptibly
slack, like the springy stride of a colt put too soon to heavy
harness.
Late afternoon was giving way to nightfall--a long shadowed twilight
that was heavy with the scent of spring in spite of the scattered
patches of wet snow that still lurked in the swamp holes. As the boy
stood, facing toward the east and the town that sprawled in the
hollow, his great, shoulder-heavy body loomed almost like a painted
figure against the cool red background of the horizon. Even in spite
of the pike-pole which he grasped in one hand and the vividly
checkered blanket coat that wrapped him, the illusion was undeniable.
Stripped of them and equipped instead with a high steeple-crowned hat
and wide buckled shoes, his long half-saddened face and lean body
might have been a composite of all the Puritan fathers who had
wrestled with the rock-strewn acres behind him, two hundred years and
more before.
Denny Bolton was waiting--Young Denny, the townsfolk preferred to call
him, to distinguish him from Old Denny of the former generation.
Somehow, although he had never mentioned it to anybody, it seemed to
him that he had always been waiting for something--he hardly knew just
what it was himself--just something that was drearily slow in the
coming.
His home, the farmhouse of the Boltons, for which the straggling
village of Boltonwood below had been named, was nearest of all the
outlying places on the post route, yet last of all to be served, for
when the rural delivery had been established they had begun delivery
at the other end of the circle. Young Denny had never been able to
understand quite why it was so--but it was, for all that. And with
the minister, too, it happened, although not so often, for the
minister of Boltonwood called at almost every door on his rounds and
stayed longer at each, so sometimes for months at a time he never got
around to the shabby place on the hill at all. But the boy believed
that he did understand this and often he smiled to himself over it,
without any bitterness--just smiled half wistfully. He lived alone in
the tumble-down old house and did his own cooking and--well, even a
most zealous man of the gospel might have beamed more heartily upon
better cooks than was Denny, without any great qualms of conscience.
One other reason existed, or at least Young Denny imagined that it
did, but whenever he stopped to think about it--a thing he had come to
do more and more often in the last few months--he never smiled.
Instead, his lips straightened until the wistful quirk at the corners
disappeared into a straight line and his eyes smouldered ominously.
There was a select circle of white-haired old men--the village old
guard--which sat in nightly session about the fat-bellied old
wood-stove in the Boltonwood Tavern. It convened with the first
snowfall of the winter and broke up long after the ice had gone out in
the spring; and this circle, when all other topics had been whipped
over at fever heat, until all the zest of bitter contradiction was
gone from them, always turned at last with a delightful sort of
unanimity to the story of the night when Old Denny had died--the
Bolton of the former generation.
An almost childish enthusiasm tinged their keen relish for the tale.
They squirmed and puckered their wrinkled old faces and shivered
convulsively, just as a child might have shivered over a Bluebeard
horror, as they recalled how Old Denny had moaned in agony one moment
that night, and then screamed horribly the next for the old stone
demijohn that always stood in the corner of the kitchen. They
remembered, with an almost astonishing wealth of detail, that he had
frothed at the mouth and blasphemed terribly one instant, and then
wept, in the very same breath--wept hopelessly, like the uncouth,
overgrown, frightened boy who knelt at the bedside.
The strangest part of the whole thing was that not one of them had
realized at the time, or ever recalled since, that Old Denny's eyes
were sane when he wept that night and blurred with madness when he
cursed. But then, too, that would have smashed the dramatic element of
the whole tale to flinters. They never missed a scene or a sob,
however, in the re-telling, and they always ended it with an ominous
tilt of the head and a little insinuating crook of the neck toward the
battered, weather-torn old house where Young Denny had lived on alone
since that last bad night. It was very much as though they had said
aloud, "He's the next--he'll go just like the rest."
Perhaps they never really thought of it, and perhaps it was because
Young Denny's failure to fulfil their prophecy had really embittered
them, but the whole village had given the boy plenty of solitude in
the last few years in which to become on terms of thorough intimacy
with the demijohn which still occupied its place in the kitchen
corner.
And yet that stone demijohn was almost the only tangible reminder
there was left of the Bolton who had gone before. There were a few in
the village who wondered how, in the three intervening years, the big
silent, shambling boy had managed to tear from his acres money enough
to clear the place of its debt--the biggest thing by far in his
heritage. Eight hundred dollars was a large sum in Boltonwood--and
Denny's acres were mostly rocks. Old Denny would have sold the last
scythe and fork in the dilapidated barn to fill the stone jug, save
for the fact that fork and scythe had themselves been too dilapidated
to find a purchaser.
But the same scythe had an edge now and a polish where the boy's hands
had gripped and swung it, and it took a flawlessly clear-grained piece
of ash to make a shaft that would stand the forkfuls of hay which his
shoulders heaved, without any apparent effort, into the mow. The
clapboards on the house, although still unpainted, no longer whined
in the wind; they were all nailed tight. And still the circle around
the stove in the Boltonwood Tavern tilted its head--tilted it
ominously--as if to say: "Just wait a bit, he'll come to it--wait now
and see!" But the prophecy's fulfilment, long deferred, was making
them still more bitter--strangely bitter--toward the boy, who stood
alone at sundown watching the road that wound up from the village.
All this Young Denny knew, not because he had been told, but because
the part of him that was still boy sensed it intuitively. He was just
as happy to be let alone, or at least so he told himself, times
without end, for it gave him a chance to sleep. And tonight as he
stood at the crest of the hill before the dark house, waiting for Old
Jerry to come along with the mail, he was glad, too, that his place
was the last on the route. It gave him something to look forward to
during the day--something to expect--for although he rarely received a
letter or, to be more exact, never, the daily newspaper was, after
all, some company. And then there were the new farm implement
catalogues and seed books, with their dyspeptic looking fruits and
vegetables. They made better reading than nothing at all.
But it was not the usual bundle of papers which came at the end of
each week for which Young Denny was waiting. Old Jerry, who drove the
post route, and had driven it as long as Denny could remember, was
late tonight--he was even later than usual for Saturday night--and
Denny's hand tightened nervously upon the shaft of the pike-pole as he
realized the cause of the delay.
For many weeks he had heard but little else mentioned on the village
streets on his infrequent trips after groceries and grain. The winter
sledding was over; the snow had gone off a month back with the first
warm rain; just that afternoon he had made the last trip behind his
heavy team down from the big timber back on the ridges, but during
that month the other drivers with whom he had been hauling logs since
fall had talked of nothing but the coming event.
From where he stood, looking out across the valley, Young Denny could
see the huge bulk of the Maynard homestead--Judge Maynard's great box
of a house--silhouetted against the skyline, and back of it high piles
of timber--framing and sheathing for the new barn that was going up.
For Judge Maynard was going to give a barn-raising--an old-fashioned
barn-raising such as the hill country had not seen in twenty years.
Already Young Denny knew that there were to be two team captains who
would choose from among the best men that the country boasted, the
very pick of strength and endurance and daring. And these, when the
word was given, would swarm up with mallet and lock-pin over their
half of the allotted work, in the race to drive home the last spike
and wedge into place the last scantling. For days now with a grave
sort of satisfaction which he hardly understood himself, Young Denny
had time after time put all his strength against a reluctant log,
skidding timber back on the hillside, and watched the lithe pike-pole
bend half double under the steadily increasing strain. Somehow he felt
very sure that one or the other of the captains would single him out;
they couldn't afford to pass him by.
But in that one respect only was Judge Maynard's barn-raising to be
like those that had passed down into history a score of years back.
Every other detail, as befitted the hospitality of the wealthiest man
in the hill country, was planned on a scale of magnificence before
unheard of, and Denny Bolton stood and touched furtively with the tip
of his tongue lips that were dry with the glamour of it all.
It was to be a masquerade--the dance which followed on the wide, clean
floors--not the kind of a masquerade which the church societies gave
from time to time to eke out the minister's salary and which, while he
had never attended, Young Denny had often heard described as
"poverty-parties," because everybody wore the oldest of his old
clothes--but a marvelously brilliant thing of hired costumes. It did
not mean so much to him, this last, and yet as he thought of it his
tight lips twisted into a slow smile and his eyes swung from their
hungry contemplation of the great Maynard house to a little clump of
brushwood which made a darker blot against the black shadow of the
hill from the crest of which the Judge's place dominated the
surrounding country. Little by little Denny Bolton's lean face lost
its hint of hardness; the lines that ran from his thin nose to the
corners of his lips disappeared as he smiled--smiled with whimsical
gentleness--at the light that glimmered from a single window through
the tangled bushes, twinkling back at him unblinkingly.
There was a tiny cottage behind that light, a little drab cottage of a
half dozen rooms. It stood, unpainted and unkempt, in a wedge-shaped
acre of neglected garden which, between high weeds and uncut
shrubbery, had long before gone to straggling ruin. And that
wedge-shaped acre which cut a deep fissure in the edge of the
immaculate pastures of Boltonwood's wealthiest citizen was like a
barbed thorn in Judge Maynard's side.
The latter was not a judge in reality; partly the size of the cash
balance which rumor whispered he carried at the county bank, partly
the fact that he was the only lawyer in that section, had earned him
the title. But every trick of his tricky trade which he could invent
he had brought against the owner of that little, dilapidated cottage
in a vain effort to force him to sell. And yet the acre of neglect
and ruin still clung like an unsightly burr to the hem of his
smooth-rolling acres.
The people of Boltonwood were given to calling John Anderson a fool,
and not alone because he persisted in his senseless antagonism of a
man as great in the township as was Judge Maynard. There was at least
one other reason. It was almost twenty years now since the day when
John Anderson had first appeared in the stern old hill town, bringing
with him a frail slip of a woman with great, moist violet-blue eyes
and tumbled yellow hair, whose very white and gold prettiness had
seemed to their puritanical eyes the flaunting of an ungodly thing.
There was a transparent pallor in her white skin and heavy shadows
beneath her big dark eyes that made them seem even larger and duskier.
A whispered rumor went around that she was not too strong--that it was
the brisk keen air for which John Anderson had brought her to the
hills.
The little drab cottage had been white then and there was scarcely a
day but what the passers-by saw the slender girl, in soft fluttering
things that contrasted painfully with their dingy calico, the thick
gleaming mass of hair that crowned her head wind-tossed into her eyes,
standing with her face buried in an armful of crimson blossoms in the
same garden where the weeds were now breast high, or running with
mad, childish abandon between the high hedgerows. And many a night
after it was too dark to see they heard the man's heavier bass
underrunning the light treble of her laughter which, to their
sensitive ears, was never quite free from a tinge of mockery.
CHAPTER II
For a year or more it was like that, and then the day came which, with
dawn, found John Anderson changed into a gray-haired, white-faced man,
whose eyes always seemed to be looking beyond one, and who spoke but
seldom, even when he was spoken to. During the month that followed
that night hardly a person in the village heard a word pass his lips,
except, perhaps, those members of the church societies who had
volunteered to help care for the baby.
He locked himself up in the small shop which occupied the back room of
the house and day after day he worked there alone in a deadly quiet,
strangely mechanical fashion. Sometimes far into the night they heard
the tap-tap of his mallet as he chipped away, bit by bit, on a slender
shaft of white marble, until more than one man in those days shook his
head dubiously and vouchsafed his neighbor the information that John
Anderson "wa'n't quite right."
A month passed during which the steady chip-chip scarcely ever ceased;
and yet, when the work was finally finished and set up over the fresh
little mound in the grounds behind the church, and they came to stand
before it, they found nothing ready for them to say. For once the
tongues of the hillsfolk were sobered into silence.
It was like her--that slim little white statue--so like her in its
pallor and frailty of feature and limb that they only gasped and then
fell to whispering behind their hands at the resemblance. And somehow,
too, as they stared, their faces failed to harden as they had always
hardened before, whenever they rebuked her slim, elfish untidiness,
for upon the face of stone, which was the face of his wife, John
Anderson's chisel had left a fleeting, poignantly wistful smile that
seemed touched with the glory of the Virgin Mother herself.
They merely stood and stared--the townsfolk--and yet they only half
understood, for when it was noised about the street a few days later
that John Anderson had given up forever his occupation of chiseling
tombstones for the bleak Boltonwood cemetery--an occupation which at
least had yielded him a bare living--and had locked himself up in that
back room to "putter with lumps of clay," he was instantly convicted
of being queer in the eyes of the entire thrifty community, even
without his senseless antagonism of the Judge in the years that
followed to clinch the verdict.
After the first few weeks that followed that night the village saw
less and less of the man who went on living alone in the small white
cottage with only the child to keep him company--the girl-child whom
he had named Dryad, perhaps in a blind, groping hunger for beauty,
perhaps in sheer revolt against the myriad Janes and Anns and Marthas
about him. His hair was snow white before she was half grown; he was
an old man, wrinkled of face and vacant of eye, who bent always over
the bench in his back-room shop too engrossed with his work even to
note that, day by day, her face and slim body and tumbled yellow hair
grew more and more like the face which was always smiling up at him
from the shaping clay or marble.
Months passed before he opened his lips again for speech. Then he
began to talk; he began to murmur little, disjointed intimate phrases
of endearment to the stone face growing under his fingers--phrases
that were more than half unintelligible to strange ears--until as the
habit grew there came long periods, days at a time, when he carried on
an uncannily one-sided conversation with the empty air before him, or,
as the villagers often hinted, with some one whom his eyes alone could
see.
But as the years went by even this novelty lost its spice with long
familiarity. The cottage at the edge of town went from straggling
neglect to utter ruin, but John Anderson still clung to it with a
senseless stubbornness over which they often shook their heads in
pity--in heartfelt commiseration for the Judge who had to endure this
eyesore at his very doors, in spite of all his shrewdness or the
reputed size of his balance at the County National.
But if time had dimmed their interest in the father, it had only
served to whet their keen curiosity over the girl, who, in the
intervening eighteen years, had changed from a half-starved, half-clad
child that flashed through the thickets like a wild thing, into a long
slender-limbed creature with wide, duskily violet eyes and shimmering,
tumbled hair--a creature of swift, passionate moods who, if they could
only have known it, was startlingly like the wild things for which he
had named her.
They were not given to the reading of heathen mythology, the people of
Boltonwood, and so they could not know. But with every passing day
they did realize that Dryad Anderson's fiercely wistful little face
was growing more and more like that of the little statue in the
grounds behind the church--the stone face of John Anderson's frail
bride of a year--long since turned a dull, nondescript gray by the sun
and weather.
She had the same trick of smiling with her eyes when there was no
mirth lurking in the corners of her full lips, the same full-throated
little laugh that carried the faintest hint of mockery in its thrill.
Year by year her slim body lost its unformed boyishness in a new soft
roundness which her long outgrown skirt and too scant little waist
failed completely to conceal. And the hillsfolk were given to shaking
their heads over her now, just as the generation before had done, for
to cap it all--the last straw upon the back of their toleration--Dryad
Anderson had "took up" with Denny Bolton, Young Denny, the last of his
name. Nothing more was needed to damn her forever in the eyes of the
hills people, although they could not have explained just why, even if
they had tried.
And Young Denny, waiting there in the thickening dusk before his own
dark place, smiled gravely back at that single blinking light in the
window of the cottage squatting under the hill--he smiled with
whimsical gentleness, a man's smile that softened somehow the hard
lines of jaw and lip. It was more than three years now since the first
night when he had stood and watched for it to flash out across the
valley before he had turned and gone to set a lamp in the dark front
windows behind him in answer to it.
He could never remember just how they had agreed upon that signal--there
had never been any mutual agreement--but every Saturday night since
that first one, three years back, he had come in from his week's work,
ploughing or planting or teaming back in the timber and waited for
it to call to him, just at dusk, across the valley.
His hand went tentatively to his chin, absently caressing his lean
cheeks as he remembered that day. Late in the afternoon he had found a
rabbit caught fast in a snare which he had set deep in the thicket,
and the little animal had squealed in terror, just as rabbits always
squeal, when he leaned and took it from the trap. And when he had
straightened to his feet with it clutched fast in his arms, to look
for a club with which to end its struggles quickly, his eyes had
lifted to encounter the stormy eyes of the girl who had flashed up
before him as silently as a shadow from the empty air.
Her two small brown fists were tight clenched against her breast; she
was breathing in short irregular gasps as if she had been running
hard.
At first Denny Bolton had been too amazed to do more than stare
blankly into her blazing eyes; then before that burning glare his face
began to redden consciously and his gaze dropped, wavering from her
face to the little blouse so long outgrown that it strained far open
across the girl's round throat, doubly white by contrast below the
brown line where the clear tan ended.
His glance went down from the fierce little face to the tight skirt,
shiny from long wear and so short that the hem hung high above her
slim ankles; and from there down to the cracked, broken shoes,
string-laced and sized too large for her fine drawn feet. They were
old and patched--the stockings--so thickly darned that there was
little of the original fabric left, but for all the patches there were
still wide gashes in them, fresh torn by the thorns, through which the
flesh beneath showed very white.
Her face colored, too, as Young Denny's uncomfortable scrutiny passed
over her. It flamed painfully from throat to hair and then went very
white. She tried vainly with one hand to close the gap at her throat,
while the other struggled to settle the dingy old skirt a little lower
on her childish hips. But her hot eyes clung unwaveringly to the boy's
face. Suddenly she lifted one hand and pointed a quivering finger at
the furry mass palpitating in his arms.
"What are you going to do with it?" she demanded.
Young Denny started at the question. The uncompromising directness of
the words startled him even more than had her first swift, silent
coming. Involuntarily, spasmodically his arms closed until the rabbit
squealed again in an ecstasy of terror.
"Why, I--I reckon to eat him!" he blurted at last, and then his face
grew hotter than ever at the baldness of the answer.
It was hard to follow the change that flashed over her face as she
became conscious of his blundering, clumsy embarrassment. It came too
quickly for that, but the angry light faded from her eyes and her
lips began to curve in the faintest of quizzical smiles. She even
forgot the too short skirt and gaping blouse to raise both hands
toward him in coaxing coquetry.
"Please let him go," she wheedled softly. "Please let him go--for
me!"
Young Denny backed away a step from her upturned face and outstretched
hands, grinning a little as he slowly shook his head. It bewildered
him--puzzled him--this swift change to supplication.
"Can't," he refused laconically. "I--I got to have him to eat."
His voice was calmly final and for no other reason than to learn what
she would do next, because already the boy knew that the soft creature
throbbing against him was to have its freedom again. No one, at least
since he could remember, had ever before smiled and asked Denny Bolton
to "do it--for me." For one flashing instant he saw her eyes flare at
his candid refusal; then they cleared again with that same miraculous
swiftness. Once more the corners of her lips lifted pleadingly, arched
with guileful, provocative sweetness.
"Please," she begged, even more softly, "please--because I ask you
to!"
Once more Young Denny shook his head.
Standing there before his dark house, still smiling vaguely at the
light across the valley his fingers tentatively caressed his lean
cheeks where her fingernails had bit deep through the skin that day.
He never remembered how it had happened--it all came too swiftly for
recollection--but even before he had finished shaking his head the
tempting smile had been wiped from her lips, her little face working
convulsively with rage, before she sprang at him--sprang with lithe,
lightning, tigerlike ferocity that sent him staggering back before
her.
Her hands found his face and tore deep through the skin before he
could lift his wide-flung arms to protect it. And then, almost before
he realized what had happened, she stood back, groping blindly away
from him until her hands found a birch sapling. She clung to it with a
desperately tight clasp as if to hold herself erect. A little spot of
red flecked her own lip where her locked teeth had cut through. She
swayed a moment, dizzily, the too-tight little waist gaping at her
throat as she struggled for breath.
"There--there!" she gasped at him voicelessly. "There," she whispered
through her white lips, "now will you let him go?"
And Denny Bolton had stood that afternoon in wondering silence, gazing
back into her twitching, distorted face without a word while the blood
oozed from the deep cuts in his cheeks and dripped noisily upon the
dry leaves. Once he turned and followed with his eyes the mad flight
of the rabbit through the underbrush; and then turned slowly back to
her.
"Why, he's gone already," he stated with a gentle gravity that was
almost ponderous. And with a deliberation which he meant more to
comfort than to conciliate: "I--I aimed to let him go, myself, right
from the first time you asked me--after a while!"
She cried over him that afternoon--cried not as he had known other
girls to cry, but with long noiseless gasps that shook her thin
shoulders terribly. Her eyes swam with great drops that hung from her
lashes and went rolling silently down her small face while she washed
out the cuts with one sleeve ruthlessly wrenched from her blouse and
soaked in the brook nearby.
But in almost the same breath while she crooned pityingly over him she
bade him--commanded him with a swift, fierce passionate vehemence--to
tell her that it did not hurt--did not hurt very much! And before she
would let him go that day she made him promise to come back--she
promised herself to set a light in the front window of the shabby
little cottage to tell him that she had found the plaster--that there
was enough left to close the cuts.
There had never been any spoken agreement between them, but since that
night, three years ago, Denny Bolton had learned to watch each week
end, just at dusk, for the signal to appear. From the first their very
loneliness had drawn them together--a childish, starved desire for
companionship; and as time passed they only clung the closer, each to
the other, as jealously fearful as a marooned man and woman might have
been of any harm which might come to the one and leave the other
utterly, desolately alone.
Winter and summer Denny Bolton went every Saturday night, close to
nightfall, and waited for her to come, except that now, in the last
few weeks since the first rumor of the Judge's big barn-raising and
masquerade had gone forth, no matter how early he started or how much
haste he made, he always found Dryad Anderson there before him. For
weeks no other topic had passed the girl's lips, and with each
recurring visit to the small clearing hidden back in the thicket near
the brook the boy's wonder grew.
Almost from the first day she had decided upon the costume which she
would wear. Night after night she sat and made plans in a tumultuous,
bubbling flood of anticipation which he could scarcely follow, for it
was only after long argument that he had sheepishly surrendered and
agreed to "dress up" at all; she sat with a picture torn from an old
magazine across her knees--a color-plate of a dancing girl which she
meant to copy for herself--poring over it with shining eyes, her
breath coming and going softly between childishly curved lips as she
devoured every detail of its construction.
It was a thing of brilliantly contrasting colors--the picture which
she planned to copy--a sleeveless waist of dullest crimson and a much
bespangled skirt of clinging, shimmering black. And that skirt hung
clear to the ankles, swinging just high enough to disclose the gleam
of silken stockings and satiny, pointed slippers, with heels of
absurdly small girth.
The boy only half understood the feverish hunger which glowed in Dryad
Anderson's face, piquantly, wistfully earnest in the dull yellow
lantern light as she leaned forward, ticking off each item and its
probable cost upon her fingers, and waited doubtfully for him to mock
at the expense; and yet, at that, he understood far better than any
one else could ever have hoped to comprehend, for Young Denny knew too
what it was to wait--to wait for something that was drearily slow in
the coming.
One other thing marked Judge Maynard's proffered hospitality as
totally different from all the other half-similar affairs which
Boltonwood had ever known. There were to be invitations--written,
mailed invitations--instead of the usual placards tacked up in the
village post-office as they always were whenever any public
entertainment was imminent, or the haphazard invitations which were
passed along by word of mouth and which somehow they always forgot to
pass on to the boy who lived alone in the dark house on the hill.
There were to be formal, mailed invitations, and Young Denny found it
hard waiting that night for Old Jerry, who had never been so late
before.
The cool red of the horizon behind him faded to a dusky gray and the
dusk thickened from twilight to dark while he stood there waiting,
leaning heavily upon the pike-pole, shifting more and more uneasily
from one tired foot to the other. He had turned at last to go and set
a light in answer to the one which was calling insistently to him from
the blackness before the Judge's place when the shrill squeal of
complaining axles drifted up to him from far down the long hill road.
Old Jerry came with exasperating slowness that night. The plodding
ascent of the fat white mare and creaking buggy was nerve-rackingly
deliberate. Young Denny shifted the shaft of his pike-pole to the
other hand to wipe his damp palm against the checkered coat as the rig
loomed up ahead of him in the darkness. Old Jerry was complaining to
himself bitterly in a whining, cracked falsetto.
"'Tain't reg'lar," the boy heard him whimpering. "'Tain't accordin' to
law--not the way I figger it, it ain't. The Gov'mint don't expect
nobody to work 'til this hour!"
The buggy came to a standstill, with the little, weazened old man
leaning far out from the torn leather seat, shading his eyes with one
unsteady hand while he peered into the shadows searching for the
big-shouldered figure that stepped hesitatingly nearer the wheel.
There was something birdlike in the brilliancy of the beady little
eyes; something of sparrowlike pertness in the tilt of the old man's
head, perked far over to one side.
"Still a-waitin', be ye?" he exclaimed peevishly. "Well, it's lucky
you ain't been kept a-standin' there a whole sight longer--half the
night, mebby! You would a-been, only for my havin' an orig'nal system
for peddlin' them letters that's all my own. It's system does it--but
it ain't right, just the same. The Gov'mint don't expect nobody to
work more'n eight hours to a stretch, and look at me, two hours late
and I ain't home yet! I'd complain, too--I'd complain to the
authorities at Washington, only--only"--his thin, high-pitched voice
dropped suddenly to a furtively conciliating whisper--"only a-course I
don't want to make no trouble for the Judge."
Denny Bolton cleared his throat and shuffled his feet uneasily, but
this hint for haste was utterly wasted upon Old Jerry. The latter
failed completely to note the strained intensity of the face that was
upturned before him and went on grumbling as he leaned over to fumble
in the box beneath the seat. And the tirade continued in an unbroken,
half-muffled stream until he straightened laboriously again, the boy's
usual weekly packet of papers and catalogues in one hand.
"No," he emphasized deliberately, "I wouldn't really go so fur's
that--I ain't figgerin' on makin' no complaint--not this time. I got
too much regard for the Judge to try to get him into any hot water.
But there wa'n't no real use nor reason in his postin' all them
invitations to once. He could a-begun back a stretch and kinda run 'em
in easy, a little to a time, instead of lumpin' 'em this way, and that
would a-give me----"
Young Denny reached out and took the bundle from the extended,
unsteady old hand. His own hands were shaking a little as he broke the
string and fluttered swiftly through the half dozen papers and
pamphlets. Old Jerry never skipped a breath at the interruption.
"But that finishes up the day--that's about the last of it." The
thin voice became heavily tinged with pride. "There ain't nobody in
the township but what's got his card to that barn-raising by
now--delivered right on the nail! That's my system." And then,
judiciously: "I guess it's a-goin' to be a real fancy affair, too,
at that. Must be it'll cost him more'n a little mite before he gits
done feedin' 'em. They was a powerful lot of them invitations."
Slowly Denny Bolton's head lifted. He stood and stared into Old
Jerry's peaked, wrinkled face as if he had only half heard the
rambling complaint, a strange, bewildered light growing in his eyes.
Then his gaze dropped once more, and a second time, far more slowly,
his fingers went through the packet of advertisements. Old Jerry was
leaning over to unwind the reins from the whipstock when the boy's
hand reached out and stopped him.
"Ain't there--wasn't there anything more for me--tonight?" Young Denny
inquired gravely.
Jerry paused impatiently. No other question ever caused him quite such
keen irritation, for he felt that it was a slur at his reliability.
"More!" he petulantly echoed the question. "More? Why, you got your
paper, ain't you? Was you expectin' sunthin' else? Wasn't looking for
a letter, now was you?"
Denny backed slowly away from the wheel. Dumbly he stood and licked
his lips. He cleared his throat again and swallowed hard before he
answered.
"No," he faltered at last, with the same level gravity. "No, I wasn't
exactly expectin' a letter. But I kind of thought--I--I was just
hopin'----"
His grave voice trailed heavily off into silence. Eyes still numbly
bewildered he turned, leaning forward a little, to gaze out across the
valley at the great square silhouette of Judge Maynard's house on the
opposite ridge, while Old Jerry wheeled the protesting buggy and
started deliberately down the hill. Just once more the latter paused;
he drew the fat gray mare to a standstill and leaned a last time far
out from the seat.
"A-course I didn't mean nothin' when I spoke about complainin' against
the Judge," he called back. "You know that, don't you, Denny? You know
I was just jokin', don't you?" A vaguely worried, appealing strain
crept into the cracked accents. "An' a-course you wouldn't say nothin'
about my speakin' like that. I think a whole heap too much of the
Judge to even try to git him into trouble--and--and then the Judge--he
might--you understand that I was only jokin', don't you, Denny?"
Young Denny nodded his head silently in reply. Long after the shrill
falsetto grumbling had ceased to drift back up the hill to him he
stood there motionless. After a while the fingers that still clutched
the bundle of circulars opened loosely and when he did finally wheel
to cross slowly to the kitchen door the papers and catalogues lay
unheeded, scattered on the ground where they had fallen.
He stopped once at the threshold to prop his pike-pole against the
house corner before he passed aimlessly inside, leaving the door wide
open behind him. And he stood a long time in the middle of the dark
room, staring dully at the cold, fireless stove. Never before had he
given it more than a passing thought--he had accepted it silently as
he accepted all other conditions over which he had no control--but
now as he stood and stared, it came over him, bit by bit, that he was
tired--so utterly weary that the task of cooking his own supper that
night had suddenly become a task greater than he could even attempt.
The very thought of the half-cooked food sickened him--nauseated him.
Motionless there in the dark he dragged one big hand across his dry
lips and slowly shook his head.
"They didn't want me," he muttered hoarsely. "It wasn't because they
forgot me before; they didn't want me--not even for the strength of my
shoulders."
With heavy, shuffling steps he crossed and dropped loosely into a
chair beside the bare board table that stood in front of one dingy
window. A long time he sat silent, his lean chin propped in his rough
palms, eyes burning straight ahead of him into vacancy. Then, little
by little, his great shoulders in the vividly checkered coat began to
sag--they slumped downward-until his head was bowed and his face lay
hidden in the long arms crooked limply asprawl across the table-top.
Once more he spoke aloud, hours later.
"They didn't want me," he repeated dully. "Not even for the work I
could do!"
CHAPTER III
It was very quiet in the front room of the little cottage that
squatted in the black shadow below Judge Maynard's huge house on the
hill. No sound broke the heavy silence save the staccato clip-clip
of the long shears in the fingers of the girl who was leaning almost
breathlessly over the work spread out on the table beneath the
feeble glow of the single oil-lamp, unless the faint, monotonous
murmur which came in an endless sing-song from the lips of the
stooped, white-haired old figure in the small back room beyond the
door could be named anything so definite.
John Anderson's lips always moved when he worked. His fingers,
strong and clean-jointed and almost womanishly smooth--the only part
of the man not pitifully seared with age--flew with a bewildering
nimbleness one moment, only to dwell the next with a lingering
caress upon the shaping features before him; and for each caress of
his finger tips there was an accompanying, vacantly gentle smile or
an uncertainly emphatic nod of the silvered head which gave the
one-sided conversation a touch of uncanny reality.
And yet, at regularly recurring intervals, even his busy fingers
faltered, while he sat head bent far over to one side as though he
were listening for something, waiting for some reply. At every such
pause the vacant smile left his face and failed to return immediately.
The monotonously inflectionless conversation was still, too, for the
time, and he merely sat and stared perplexedly about him, around the
small workshop, bare except for the single high-stool that held him
and the littered bench on which he leaned.
There was a foot-wide shelf against each wall of that room, fastened
waist high from the floor, and upon it stood countless small white
statues, all slim and frail of limb, all upturned and smiling of lip.
They were miraculously alike, these delicate white figures, each with
a throat-tightening heartache in its wistful face--so alike in form
and expression that they might have been cast in a single mold.
Wherever his eyes might fall, whenever he turned in one of those
endlessly repeated fits of faltering uncertainty, that tiny face was
always before him, uplifted of lip, smiling back into John Anderson's
vacant eyes until his own lips began to curve again and he turned once
more, nodding his head and murmuring contentedly, to the clay upon his
bench.
Out in the larger front room, as she hovered over the work spread out
before her, the girl, too, was talking aloud to herself, not in the
toneless, rambling voice that came from John Anderson's mumbling
lips, but in hushed, rapt, broken sentences which were softly tinged
with incredulous wonder.
The yellow glow of the single lamp, pushed far across the table from
her, where the most of its radiance was swallowed up by the gloom of
the uncurtained window, flickered unsteadily across her shining,
tumbled hair, coloring the faintly blue, thinly penciled lines beneath
her tip-tilted eyes with a hint of weariness totally at variance with
the firm little sloping shoulders and full lips, pursed in a childish
pout over a mouthful of pins.
The hours had passed swiftly that day for Dryad Anderson; and the last
one of all--the one since she had lighted the single small lamp in the
room and set it in the window, so far across the table from her that
she had to strain more and more closely over her swift flashing
scissors in the thickening dusk--had flown on winged feet, even faster
than she knew.
Twice, early in the evening she had laid the long shears aside and
risen from the matter that engrossed her almost to the exclusion of
every other thought, to peer intently out of the window across the
valley at the bleak old farmhouse on the crest of the opposite ridge;
and each time as she settled herself once more in the chair, hunched
boyishly over the table edge, she only nodded her bright head in
utter, undisturbed unconsciousness of the passage of time.
"He's late getting home tonight," she told herself aloud, after she
had searched the outer darkness in vain for any answering signal, but
there was not even the faintest trace of troubled worry in her words.
She merely smiled with mock severity.
"He's later than he ought to be--even if it is his last week back in
the hills. Next week I'll have to make him wait----"
Her vaguely murmured threat drifted away into nothingness, left
unfinished as she rose and stood, hands lightly bracketed upon her
hips, scrutinizing the completed work.
"There," she went on softly, sighing in deep relief, "there--that's
done--if--if it will only fit."
She removed the cluster of pins from her mouth and unfastened the long
strip of newspaper from the section of the old black skirt which she
had ripped apart that afternoon for a pattern. It was far too
short--that old skirt--to duplicate the long free lines of the
brilliant red and black costume of the dancer beside her elbow on the
table, but Dryad Anderson's shears, coasting rapidly around the edge
of the worn cloth, had left a wide margin of safety at the hem.
The critical frown upon her forehead smoothed little by little while
she lifted cautiously that long strip of paper pattern and turned with
it dangling from one hip to walk up and down before the tilted mirror
at the far end of the room, viewing her reflected image from every
possible angle. Even the thoughtful pucker at the corners of her eyes
disappeared and she nodded her small head with its loosened mass of
hair in judicious satisfaction.
"I do believe that's it," the hushed voice mused on, "or, if it isn't,
it is as near as I can ever hope to get it. If--if only it doesn't sag
at the heels--and if it does I'll have to----"
Again with a last approving glance flung over one shoulder the
murmured comment, whatever it might have been, was finished
wordlessly. Her fingers, in spite of their very smallness as strong
and straight and clean-jointed as those of the old man bent double
over his bench in the back room, lingered absently over the folding of
that last paper pattern, and when she finally added it to the top of
the stack already folded and piled beside the lamp her eyes had become
velvety blank with preoccupation.
From early afternoon, ever since the Judge himself had whirled up to
the sagging gate at the end of their rotting boardwalk and clambered
out of his yellow-wheeled buckboard to knock with measured solemnity
at the front door, Dryad had been rushing madly from task to task and
pausing always in just such fashion in the midst of each to stand
dreamily immobile, everything else forgotten for the moment in an
effort to visualize it--to understand that it was real, after all, and
not just a cobweb fabric of her own fancy, like the dreams she was
always weaving to make the long week days pass more quickly.
It was more than a few years since the last time Judge Maynard had
driven up to the gate of that old, drab cottage; and now standing
there with one slim outstretched hand lovingly patting the bundle of
paper patterns which represented her afternoon's work, she smiled with
gentle derision for the mental picture she had carried all those years
of the wealthiest man in Boltonwood.
The paternal, almost bewildering familiar cordiality with which he had
greeted her and the pompously jovial urgency of the invitation which
he had come to deliver in person, urging acceptance upon her because
she "saw entirely too little of the young folks of the town," was
hardly in accord with the childish recollection she had carried with
her, year after year, of a purple faced, cursing figure who leaned
over the rickety old fence that bounded the garden, shook his fists in
John Anderson's mildly puzzled face and roared threats until he had to
cease from very breathlessness.
A far different Judge had bowed low before her that afternoon when she
answered the measured summons at the door--a sleek, twinkling,
unctuously solicitous, far more portly Judge Maynard--and Dryad
Anderson, who could not know that he had finally come to agree with
the rest of the village that he might "catch more flies with molasses
than with vinegar," and was ordering his campaign accordingly, flushed
in painful memory for the half-clad, half-starved little creature that
had clung to John Anderson's rusty coat-tails that other day and
glared black, bitter hate back at the man beyond the fence.
Leaning against the table there in the half light of the room, a slow
smile curled back the corners of her lips, still childishly quizzical
in contrast with that slim roundness of body which was losing its
boyish litheness in a new slender fullness that throbbed on the
threshold of womanhood. She smiled deprecatingly as she lifted one
hand to search in the breast of the blouse that was always just enough
outgrown to fail of closing across her throat, and drew out the thing
which the Judge had delivered with every possible flourish, barely a
few hours back.
Already the envelope was creased and worn with much handling, but the
square card within, thickly, creamily white, was still unspotted. As
if it were a perishably precious thing her fingers drew it with
infinite care from its covering, and she leaned far across the table
to prop it up before her where the light fell brightest. Pointed chin
cupped in her palms, she lay devouring with hungry eyes the words upon
its polished surface.
"---- requests the pleasure of," she picked up the lines which she
already knew by rote; and then, "Miss Dryad Anderson's company," in
the heavy sprawling scrawl which she knew must have come from the
Judge's own pen.
Suddenly her two hands flashed out and swept the card up to crush it
against her with passionate impetuosity.
"Oh, you wonderful thing!" she crooned over it, a low laugh that was
half a sob bubbling in her throat. "You wonderful thing! And to think
that I've had you all the afternoon--almost all day--and he's had to
wait all this time for his to come. He's had to wait for Jerry to
bring his with the mail--and Jerry is so dreadfully slow at times."
Lingeringly, as though she hated to hide it, her fingers thrust the
card back inside its envelope. And she was tucking it away in its warm
hiding place within the scant fullness of the white blouse when the
clock on the wall behind her began to beat out the hour with a noisy
whir of loosened cogs.
"Hours and hours," she murmured, counting the strokes subconsciously.
And then as the growing total of those gong strokes beat in upon her
brain, all the dreamy preoccupation faded from her face. The little
compassionate smile which had accompanied the last words disappeared
before the swift, taut change that straightened her lips. She whirled,
peering from startled eyes up at the dim old dial, refusing to
believe her own count; and as she stood, body tensely poised, gazing
incredulously at the hands, she realized for the first time how fast
the hours had flown while she bent, forgetful of all else, over her
paper patterns.
The table rocked dangerously as she crowded her body between it and
the windowsill and, back to the light, stood staring with her face
cupped in her hands out into the blackness. Far across the valley the
dilapidated farmhouse on the ridge showed only a blurred blot against
the skyline.
Minutes the girl stood and watched. The minutes lengthened interminably
while the light for which she waited failed to show through the
dark, until a dead white, living fear began to creep across her face--a
fear that wiped the last trace of childishness from her tightened
features.
"He's late," she whispered hoarsely. "It's the last week, and it's
just kept him later than usual!"
But there was no assurance in the words that faltered from her lips.
They were lifelessly dull, as though she were trying to convince
herself of a thing she already knew she could not believe.
As long as she could she stood there at the window, doggedly fighting
the rising terror that was bleaching her face; fighting the dread
which was never quite asleep within her brain--the dread of that old
stone demijohn standing in the corner of the kitchen, which for all
her broken pleading Young Denny Bolton had refused with a strange,
unexplained stubbornness to remove--until that rising terror drove her
away from the pane.
One wide-flung arm swept the stack of neatly folded patterns in a
rustling storm to the floor as she pushed her way out from the
narrow space between table edge and sill. The girl did not heed
them or the lamp, that rocked drunkenly with the tottering table.
She had forgotten everything--the thick white square of cardboard,
even the stooped old man in the small back room--in the face of the
overwhelming fear that reason could not fight down. Only the
peculiarly absolute silence that came with the sudden cessation of his
droning monotone checked the panic haste of her first rush. With one
hand clutching the knob of the outer door she turned back.
John Anderson was sitting twisted about on his high stool, gazing
after her in infantile, perplexed reproach, his long fingers clasped
loosely about the almost finished figure over which he had been
toiling. As the girl turned back toward him his eyes wandered down to
it and he began to shake his head slowly, vacantly, hopelessly. A low
moaning whimper stirred her lips; then the hand tight-clenched over
the knob slackened. She ran swiftly across to him.
"What is it, dear?" Her voice broke, husky with fright and pity.
"Tell me--what is the matter? Won't it come right tonight?"
With shaking hands she leaned over him, smoothing the shining hair. At
the touch of her fingers he looked up, staring with pleading
uncertainty into her quivering face before he shook his head.
"It--it don't smile," he complained querulously. His fingers groped
lightly over the small face of clay. "I--I can't make it smile--like
the rest."
Sudden terror contorted the thin features, a sheer ecstacy of terror
as white-lipped as that which marred the face of the girl who bent
above him.
"Maybe I've forgotten how she smiled!" he whispered fearfully. "Maybe
I'll never be able to----"
Dryad's eyes flitted desperately around the room, along the shelves
laden with those countless figures--all white and finely slender, all
upturned of face. Again a little impotent gasp choked her; then, eyes
filling hotly at that poignantly wistful smile which edged the lips of
each, she stooped and patted reassuringly the trembling hands before
she stepped a pace away from him.
"You've not forgotten, dear. Why, you mustn't be frightened like that!
We know, you and I, don't we, that you never could forget? You're just
tired. Now, that's better--that's brave! And now--look! Isn't this the
way--isn't this the way it ought to be?"
Face uptilted, bloodless lips falling apart in the faintest of pallid
smiles, she swayed forward, both arms outstretched toward him. And as
she stood the wide eyes and straight nose and delicately pointed chin
of her colorless face took line for line the lines of all those,
chalky white, against the wall.
For a moment John Anderson's eyes clung to her--clung vacant with
hopeless doubt; then they glowed again with dawning recollection. He,
too, was smiling once more as his fingers fluttered in nervous haste
above the lips of the clay face on the bench before him, and almost
before the girl had stepped back beside him he had forgotten that she
was there.
"Marie!" she heard him murmur. "Marie, why, you mustn't be afraid!
We'll never forget--you and I--we never could forget!"
Even while she waited another instant those plastic earthen lips began
to curl--they began to curve with hungry longing like all the rest. He
was talking steadily now, mumbling broken fragments of sentences which
it was hard to understand. Her hand hovered a moment longer over his
bowed head; once at the door she paused and looked back at him.
"It's only for a little while," she promised unsteadily. "I--I have to
go--but it's only for a little while. I'll be back soon--so soon! And
you'll be safe until I come!"
He gave no sign that he had heard, not even so much as a lifted
glance. But as she drew the door shut behind her she heard him pick
up the words, caressingly, after her.
"You'll be safe, Marie," he whispered. "It'll be only for a little
while, now. You'll be safe till I come." An ineffably peaceful smile
flickered across his face. "We couldn't forget--why, of course, we
couldn't forget--you and I!"
With the short black skirt lifted even higher above her ankles that
she might make still more speed, Dryad turned into the dark path that
twisted crookedly through the brush to the open clearing beside the
brook and from there on to the black house on the hill.
She ran swiftly, madly, through the darkness, with the wild,
panic-stricken, headlong abandon of a hunted thing, finding the narrow
trail ahead of her by instinct alone. Only once she overran it, but
that once a low hanging branch, face high, caught her full across the
forehead and sent her crashing back in the underbrush. Just once she
put one narrow foot in its loosely flapping shoe into the deep crevice
between two rocks and gasped aloud with the pain of the fall that
racked her knees. When she groped out and steadied herself erect she
was talking--stammering half incoherent words that came bursting
jerkily from her lips as she tore on.
"Help me ... in time ... God," she panted, "Just this once ... get to
him ... in time. Lord, forgive ... own vanity. Oh, God, please in
time!"
Small feet drumming the harder ground, she flashed up the last rise
and across the yard to the door of that unlighted kitchen. Her hands
felt for the latch and failed to find it; then she realized that it
was already open--the door--but her knees, all the strength suddenly
drained from them at the black quiet in that room, refused to carry
her over the threshold. She rocked forward, reaching out with one hand
for the frame to steady herself, and in that same instant the man who
lay a huddled motionless heap across the table top, moved a little and
began to speak aloud.
"They didn't want me," he muttered, and the words came with muffled
thickness. "Not even for the strength of my shoulders."
She took one faltering step forward--the girl who stood there swaying
in the doorway--and stopped again. And the man lifted his head and
laughed softly, a short, ugly rasping laugh.
"Not even for the work I could do," he finished.
And then she understood. She tried to call out to him, and the words
caught in her throat and choked her. She tried again and this time her
voice rang clear through the room.
"Denny," she cried, "Denny, I've come to you! Strike a light! I'm
here, Denny, and--oh, I'm afraid--afraid of the dark!"
Before he could rise, almost before his big-shouldered body whirled in
the chair toward her, her swift rush carried her across to him. She
knelt at his knees, her thin arms clutching him with desperate
strength. Denny Bolton felt her body shudder violently as he leaned
over, dumb with bewilderment, and put his hands on her bowed head.
"Thank God," he heard her whispering, "thank God--thank God!"
But far more swiftly than his half numbed brain could follow she was
on her feet the next instant, tense and straight and lancelike in the
gloom.
"Damn 'em," she hissed. "Damn 'em--damn 'em--damn 'em!"
His fingers felt for and found a match and struck it. Her face was
working convulsively, twisted with hate, both small fists lifted
toward the huge house that crowned the opposite hill. It made him
remember that first day when he had looked up, with the rabbit
struggling in his arms, and found her standing there in the thicket
before him, only now the fury that blazed in her eyes was not for him.
There was a rough red welt across her forehead only half hidden by the
tumbled hair that cascaded to her waist, torn loose from its scant
fastenings by the whipping brush. And as he stood with the flame of
the flickering match scorching his fingers, Denny Bolton remembered
all the rest--he remembered the light that still burned unanswered in
the window across the valley. He bowed his head.
[Illustration: "HOLD ME TIGHT--OH! HOLD ME TIGHTER! FOR THEY FORGOT ME,
TOO, DENNY; THEY FORGOT ME TOO!"]
"I--I forgot," he faltered at last. "I did not know it was so late. I
must have been--pretty tired."
Slowly the girl's clenched hands came away from her throat while she
stared up into his face, brown and lean and very hard and bitter. The
ashen terror upon her own cheeks disappeared with a greater, growing
comprehension of all that lay behind that dully colorless statement.
For just a moment her fingers hovered over the opening at the neck of
her too small blouse and felt the thick white card that lay hidden
within, before she lifted both arms to him in impulsive compassion,
trying to smile in spite of the wearily childish droop at the corners
of her lips.
"I know, Denny," she quavered. "I--I understand." Her arms slipped up
around his neck. "Hold me tight--oh, hold me tighter! For they forgot
me, too, Denny; they forgot me, too!"
As his arms closed about her slim body she buried her bright head
against the vividly checkered coat and sobbed silently--great
noiseless gasps that shook her small shoulders terribly. Once, after a
long time, when she held his face away to peer up at him through
brimming eyes, she saw that all the numb bitterness was gone from
it--that he had forgotten all else save her own hurt.
"Why, you mustn't feel so badly for me," she told him then, warmly
tremulous of mouth. "I--I don't mind now, very much. Only"--her voice
broke unsteadily--"only I did want to go just once where all the
others go; I wanted them to see me just once in a skirt that's long
enough for me--and--and to wear stockings without any patches, and
silk, Denny, silk--next to my skin!"
CHAPTER IV
At her first swift coming when she had cried out to him there in the
dark and run across to kneel at his knees, a dull, shamed flush had
stained his lean cheeks with the realization that, in his own great
bitterness he had failed even to wonder whether she had been
forgotten, too.
Now as his big hand hovered over the tumbled brightness of her hair,
loose upon his sleeve, that hot shame in turn disappeared. After the
quivering gasps were all but stilled, he twice opened his lips as if
to speak, and each time closed them again without a word. He was
smiling a faint, gravely gentle smile that barely lifted the corners
of his lips when she turned in his arms and lifted her face once more
to him.
"We don't mind very much," she repeated in a half whisper. "Do
we--either of us--now?"
Slowly he shook his head. With effortless ease he stooped and swung
her up on one arm, seating her upon the bare table before the window.
Another match flared between his fingers and the whole room sprang
into brightness as he touched the point of flame to the wick of the
lamp bracketed to the wall beside him.
She sat, leaning forward a little, both elbows resting upon her slim
knees, both feet swinging pendulum-like high above the floor, watching
with a small frown of curiosity growing upon her forehead, while he
stooped without a word of explanation and dragged a bulky package from
the table and placed it beside her. Then she sighed aloud, an audible
sigh of sheer surprise after he had broken the string and drawn aside
the paper wrapper.
Just as they had seemed in the picture they lay there under her amazed
eyes--the pointed, satiny black slippers of the dancing girl, with
their absurdly slender heels and brilliant buckles, and filmy
stockings to match. And underneath lay two folded squares of
shimmering stuff, dull black and burnished scarlet, scarce thicker
than the silk of the stockings themselves.
The faint, vaguely self-conscious smile went from Denny Bolton's lips
while he stood and watched her bend and touch each article, one by
one--the barest ghost of contact. Damp eyes glowing, lips curled half
open, she lifted her head at last and gazed at him, as he stood with
hands balanced on his hips before her.
A moment she sat immobile, her breath coming and going in soft,
fluttering gasps, and looked into his sober, questioning face; then
she turned again and picked up one web-like stocking and held it
against her cheek, as hotly tinted now beneath its smooth whiteness as
the shining scarlet cloth beside her.
He heard her murmur to herself little, broken, incoherent phrases that
he could not catch.
"Denny," he heard her whisper, "Denny--Denny!"
And then, with the tiny slippers huddled in her lap, her hands flashed
out and caught his face and drew it down against the too-small white
blouse, open at the throat.
"Man--man," she said, and he felt her breast rise and fall, rise and
fall, against his cheek. "Man, you didn't understand! It--it wasn't
the clothes, Denny, but--but I'm all the gladder, I think, because
you're so much of a man that you couldn't, not even if I tried a
hundred years to explain."
He drew the chair at the side of the table around in front of her and
dropped into it. With a care akin to reverence he lifted one slipper
and held it outstretched at arm's length upon his broad palm.
"I--I hadn't exactly forgotten, tonight," he told her. "I'd watched
for the light, and I meant to bring them--when I came." His steady
eyes dropped to her slim, swinging feet. "They're the smallest they
had in any shop at the county-seat," he went on, and the slow smile
came creeping back across his face. "I crossed over through the timber
late last night, after we had broken camp, and I--I had to guess the
size. Shall we--try them on?"
She reached out and snatched the small thing of satin and leather away
from him with mock jealous impetuosity, a little reckless gurgle of
utter delight breaking from her lips.
"Over these," she demanded, lifting one foot and pointing at the
thickly patched old stocking above the dingy, string-tied shoe.
"You--you are trying to shame me, Denny--you want to make me confess
they are too small!"
Then, almost in the same breath, all the facetious accusation left her
face. Even the warm glow of wonder which had lighted her wet eyes gave
way to a new seriousness.
"No one has ever told me," she stated slowly, "but I know it is so,
just the same. Somehow, because it was to be the first party I had
ever attended--or--or had a chance to attend, I thought it must be all
right, just once, for you to buy me these. There was no one else to
buy them, Denny, and maybe I wanted to go so very much I made myself
believe that it was all right. But there isn't any party now--for us.
And--and men don't buy clothes for women, Denny--not until they're
married!"
Her face was tensely earnest while she waited for the big man before
her to answer. And Young Denny turned his head, staring silently out
of the opposite window down toward the village, dark now, in the
valley below. He cleared his throat uncertainly.
"Do they?" She was leaning forward until her hair brushed his own. "Do
they, Denny?" A rising inflection left the words hanging in midair.
"I don't know just what the difference is," he began finally, his
voice very deliberate. "I've often tried to figure it out, and never
been quite able to get it straight"--he nodded his head again toward
the sleeping village--"but we--we've never been like the rest, anyhow.
And--and anyway," he reached out one hand and laid it upon her knees,
"we're to be married, too--when--when----"
With swift, caressing haste she lifted the slippers that lay cradled
in her lap and set them back inside the open package. Lightly she
swung herself down and stood before him, both hands balanced upon his
shoulders. For just the fraction of a moment her eyes lifted over his
head, flickering toward the stone demijohn that stood in the far,
shadowy corner near the door. Her voice was trembling a little when
she went on.
"Then let me come soon, Denny," she begged. "Can't it be soon? Oh, I'm
going to keep them!" One hand searched behind her to fall lightly upon
the package upon the table. "They're--they're so beautiful that I
don't believe I could ever give them back. But do we have to wait any
longer--do we? I can take care of him, too."
Vehemently she tilted her head toward the little drab cottage across
under the opposite hill.
"He hardly ever notices when I come or go. I--I want to come, Denny.
I'm lonesome, and--and--" her eyes darkened and swam with fear as she
stared beyond him into the dusky corner near the door, "why can't I
come now, before some time--when it might be--too late?"
He reached up and took her hands from his shoulders and held them in
front of him, absently contemplating their rounded smoothness. She
bent closer, trying to read his eyes, and found them inscrutable. Then
his fingers tightened.
"And be like them?" he demanded, and the words leaped out so abruptly
that they were almost harsh. "And be like all the rest," he
reiterated, jerking his head backward, "old and thin, and bent and
worn-out at thirty?" A hard, self-scathing note crept into the words.
"Why, it--it took me almost a month--even to buy these!"
He in turn reached out and laid a hand upon the bundle behind her. But
she only laughed straight back into his face--a short, unsteady laugh
of utter derision.
"Old?" she echoed. "Work! But I--I'd have you, Denny, wouldn't I?"
Again she laughed in soft disdain. "Clothes!" she scoffed. And then,
more serious even than before: "Denny, is--is that the only reason,
now?"
The gleam that always smoldered in Denny Bolton's eyes whenever he
remembered the tales they told around the Tavern stove of Old Denny's
last bad night began to kindle. His lips were thin and straight and as
colorless as his suddenly weary face as he stood and looked back at
her. She lifted her hands and put them back upon his shoulders.
"I'm not afraid--any more--to chance it," she told him, her lips
trembling in spite of all she could do to hold them steady. "I'm never
afraid, when I'm with you. It--it's only when I'm alone that it grows
to be more than I can bear, sometimes. I'm not afraid. Does it--does
it have to stay there any longer, in the corner, Denny? Aren't we sure
enough now--you and I--aren't we?"
He stopped back a pace--his big body huge above her slenderness--stepped
away from the very nearness of her. But as she lifted her arms to him
he began to shake his head--the old stubborn refusal that had
answered her a countless number of times before.
"Aren't we?" she said again, but her voice sounded very small and
bodiless and forlorn in the half dark room.
He swung one arm in a stiff gesture that embraced the entire valley.
"They're all sure, too," his voice grated hoarsely, "They're all sure,
too--just as sure as we could ever be--and there's a whole town of
them!"
She was bending silently over the table, retying the bundle, when he
crossed back to her side, a lighted lantern dangling in one hand.
"I don't know why myself," he tried to explain. "I only know I've got
to wait. And I don't even know what I'm waiting for--but I know it's
got to come!"
She would not lift her head when he slipped his free arm about her
shoulders and drew her against him. When he reached out to take the
package from her she held it away from him, but her voice, half
muffled against his checkered coat, was anything but hard.
"Let _you_ carry them?" she murmured. "Why--I wouldn't trust them to
any other hands in the world but my own. You can't even see them
again--not until I've finished them, and I wear them--for you."
With head still bowed she walked before him to the open door. But
there on the threshold she stopped and flashed up at him her
whimsically provocating smile.
"Tell me--why don't you tell me, Denny," she commanded imperiously,
"that I'm prettier than all the others--even if I haven't the pretty
clothes!"
When the ridges to the east were tinged with the red of a rising sun,
Denny Bolton was still sitting, head propped in his hands, at the
table before the window, totally oblivious to the smoking lamp beside
him, or to anything else save the square card which he had found lying
there beneath the table after he had taken her back across the valley
to John Anderson's once-white cottage. He rose and extinguished the
smoking wick as the first light of day began to creep through the
room.
"---- requests the pleasure of Miss Dryad Anderson's company," he
repeated aloud. And then, as he turned to the open door and the work
that was waiting for him, in a voice that even he himself had never
before heard pass his lips:
"And she could have gone--she could have, and she didn't--just
because----"
His grave voice drifted off into silence. As if it were a perishably
precious thing, he slipped the square card within its envelope and
buttoned the whole within his coat.
CHAPTER V
As far back as he could remember Denny could not recall a single day
when Old Jerry had swung up the long hill road that led to his
lonesome farmhouse on the ridge at a pace any faster than a crawling
walk. Nor could he recollect, either, a single instance when he had
chanced to arrive at that last stop upon the route much before dark.
And yet it was still a good two hours before sundown; only a few
minutes before he had driven his heavy steaming team in from the
fields and turned toward the ladder that mounted to the hayloft, when
the familiar shrill complaint of ungreased axles drifted up to him
from the valley.
With a foot upon the first rung Young Denny paused, scowling in mild
perplexity. He had crossed the next moment to the open double doors,
as the sound floated up to him in a steadily increasing volume, and
was standing, his big body huge in its flannel shirt, open at the
throat, and high boots laced to the knees, leaning loosely at ease
against the door frame, when the dingy rig with its curtains flapping
crazily in the wind lurched around the bend in the road and came
bouncing wildly up the rutty grade.
The boy straightened and stiffened, his head going forward a little,
for the fat old mare was pounding along at a lumbering gallop--a pace
which, in all the time he had watched for it, he had never before
beheld. Old Jerry was driving with a magnificent abandon, his hands
far outstretched over the dash, and more than that, for even from
where he stood Denny could hear him shouting at her in his thin,
cracked falsetto--shouting for still more speed.
A rare, amused smile tugged at the corners of Young Denny's lips as he
crossed the open yard to the crest of the hill. But when the groaning
buggy came to a standstill and Old Jerry flung the reins across the
mare's wide back, to dive and burrow in frantic haste under the seat
for the customary roll of advertisements, without so much as a glance
for the boy who strode slowly up to the wheel, that shadow of a smile
which had touched his face faded into concerned gravity. He hesitated
a moment, as if not quite certain of what he should do.
"Is there--there isn't any one sick, is there?" he asked at last, half
diffidently.
The little, white-haired old man in the buggy jerked erect with
startling, automatonlike swiftness at that slow question. For a moment
he stood absolutely motionless, his back toward the speaker, his head
perked far over to one side as though he refused to believe he had
heard correctly. Then, little by little, he wheeled until his
strangely brilliant, birdlike eyes were staring straight down into
Denny's upturned, anxious face. And as he stared Old Jerry's
countenance grew blankly incredulous.
"Sick!" he echoed the boy's words scornfully. "Sick!"
His grotesquely thin body seemed to swell as he straightened himself,
and his shrill squeak of a voice took on a new note of pompous
importance.
"I guess," he stated impressively, "I reckon, Denny, you ain't heard
the news, hev you?" He chuckled pityingly, half contemptuously. "I
reckon you couldn't've," he concluded with utter finality.
The old, sullenly bewildered light crept back into Young Denny's gray
eyes. He shifted his feet uneasily, shaking his head.
"I--I just got back down from the timber, three days ago," he
explained, and somehow, entirely unintentionally, as he spoke the slow
statement seemed almost an apology for his lack of information. "I
guess I haven't heard much of anything lately--up here. Is it--is it
something big?"
Old Jerry hesitated. He felt suddenly the hopeless, overwhelming
dearth of words against which he labored in the attempt to carry the
tidings worthily.
"Big!" He repeated the other's question. "Big! Why, Godfrey 'Lisha,
boy, it's the biggest thing that's ever happened to this town.
It--it's terrific! We'll be famous--that's what we'll be! In a week
or two Boltonwood'll be as famous as--as--why, we'll be as famous as
the Chicago Fair!"
He broke off with a gasp for breath and started fluttering madly
through the paper which he had wrenched from Young Denny's bundle of
closely wrapped mail, until he found the page he sought.
"There 'tis," he cried, and pointed out a lurid headline that ran half
across the head of the sporting section. "There 'tis--or leastwise
that's a part on it. But they's more a-comin'--more that that won't be
a patch to! But you just take a look at that!"
Young Denny took the paper from his hand with a sort of sober
patience, and there across the first three column heads, following the
direction of Old Jerry's quivering forefinger, he found his first
inkling of the astounding news.
"Jed The Red wins by knockout over The Texan in fourteenth round," ran
the red-inked caption.
Word by word he read it through, and a second time his grave eyes went
through it, even more painstakingly, as though he had not caught at a
single reading all its sensational significance. Then he looked up
into the seamed old face above him, a-gleam and a-quiver with
excitement.
"Jed The Red," the boy said in his steady voice. "Jed The Red!" And
then, levelly: "Who's he?"
Old Jerry stared at him a moment before he shook his head hopelessly
and collapsed with a thud upon the torn seat behind him, in an excess
of disgust for the boy's stupidity which he made no effort to
conceal.
"Jed who?" he mimicked, his voice shrill with sarcasm. "Now what in
time Jed would it be, if 'twa'n't Jeddy Conway--our own Jeddy Conway
from this very village? What other Jed is there? Ain't you got no
memory at all, when you ought to be proud to be able to say that you
went to school with him yourself, right in this town?"
Again Young Denny nodded a silent agreement, but Old Jerry's feverish
enthusiasm had carried him far beyond mere anger at his audience's
apparent lack of appreciation.
"And that ain't all," he rushed on breathlessly, "not by a lot, it
ain't! That ain't nothin' to compare with what's to come. Why, right
this minute there's a newspaper writer down to the village--he's from
New York and he's been stayin' to the Tavern ever since he come in
this morning and asked for a room with a bath--and he's goin' to
write up the town. Yes sir-e-e--the whole dad-blamed town! Pictures
of the main street and the old place where Jeddy went to school,
like as not, and--and"--he hesitated for an instant to recall the
exact phrasing--"and interviews with the older citizens who
recognized his ability and gave him a few pointers in the game when
he was only a little tad. That's what's to follow, and it's comin'
out in the New York papers, too--Sunday supplement, colors, maybe,
and--and----"
Sudden recollection checked him in the middle of the tumbled flow of
information. Leaning far out over the dash, he put all his slight
weight against the reins and turned the fat white mare back into the
road with astonishing celerity.
"Godfrey, but that makes me think," he gasped. "I ain't got no time to
fritter away here! I got to git down to the Tavern in a hurry. He'll
be waitin' to hear what I kin tell him."
The thin, wrinkled old face twisted into a hopeful, wheedling smile.
"You know that, don't you, Denny? You could tell him that there wa'n't
nobody in the hills knew little Jeddy Conway better'n I did, couldn't
you? It--it's the last chance I'll ever git, too, more'n likely.
"Twice I missed out--once when they found Mary Hubbard's husband
a-hangin' to his hay mow--a-hangin by the very new clothes-line Mary'd
just bought the day before and ain't ever been able to use since on
account of her feelin' somehow queer about it--and me laid up to home
sick all the time! Everybody else got their names mentioned in the
article, and Judge Maynard had his picture printed because it was the
Judge cut him down. 'Twa'n't fair, didn't seem to me, and me older'n
any of 'em.
"And 'twas just the same when they found Mrs. Higgins's Johnny, who
had to go and git through the ice into the crick just the one week in
all the winter when I was laid up with a bad foot from splittin'
kindling. I begun to think I wasn't ever goin' to git my chance--but
it's come. It's come at last--and I got to cut along and be there!"
Once more he leaned over the dash and slapped the old mare's back with
the slack of the lines.
"Git there, you," he urged, and the complaining buggy went lurching
down the rough road at the same unheard of pace at which it had
ascended. Halfway down the hill, after he had lifted the mare from her
shuffling fox-trot to a lumbering gallop, Old Jerry turned back for a
last shouted word.
"He'll be anxious to git all I can tell him, don't you think?" the
shrill falsetto drifted back to the boy who had not stirred in his
tracks. "No article would be complete without that, would it? And
they's to be pictures--Sunday paper--and--maybe--in colors!"
There was an odd light burning in Denny Bolton's eyes as he stood and
watched the crazy conveyance disappear from view. The half hungry,
half sullen bewilderment seemed to have given place to a new
confusion, as though all the questions which had always been baffling
him had become, all in one breath, an astounding enigma which clamored
for instant solution. Not until the shrill scream of the ungreased
axles had died out altogether and his eyes fell once more to the vivid
streak of red that ran across the top of the sheet still clutched in
his hand did Young Denny realize that Jerry had even failed to leave
him the rest of his mail--the bulky package of circulars.
He was smiling again as he turned and went slowly toward the back door
of the house, but somehow, as he went, the stoop of his big shoulders
seemed to have even more than the usual vague hint of weariness in
their heavy droop. He even forgot that the hungry team which he had
stabled just a few minutes before was still unfed, as he dropped upon
the top step and spread the paper out across his knees.
"Jed The Red wins by knockout over The Texan in fourteenth round," he
read again and again.
And then, with a slow forefinger blazing the way, he went on through
the detailed account of the latest big heavyweight match, from the
first paragraph, which stated that "Jed Conway, having disposed of The
Texan at the Arena last night, by the knockout route in the fourteenth
round, seems to loom up as the logical claimant of the white
heavyweight title," to the last one of all, which pithily advised the
public that "the winner's share of the receipts amounted to twelve
thousand dollars."
It was all couched in the choicest vocabulary of the ringside, and
more than once Young Denny, whose literature had been confined
chiefly to harvesters and sulky plows, had to stop and decipher
phrases which he only half understood at first reading. But that last
paragraph he did not fail to grasp.
It grew too dark for him to make out the small type any longer and the
boy folded the paper and laid it back across his knees. With his chin
resting upon one big palm he sat motionless, staring out beyond his
sprawling, unpainted sheds toward the dim bulk of his hilly acres,
with their jagged outcroppings of rock.
"Twelve thousand dollars!" He muttered the words aloud, under his
breath. Eight hundred in three years had seemed to him an almost
miraculous amount for him to have torn from that thin soil with
nothing but the strength of his two hands. Now, with a bitterness that
had been months in accumulating, it beat in upon his brain with
sledgelike blows that he had paid too great a price--too great a price
in aching shoulders and numbed thighs.
Methodically, mechanically, his mind went back over the days when he
had gone to school with Jed Conway--the same Jed The Red whom the
whole town was now welcoming as "our own Jeddy," and the longer he
pondered the greater the problem became.
It was hard to understand. From his point of view comprehension was
impossible, at that instant. For in those earlier days, when anybody
had ever mentioned Jed Conway at all, it had been only to describe him
as "good for nothing," or something profanely worse. Young Denny
remembered him vividly as a big, freckle-faced, bow-legged boy with
red bristly hair--the biggest boy in the school--who never played but
what he cheated, and always seemed able to lie himself out of his
thievery.
But most vividly of all, he recalled that day when Jed Conway had
disappeared from the village between sundown and dawn and failed to
return. That was the same day they discovered the shortage in the old
wooden till at Benson's corner store. And now Jed Conway had come
home, or at least his fame had found its way back, and even Old Jerry,
whipping madly toward the village to share in his reflected glory,
had, for all the perfection of his "system," failed to leave the very
bundle of mail which he had come to deliver.
For a long time Young Denny sat and tried to straighten it out in his
brain--and failed entirely. It had grown very dark--too dark for him
to make out the words upon it--when he reached into the pocket of his
gray flannel shirt and drew out the card which he had found lying upon
the kitchen floor that previous Saturday night, after he had lighted
Dryad Anderson on her way home through the thickets. But he did not
need, or even attempt, to read it.
"And it took me a month," he said aloud to the empty air before him,
"almost a month to save fifteen dollars."
He rose at the words, stiffly, for the chill air had tightened his
muscles, and stood a moment indecisively contemplating the lights
which were beginning to glimmer through the dusk in the hollow, before
he, too, took the long road to the village down which Old Jerry had
rattled a scant hour or two before.
CHAPTER VI
The Tavern "office" was crowded and hazy with acrid blue smoke. Behind
the chairs of the favored members of the old circle, who always sat in
nightly conclave about the stove, a long row of men lounged against
the wall, but the bitter controversies of other nights were still.
Instead, the entire room was leaning forward, hanging breathlessly
upon the words of the short fat man who was perched alone upon the
worn desk, too engrossed even to notice Young Denny's entrance that
night.
The boy stood for a moment, his hand still clasping the knob behind
him, while his eyes flickered curiously over the heads of the crowd.
Even before he drew the door shut behind him he saw that Judge
Maynard's chair was a good foot in advance of all the others, directly
in front of the stranger on the desk, and that the rest of the room
was furtively taking its cue from him--pounding its knee and laughing
immoderately whenever he laughed, or settling back luxuriously
whenever the Judge relaxed in his chair.
Subconsciously Young Denny realized that such had always been the
recognized order of arrangement, ever since he could remember. The
Judge always rode in front in the parades and invariably delivered
the Fourth of July oration. Undisputed he held the one vantage point
in the room, but over his amply broad back, as near as he dared lean,
bent Old Jerry, his thin face working with alternate hope and half
fearful uncertainty.
Denny Bolton would have recognized the man on the desk as the
"newspaper writer" from New York from his clothes alone, even without
the huge notebook that was propped up on his knees for corroborative
evidence. From the soft felt hat, pushed carelessly back from his
round, good-natured face, to the tips of his gleaming low shoes, the
newcomer was a symphony in many-toned browns. And as Young Denny
closed the door behind him he went on talking--addressing the entire
throng before him with an easy good-fellowship that bordered on
intimate _camaraderie_.
"Just the good old-fashioned stuff," he was saying; "the sort of thing
that has always been the backbone of the country. That is what I want
it to be. For, you see, it's like this: We haven't had a champion who
came from our own real old Puritan stock in years and years like
Conway has, and it'll stir up a whole lot of enthusiasm--a whole lot!
I want to play that part of it up big. Now, you're the only ones who
can give me that--you're the only men who knew him when he was a
boy--and right there let's make that a starter! What sort of a
youngster was he? Quite a handful, I should imagine--now wasn't he?"
The man on the desk crossed one fat knee over the other, tapping a
flat-heeled shoe with his pencil. He tilted the brown felt hat a
little farther back from his forehead and winked one eye at the Judge
in jovial understanding. And Judge Maynard also crossed his knees,
tucked his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, and winked back with
equal joviality.
"Well, ye-e-s," he agreed, and the agreement was weightily deliberate.
"Ye-e-s, quite a handful was Jeddy."
One pudgy hand was uplifted in sudden, deprecatory haste, as though he
would not be misunderstood.
"Nothing really wrong, of course," he hurried to add with oratorical
emphasis. "Nothing like that! There never was anything mean or sneaking
about Jeddy, s'far as I can recollect. Just mischievous--mischievous
and up and coming all the time. But there were folks," Judge Maynard's
voice became heavy with righteous accusation--"it's always that way,
you understand--and there were folks, even right here in Jeddy's own
village, who used to call him a bad egg. But I--I knew better!
Nothing but mischievousness and high spirits--that's what I always
thought. And I said it, too--many's the time I said----"
The big shouldered boy near the door shifted his position a little.
He leaned forward until he could see Judge Maynard's round, red face a
little more distinctly. There was an odd expression upon Denny
Bolton's features when the fat man in brown lifted his eyes from his
notebook, eyes that twinkled with sympathetic comprehension.
"----That it was better a bad egg than an omelette, eh?" he
interrupted knowingly.
The Judge pounded his knee and rocked with mirth.
"Well, that's just about it--that's just about as near as words could
come to it," he managed to gasp, and the circle behind him rocked,
too, and pounded its knee as one man.
The man on the desk went on working industriously with his pencil,
even while he was speaking.
"And then I suppose he was pretty good with his hands, too, even when
he was a little shaver?" he suggested tentatively. "But then I don't
suppose that any one of you ever dreamed that you had a world's
champion, right here at home, in the making, did you?"
The whole room leaned nearer. Even the late comer near the door forgot
himself entirely and took one step forward, his narrowing gray eyes
straining upon the Judge's face.
Judge Maynard again weighed his reply, word for word.
"We-e-ll, no," he admitted. "I don't believe I can say that I
downright believed that he'd make a world's champion. Don't believe's
I could truthfully state that I thought that. But I guess there isn't
anybody in this town that would ever deny but what I did say more than
once that he'd make the best of 'em hustle--ye-e-s, sir, the very best
of 'em, some day!"
The speaker turned to face the hushed room behind him, as if to
challenge contradiction, and Young Denny, waiting for some one to
speak, touched his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. But no
contradiction came. Instead Old Jerry, leaning across the Judge's
broad back, quavered breathlessly.
"That's jest it--that's jest as it was--right to a hair. It was system
done it--system right from the very beginning. And many's the time the
Judge says to me--says he----"
Old Jerry never finished, for Judge Maynard lifted one hand
majestically and the little white-haired old man's eager corroboration
died on his lips. He shrank back into abashed silence, his lips
working wordlessly.
"As I was saying," the Judge then proceeded ponderously, "I recognized
he had what one could call--er----"
"Class?" the man on the desk broke in again with his engaging smile.
"Well, yes," the other continued, "or, as I was about to call it,
talent. From the very first that was very apparent, but then, of
course, a man in my position in the community could scarcely have been
the one to encourage him openly. But he was pretty good, even as a
little shaver! Why, there was nothing among the boys that he wouldn't
tackle--absolutely nothing! Size, sir, never made any difference to
him--not a particle. Jeddy Conway fight----!"
Again he turned to the close-packed circle behind him as if mere words
were too weak things to do the question justice. And this time as he
turned his eyes met squarely those of the gray-shirted figure that was
staring straight back at him in a kind of fascination. For one
disconcerted instant Judge Maynard wavered; he caught his breath
before that level scrutiny; then with a flourish of utter finality he
threw up one pudgy hand.
"There's one of 'em right now," he cried. "There's Young Denny Bolton,
who went to school with him, right here in this town. _Ask him_ if Jed
Conway was pretty handy as a boy! Ask him," he leered around the room,
an insinuating accent that was unmistakable underrunning the words.
Then a deep-throated chuckle shook him. "But maybe he won't
tell--maybe he's still a little mite too sensitive to talk about it
yet. Eh, Denny--just a little mite too sensitive?"
Denny Bolton failed to realize it at that moment, but there was a new
quality in the Judge's chuckling statement--a certain hearty admission
of equality which he had only a second before denied to Old Jerry's
eager endeavor to help. The eyes of the fat man in brown lifted
inquiringly from the notebook upon his knees and followed the
direction of the Judge's outstretched finger. He was still grinning
expansively--and then as he saw more clearly through the thick smoke
the face which Judge Maynard was indicating, the grin disappeared.
Little by little Young Denny's body straightened until the slight
shoulder stoop had entirely vanished, and all the while that his gaze
never wavered from the Judge's face his eyes narrowed and his lips
grew thinner and thinner. The confused lack of understanding was gone,
too, at last, from his eyes. He even smiled once, a fleeting,
mirthless smile that tugged at the corners of his wide mouth. For the
moment he had forgotten the circle of peering faces. The room was very
still.
It was the man on the desk who finally broke that quiet, but when he
spoke his voice had lost its easily intimate good-fellowship. He spoke
instead in a low-toned directness.
"So you went to school with Jed The Red, did you?" he asked gravely.
"Knew him when he was a kid?"
Slowly Denny Bolton's eyes traveled from the Judge's face. His lips
opened with equal deliberation.
"I reckon I knew him--pretty well," he admitted.
The eyes of the man in brown were a little narrower, too, as he nodded
thoughtfully.
"Er--had a few set-to's with him, yourself, now and then?"
He smiled, but even his smile was gravely direct. Again there was a
heavy silence before Young Denny replied.
Then, "Maybe," he said, noncommittally. "Maybe I did."
The throbbing silence in that room went all to bits. Judge Maynard
wheeled in his chair toward the man on the desk and fell to pounding
his knee again in the excess of his appreciation.
"Maybe," he chortled, "maybe he did! Well--I--reckon!"
And, following his lead, the whole room rocked with laughter in which
all but the man in brown joined. He alone, from his place on the desk,
saw that there was a white circle about the boy's tight mouth as Young
Denny turned and fumbled with the latch before he opened the door and
passed quietly out into the night. He alone noticed, but there was the
faintest shadow of a queer smile upon his own lips as he turned back
to the big notebook open on his knees--a vaguely unpleasant smile that
was not in keeping with the rotund jollity of his face.
For a moment Denny Bolton stood with his strained white face turned
upward, the roar in the room behind him beating in his ears; then he
turned and went blindly up the road that wound toward the bleak house
on the hill--he went slowly and unsteadily, stumbling now and again in
the deep ruts which it was too dark for him to see.
It was only when he reached the crest of the hill, where Old Jerry had
failed to remember to leave him his mail that afternoon, that he
recalled his own failure to feed the team with which he had been
ploughing all day back in the fields. And in the same blind, automatic
fashion he crossed and threw open the door of the barn.
The interior was dark, blacker even than the thick darkness of the
night outside. Young Denny, muttering to himself, forgot to strike a
light--he even forgot to speak aloud to the nervous animals in the
stalls until his fingers, groping ahead of him, touched something
sleek and warm and brought him back to himself. Then, instinctively,
although it was too late, he threw up one big shoulder to protect his
face before he was lifted and hurled crashing back against the wall by
the impact of the heavy hoofs that catapulted out of the blackness. A
moment the boy stood, swayed sickeningly, and sank to his knees. Then
he began to think clearly again, and with one hand clasped over the
great, jagged gash which the glancing iron shoe had laid open across
his chin, he reached up and found a cross beam and dragged himself
erect.
"Whoa, Tommy, whoa boy!" he soothed the dancing horse. "Steady, it's
only me, boy!" he stammered, and supporting himself against the wall
he groped again until he found the feedbin and finished his day's
work.
It was even darker in the bare kitchen when he lurched dizzily through
the door. Once as he was feeling his way along the wall, searching for
a light, his feet stumbled on a hard rounded object against the
wainscoting, and as it toppled over its contents ran with a slopping
gurgle over the floor.
Then his fingers found the light. Holding himself with one hand, he
lifted the little lamp with its blackened chimney from its bracket and
raised it until it illuminated his features reflected in the small
square mirror that hung against the wall. For a long time he stood and
looked. The blood that oozed from the ugly bruise upon his chin was
splashing in warm drops to the floor; his face was paper white, and
strangely taut and twisted with pain, but the boy noticed neither the
one nor the other. Straight back into his own eyes he stared--stared
steadily for all that his big shoulders were swaying drunkenly. And
for the first time that he could ever recollect Young Denny Bolton
laughed--laughed with real mirth.
He placed the smoking lamp upon the bare board table and turned. As if
they could still hear him--the circle about the Tavern stove in the
valley below--he lifted both hard fists and tightened them until the
heavy muscles beneath his shirt bunched and quivered like live
things.
[Illustration: "DRYAD, IT'S ALL RIGHT--IT'S ALWAYS BEEN ALL RIGHT--WITH
US! THEY LIED--THEY LIED AND THEY KNEW THEY WERE LYING!"]
"Size never made any difference to him?" he repeated the Judge's word
aloud, with a drawling interrogation. "Size never made any difference
to him?"
He laughed again, softly, as if there were a newly discovered humor
about it all which must be jealously guarded.
"It never had to make any difference," the drawling voice went on, "it
didn't have to--because Jed Conway was always the biggest boy in the
school!"
His nostrils were dilating, twitching with the thin, sharp odor of the
overturned demijohn which was rising and thickening in the room. His
eyes fell and for the first time became conscious of it lying there at
his feet. And he stooped and picked it up, lifting it between both
hands until it was level with his face--until it was held at arm's
length high above his head. Then his whole body snapped forward and
the glass from the broken window pane jingled musically on the floor
as the jug crashed out into the night.
Young Denny stood and smiled, one side of his chin a gash of crimson
against the dead white of his face. Again he lifted his fists.
"He never whipped me," he challenged the lights in the hollow, "he
never whipped me--and he never tried but once! I--I--ain't never
been--whipped--yet!"
There had been no sound to herald her coming as she darted up to the
door. Reeling giddily there in the middle of the room, he had not even
heard the one low cry that she choked back as she stopped at the
threshold, but he half turned that moment and met the benumbed horror
of Dryad Anderson's eyes. Minute after minute he merely stood and
stared back at her stupidly, while bit by bit every detail of her
transformation began to penetrate his brain, still foggy with the
force of the blow that had laid his chin wide open. Her tumbled hair
was piled high upon her head; she was almost tall with the added
height of the high-heeled satin slippers; more slender than ever in
the bespangled clinging black skirt and sleeveless scarlet waist which
the old cloak, slipping unheeded from her shoulders, had disclosed.
As his brain began to clear Young Denny forgot the dripping blood that
made his white face ghastly, he forgot the stinging odor of the broken
demijohn, thick in the room--forgot everything but Judge Maynard's
face when the latter had looked up and found him standing at the
Tavern door. He knew now what the light was that had lurked in their
shifty depths; it was fear--fear that he--Young Denny--might speak up
in that moment and disclose all the hypocrisy of his suave lies. He
even failed to see the horror in the eyes of the girl before him.
Sudden, reckless laughter rang from his lips.
"Dryad," he cried out. "Dryad, it's all right--it's always been all
right--with us! They lied--they lied and they knew they were lying!"
She shrank back, as if all the strength had been drained from her
knees, as he lurched unsteadily across toward her and reached out
his arms. But at the touch of his hands upon her shoulders the power
of action came rushing back into her limbs. She shuddered and
whirled--and shook off his groping fingers. Her own hands flashed out
and held his face away from her.
"Don't you touch me!" she panted huskily. "Oh, you--you--don't you
even dare to come near me!"
He tried to explain--tried to follow her swift flight as she leaped
back, but his feet became entangled in the cloak on the floor and
brought him heavily to his knees. He even tried to follow her after
she had been swallowed up in the shadows outside, until he realized
dully that his shuffling feet would not go where his whirling head
directed them. Once he called out to her, before he staggered back to
the kitchen door, and received no answer.
With his hands gripping the door frame he eased himself down to the
top step and sat rocking gently to and fro.
"S'all right," he muttered once, his tongue thick with pain. "S'always
been all right!"
And he laughed aloud, a laugh of utter confidence in spite of all its
unsteadiness.
"Twelve thousand dollars," he said, "and--and he never whipped me! He
never could--not the best day he ever lived!"
CHAPTER VII
Denny Bolton never quite knew at what hour of that long black night he
reached the final decision; there was no actual beginning or ending or
logical sequence to the argument in the back of his brain which led up
to it, to crystallize into final resolve.
He merely sat there in the open door of his half-lighted kitchen,
swaying a little from side to side at first, giddy with the pain of
that crashing blow that had laid open his chin; then balancing,
motionless as the thick shadows themselves, in a silence that was
unbroken save for the creaking night noises about him and the rhythmic
splash of the warm drops that fell more and more slowly from the
gaping, unheeded wound, he groped back over the succession of events
of that afternoon and night, reconstructing with a sort of dogged
patience detail after detail which was waveringly uncertain of
outline, until with the clearing of his numbed brain they stood out
once again in sane, well-ordered clarity. And as they gradually took
shape again each detail grew only more fantastically unbelievable.
It seemed ages since he had stood against the closed door of the
Tavern office and seen Judge Maynard turn and falter before his
unsuspected presence--days and days since he had stood there and
watched that round moon-like face flush heavily with the first shock
of surprise, and realized that the startled light in the shifty eyes
of Boltonwood's most prominent citizen was part fear, part appeal,
that he, Denny Bolton, whose name in the estimation of that same
village stood for all that was at the other extreme, would confirm and
support his barefaced lying statement. It was more than merely
fantastic; and yet, at that, sitting there in the dark, Young Denny
still found something in the recollection that was amusing--far more
amusing than he had imagined anything so simple ever could be.
And already, although it was scarcely hours old, the rest of it, too,
was tinged with an uncanny unreality that was not far removed from the
bodiless fabric of nightmare itself: Those great, catapulting hoofs
which had thundered against him from the darkness and beaten him back,
a half-senseless heap, against the barn wall; the blind, mad rage, as
much a wildly hysterical abandonment of utter joy as anything else,
which had surged through him when, with the stinging odor of the
overturned jug in his nostrils, he had stooped and straightened and
sent the old stone demijohn, that had stood sentinel for years in the
corner near the door, splintering its way through the window into the
night; and, last of all, the sick horror of the girl's face as she
recoiled before him came vividly before his eyes, and his own strange
impotence of limb and lip when he had tried to follow and found that
his feet would not obey the impulse of his brain, tried to explain
only to find that his tongue somehow refused at that moment to voice
the words he would have spoken.
That was hardest of all to believe--most difficult to visualize--and
he would not give it full credence until he had reached out behind him
in the dark and found the bit of a cloak which, slipping from her
shoulders, become entangled in his stumbling feet and brought him
crashing to his knees. The feel of that rough cloth beneath his hand
was more than enough to convince him, and swiftly, unreasonably, the
old bitter tide of resentment began to creep back upon him--bitter
resentment of her quick judgment of him, which like that of the
village, had condemned in the years that were past, even without a
hearing.
"She thought," he muttered slowly aloud to himself, "she thought I
had--" He left the sentence unfinished to drift off into a long
brooding silence; and then, many minutes later: "She didn't even wait
to ask--to see--to let me tell her----"
One hand went tentatively to the point of his chin--his old, vaguely
preoccupied trick of a gesture--and the wet touch of that open wound
helped to bring him back to himself. A moment longer he sat, trying
to make out the stained figures that were invisible even though he
held them a scant few inches from his eyes, before he rose, stretching
his legs in experimental doubt at first, and passed inside. And once
more he stood before the square patch of mirror on the wall, with the
small black-chimneyed lamp lifted high in one hand, just as he had
stood earlier that same night, and scanned his own face.
All trace of resentment left his eyes as he realized the ghastly
pallor of those features--all the ragged horror of that oozing welt
which he had only half seen in that first moment when he was clinging
to consciousness with clenched teeth. It was not nice to look at, and
the light that replaced that sudden flare of bitterness was so new
that he did not even recognize it himself at first.
It was a clearer, steadier, surer thing than he had ever known them
to reflect before; all hint of lost-dog sophistication was gone; even
the smile that touched his thin, pain-straightened lips was
different somehow. It was just as whimsical as before, and just as
half-mirthless--gentle as it always had been whenever he thought at
all of her--but there was no wistful hunger left in it, and little
of boyishness, and nothing of lurking self-doubt.
"Why, she couldn't have known," he went on then, still murmuring
aloud. "She couldn't have been expected to believe anything else.
I--I'm not much to look at--just now."
He even forgot that he had tried to follow her--forgot that her cloak
had thrown him sprawling in the doorway.
"I ought to have told her," he condemned himself. "I shouldn't have
let her go--not like that."
In the fullness of this new certainty of self that was setting his
pulses hammering, he even turned toward the sleeping town, thickly
blanketed by the shadows in the valley, in a sudden boyish burst of
generosity.
"Maybe they didn't mean to lie, either," he mused thoughtfully. "Maybe
they haven't really meant to lie--all this time. They could have been
mistaken, just as she was tonight--they certainly could have been
that."
He found and filled a basin with cold water and washed out the cut
until the bleeding had stopped entirely. And then, with the paper
which that afternoon's mail had brought--the sheet with the astounding
news of Jed The Red, which Old Jerry prophesied would put Boltonwood
in black letters on the map of publicity--spread out on the table
before him, he sat until daybreak poring over it with eyes that were
filmed with preoccupation one moment and keenly strained the next to
make out the close-set type.
Not long before dawn he reached inside his coat and brought out a bit
of burnished white card and set it up in front of him against the
lamp. There was much in the plump, black capitals and knobby script of
Judge Maynard's invitation which was very suggestive of the man
himself, but Young Denny failed to catch the suggestion at that
moment.
He never quite knew when that decision became final, nor what the
mental process was which brought it about. Nor did he even dream of
the connection there might have been between it and that square of
cardboard lying in front of him. Just once, as the first light came
streaking in through the uncurtained window beside him, he nodded his
head in deliberate, definite finality.
"Why, it's the thing I've been waiting for," he stated, something
close akin to wonder in his voice. "It's just a man's size chance. I'd
have to take it--I'd have to do that, even if I didn't want to--for
myself."
And later, while he was kindling a fire in the stove and methodically
preparing his own breakfast, he paused to add with what seemed to be
absolute irrelevance:
"Silk--silk, next to her skin!"
There were only two trains a day over the single-track spur road
that connected Boltonwood with the outer world beyond the hills; one
which left at a most unreasonably inconvenient hour in the early
morning and one which left just as inconveniently late at night.
Denny Bolton, who had viewed from a distinctly unfavorable angle
any possible enchantment which the town might chance to offer,
settled upon the first as the entirely probable choice of the short,
fat, brown-clad newspaper man, even without a moment's hesitation to
weigh the merits of either. And the sight of the round bulk of the
latter, huddled alone upon a baggage truck before the deserted
Boltonwood station-shed, fully vindicated his judgment.
It was still only a scant hour since daybreak. Heavy, low-hanging
clouds in the east, gray with threatening rain, cut off any warmth
there might have been in the rising sun and sharpened the raw wind to
a knifelike edge. The man on the truck was too engrossed with the
thoughts that shook his plump shoulders in regularly recurring, silent
chuckles, and a ludicrously doleful effort to shut off with upturned
collar the draft from the back of his neck, to hear the boy's
approaching footsteps. He started guiltily to his feet in the very
middle of a spasmodic upheaval, to stand and stare questioningly at
the big figure whose fingers had plucked tentatively at his elbow,
until a sudden, delighted recognition flooded his face. Then he
reached out one pudgy hand with eager cordiality.
"Why, greetings--greetings!" he exclaimed. "Didn't quite recognize you
with your--er--decoration." His eyes dwelt in frank inquisitiveness
upon the ragged red bruise across Young Denny's chin. "You're the
member who stood near the door last night, aren't you--the one who
didn't join to any marked degree in the general jubilee?"
Young Denny's big, hard hand closed over the outstretched pudgy white
one. He grinned a little and slowly nodded his head.
"Thought so," the man in brown rambled blithely on, "and glad to see
you again. Glad of a chance to speak to you! I wanted most mightily to
ask you a few pertinent questions last night, but it hardly seemed a
fitting occasion."
He tapped Young Denny's arm with a stubby forefinger, one eyelid
drooping quizzically.
"_Entre nous_--just 'twixt thee and me," he went on, "and not for
publication, was this Jeddy Conway, as you knew him, all that your
eminent citizenry would lead a poor gullible stranger to believe, or
was he just a small-sized edition of the full-blown crook he happens
to be at the present stage of developments? Not that it makes any
difference here," he tapped the big notebook under his arm, "but I'm
just curious, a little, because the Jed The Red whom I happen to know
is so crooked nowadays that his own manager is afraid to place a bet
on him half the time. See?"
Denny smiled comprehendingly. He shifted his big body to a more
comfortable and far less awkward position.
"I see," he agreed.
Somehow, where it would have been an utter impossibility to have
spoken lightly to him the night before, he found it very easy now to
understand and meet half way the frivolity of the fat, grinning man
before him.
"Well, when he left town about eight years ago, his going was just a
trifle hasty. He--he took about everything there was in the
cash-drawer of Benson's store with him--except maybe a lead slug or
two--and there are some who think he only overlooked those."
The gurgle of sheer delight that broke from the lips of the man in
brown was spontaneously contagious.
"Just about as your servant had it figured out last night," he fairly
chirped. Then he slipped one hand through the crook of Denny's elbow.
"I guess I'll have to take a chance on you. It's too good to keep all
to myself." He led the way back to the empty truck. "And you ought to
be safe, too, for judging from the sentiments that were expressed
after you left last night, you--er--don't run very strong with this
community, either."
Again he paused, his eyelid cocked in comical suggestion. Instead of
narrowing ominously, as they might have twelve hours before, Denny's
own eyes lighted appreciatively at the statement. He even waited an
instant while he pondered with mock gravity.
"I reckon," he drawled finally, "that I'll have to confess that I've
never been what you might call a general favorite."
The newspaper man's head lifted a little. He flashed a covertly
surprised glance at the boy's sharp profile. It was far from being the
sort of an answer that he had expected.
"No, you certainly are not," he emphasized, and then he opened the
flat notebook with almost loving care across his knees.
Young Denny, with the first glimpse he caught of that very first page,
comprehended in one illuminating flash the cause of those muffled
chuckles which had convulsed that rounded back when he turned the
corner of the station-shed a moment before; he even remembered that
half-veiled mirth in the eyes of the man who had sat balanced upon the
desk in the Tavern office the night before and understood that, too.
For the hurriedly penciled sketch, which completely filled the first
page of the notebook, needed no explanation--not even that of the
single line of writing beneath it, which read:
"I always said he'd make the best of 'em hustle--yes, sir, the very
best of 'em!"
It was a picture of Judge Maynard--the Judge Maynard whom Young Denny
knew best of all--unctuous of lip and furtively calculating of eye.
For all the haste of its creation it was marvelously perfect in
detail, and as he stared the corners of the boy's lips began to twitch
until his teeth showed white beneath. The fat man grinned with him.
"Get it, do you?" he chuckled. "Get it, eh?"
And with the big-shouldered figure leaning eagerly nearer he turned
through page after page to the end.
"Not bad--not bad at all," he frankly admired his own handiwork at
the finish. "You see, it was like this. I've been short on anything
like this for a long time--good Rube stuff--and so when Conway came
through in his match the other night it looked like a providential
opportunity--and it certainly has panned up to expectations."
Once more he turned to scan the lean face turned toward him, far more
openly, far more inquisitively, this time. It perplexed him,
bewildered him--this easy certainty and consciousness of power which
had replaced the lost-dog light that had driven the smile from his own
lips the night before when he had followed Judge Maynard's beckoning
finger.
Hours after the enthusiastic circle about the Tavern stove had
dissolved he had labored to reproduce that white, bitter, quivering
face at the door, only to find that the very vividness of his memory
somehow baffled the cunning of his pencil. There had been more than
mere bitterness in those curveless, colorless lips; something more
than doubt of self behind the white hot flare in the gray eyes. Now,
in the light of day, his eyes searched for it openly and failed to
find even a ghost of what it might have been.
"No," he ruminated gently, and he spoke more to himself than the
other, "you don't stand deuce high with this community. You're way
down on the list." He hesitated, weighing his words, suddenly a little
doubtful as to how far he might safely venture. "I--I guess
you've--er--disappointed them too long, haven't you?"
The blood surged up under Young Denny's dark skin until it touched his
crisp black hair, and the fat man hastened to throw a touch of
jocularity into the statement.
"Yep, you've disappointed 'em sorely. But I've been monopolizing all
the conversation. I can't convince myself that you've come down here
merely to say me a touching farewell. Was there--was there something
you wanted to see me about in particular?"
It was the very opening for which Denny had been waiting--the opening
which he had not known how to make himself, for his plan for procedure
by which he was to accomplish it was just as indistinct as his
resolution had been final. He nodded silently, uncertain just how to
begin, and then he plunged desperately into the very middle of it.
"I thought maybe you could tell me if this was true or not," he said,
and he drew from his pocket the paper which bore the account of Jed
The Red's victory over The Texan. A hint of a frown appeared upon the
forehead of the man in brown as he took the folded sheet and read
where Denny's finger indicated--the last paragraph of all.
"The winner's share of the receipts amounted to twelve thousand
dollars," was its succinct burden.
He read it through twice, as if searching for any puzzling phrase it
might contain.
"I certainly can," he admitted at last. "I wrote it myself, but it's
no doubt true, for all that. Not a very big purse, of course, but
then, you know, he isn't really championship calibre. He's just a
second-rate hopeful, that's all. It seems hard to find a real one
these days. But why the riddle?" he finished, as he handed back the
paper.
"Why, I thought if it was true maybe I'd ask you to tell me if I--how
I could get a chance at him."
The boy's explanation was even more flounderingly abrupt than his
former question had been, but his eyes never wavered from the
newspaper man's face. The latter laid his notebook upon the truck with
exaggerated care and rose and faced him.
"Another!" he lamented in simulated despair. But the next moment all
the bantering light went from his face, while his eyes flashed in
lightning-like appraisement over Denny's lean shoulder-heavy body,
from his feet, small and narrow in spite of the clumsy high boots, to
his clean-cut head, and back again. There was a hint of businesslike
eagerness in that swift calculation of possibilities. The boy shifted
consciously under the scrutiny.
"It isn't that he never was able to whip me--even when he was a kid,"
he tried to explain. "It--it's because I don't believe, somehow, that
he ever could."
All the strained eagerness disappeared from the face of the pudgy man
in brown. He laughed softly, a short little laugh of amusement at his
own momentary folly.
"Whew!" he murmured. "I'm getting to be just as bad as all the rest!"
He felt in a pocket for a card and scribbled an address across its
back. A trace of good-natured familiarity--the first hint of
superiority that had marked his manner--accompanied his gesture when
he extended it in one hand. It savored of the harmless humoring of a
childish vagary.
"If you ever did chance to get as far from home as that, there's a man
at that address who'd fall on your neck and weep real tears if you
happened to have the stuff," he said. "But just one additional word.
Maybe I've led you astray a bit. Just because I said that Jed The Red
is a second-rater, don't think for a moment that he fights like a
schoolboy now. He doesn't--nothing like that!"
He gazed for another second at the boy's thin, grave face, so like, in
its very thinness and gravity, all that a composite of its Puritan
forbears might have been. And as he became suddenly conscious of that
resemblance he reversed the card, a whimsical twist touching his lips,
and wrote above his own name, "Introducing the Pilgrim," and put it in
the outstretched hand.
"Any idea when you expect to make a start?" he inquired with an
elaborate negligence that brought the hot color to the boy's cheeks.
But again, at the words, he caught, too, a glimpse of the unshaken
certainty that backed their gray gravity.
"Tomorrow, I reckon. It'll take me all of today to get things fixed up
so I can leave. I'll take this train in the morning. And they--they
ought to have told you at the hotel that it's always a half-hour
late."
Young Denny rose.
"Surely--surely," the chubby man agreed. "Nothing like getting away
with the bell. And--er--there's one other thing. Of course if it's a
little private affair, I'll bow myself gracefully out, but I do
confess to a lot of curiosity concerning that small souvenir." His
eyes traveled to the red welt across the boy's chin. "May I inquire
just how it happened?"
Denny failed to understand him at first; then his finger lifted and
touched the wound interrogatively.
"This?" he inquired.
The man in brown nodded.
"Last night," the boy explained, "I--I kind of forgot myself and
walked in on the horses in the dark, without speaking to them. I'd
forgot to feed before I went to the village. One of them's young
yet--and nervous--and----"
The other scowled comprehendingly.
"And so, just for that, they both went hungry till you came to in the
morning and found yourself stretched out on the floor, eh?"
Again Young Denny puzzled a moment over the words. He shook his head
negatively.
"No-o-o," he contradicted slowly. "No, it wasn't as bad as that.
Knocked me across the floor and into the wall and made me pretty dizzy
and faint for a little while. But I managed to feed them. I--I'd
worked them pretty hard in the timber last week."
The man in brown puckered his lips sympathetically, whistling softly
while he considered the damage which that flying hoof had done, and
the utter simplicity of the explanation.
"I wonder," he said to himself, "I wonder--I wonder!" And then, almost
roughly: "Give me back that card!"
Young Denny's eyes widened with surprise, but he complied without a
word. The man in brown stood a moment, tapping his lips with the
pencil, before he wrote hastily under the scribbled address, cocked
his head while he read it through, and handed it back again.
The belated train was whistling for the station crossing when he
thrust out his pudgy white hand in farewell.
"My name's Morehouse," he said, "and I've been called 'Chub' by my
immediate friends, a title which is neither dignified nor reverend,
and yet I answer to it with cheerful readiness. I tell you this
because I have a premonition that we are to meet again. And don't lose
that card!"
Young Denny's fingers closed over the outstretched hand with a grip
that brought the short, fat man in brown up to his toes. Long after
the train had crawled out of sight the boy stood there motionless
beside the empty truck, reading over and over again the few scrawled
words that underran the line of address.
"Some of them may have science," it read, "and some of them may have
speed, but, after all, it's the man that can take punishment who gets
the final decision. Call me up if this ever comes to hand."
Which, after all, was not so cryptic as it might have been.
CHAPTER VIII
That drearily bleak day which was to witness the temporary passing of
the last of the line of Boltons from the town which had borne their
name longer even than the oldest veteran in the circle of regulars
which nightly flanked the cracked wood-stove in the Tavern office
could recall, brought with it a succession of thrills not second even
to those that had been occasioned by the advent of the plump newspaper
man from the metropolis, and all his promised works.
And yet, so far as he himself was concerned, Young Denny Bolton was
totally oblivious, or at least apparently so, to the very audible hum
of astonishment which ripped along behind them when they--he and Judge
Maynard of all men--whirled down the main street of the village that
morning through the gray mist already heavy as fine rain, to stop with
a great flourish of glittering harness buckles and stamping of hoofs
before the post-office doors.
It was the busiest hour which the straggling one-story shops along
the unpaved thoroughfare knew, this one directly following the
unshuttering of the specked, unwashed show-windows, known distinctly
as "mail time"--a very certain instant when Old Jerry's measured
passage from the office doors to his dilapidated rig at the edge of
the boardwalk heralded the opening of the general delivery window
within.
It was Old Jerry's hour--the one hour of the day in which his starved
appetite for notoriety ever supped of nourishment--that moment when
the small knot of loiterers upon the sidewalk, always, face for face,
composed of the same personnel as the unvarying nightly circle about
the Tavern stove, gave way before him and the authority of the
"Gov'mint" which he personified.
Since that first morning, years back, which had hailed his initial
appearance with the mail bags slung over one thin shoulder, he had
made the most of that daily entrance upon the stage of publicity.
There was always a haughty aloofness in his eyes that killed any word
of greeting upon the lips of these same beholders with whom, a few
hours later, he was to sit and wrangle in bitterest intimacy; a
certain brisk importance of step which was a palpable rebuke to their
purposeless unemployment.
Just once this haughty reserve had been assailed. It happened that
same first morning when Old Dave Shepard, white of head and womanishly
mild of voice, alike the circle's patriarch and most timid member, had
stepped forward and laid one unsteady hand upon his arm, some
embarrassed word of congratulation trembling on his lips. Old Jerry's
bearing upon that one occasion had precluded for all time the
possibility of its recurrence. He had stepped back a pace, out of
reach of those detaining fingers, and fastened the offender with a
stare of such baleful resentment that the latter drew off in pitiful
haste for self-effacement. And Jerry's words on that one occasion were
still current history.
"I warn you, Mister Shepard," he had shrilled, "that it's a state's
prison offense to interfere with a Gov'mint official in the
performance of his duty--and if you've got any complaints to make
they'll have to be set down reg'lar in writin', so's I can give 'em
due consideration!"
Dating from that day Old Jerry's daily appearance had taken on, at
least in the eyes of the Tavern regulars, a ceremonious importance
that demanded their personal attendance, and although it still lacked
a few moments of the hour for which they were waiting, a roll-call
would have found their number complete when the yellow-wheeled
buckboard of Boltonwood's most important citizen, with its strangely
assorted pair of passengers, flashed into view. Denny Bolton was
totally oblivious to the stir which their appearance created, but if
he was too engrossed with other things to be aware of the breathless
hush which followed it, the huge, moon-faced man who occupied the seat
of the buckboard with him was conscious of it all to a degree
sufficient for both.
From the moment when he had himself answered the summons at the front
door of his great, boxlike house on the hill, and found Young Denny
standing there, Judge Maynard had sensed a sensation. With unerring
judgment he read it in the very carriage of the big-shouldered boy
before him, who for the first time in his life failed to uncover his
head, with a due amount of reverence, in the presence of the town's
great man.
Perhaps with his mind set upon other things that morning Young Denny
forgot it, perhaps there was an even deeper reason for his remissness,
but the Judge, while he stood and listened to the boy's tersely short
explanation of his errand, was himself too taken up with other
thoughts to note the omission. He was already formulating the rounded
sentences with which he would introduce the subject that night to the
circle in the Tavern office.
There was much of the dramatic in the whole situation--much that
needed only proper staging and elaboration to make of it a tremendous
triumph, a personal triumph, the extent of which he began to foresee
with Denny's opening words. And the greater became his consciousness
of Denny Bolton's strange new bearing, the clearer he saw all the
possibilities of the situation.
To cap it all, the one big, irrefutable fact about which he
could build his climax was there all ready before him, ripe for
exploitation. It was with an actual effort of the will that the
Judge held his brain sufficiently attentive to the boy's words to
grasp the reason for his early morning visit, in the face of the
fascination which that great, ragged bruise across Denny's chin had
for him. Properly displayed, properly played up, the possibilities
of that raw, unbandaged wound were incalculable, and the Judge
started almost guiltily from his greedy scrutiny of it to a sudden
realization that the boy before him had paused in his recital and
was waiting in almost insulting self-possession for a reply.
Many men and some few women had rung boldly at the Judge's front door
or, more often, tapped timidly at the entrance in the rear of the
house, all bent upon the same errand. For it was a country-wide secret
that no one had ever been turned away from those doors with a refusal.
If any of those same visitors ever awakened to a realization that the
terms of their bargain were far harder to bear than a refusal might
have been, they nursed that knowledge in secret.
The Judge was a first mortgage financier, and he scanned each new
addition to his already extensive collection with all the elaborate
care which a matcher of precious stones might have exercised in the
assembling of a fabulous priced string of pearls. It was his practice
to scrutinize each transaction from every possible angle, in every
degree of light and shade, but in his eagerness that morning he forgot
to don for Denny the air of gracious understanding that was half
paternal, half deprecating, which he always wore to set the others
more at their ease. He even forgot to clear his throat judicially when
he asked the boy before him if he had considered sufficiently the
gravity of such a step as the placing in pawn of the roof that
sheltered him and the ground that gave him food. It may have been
because Young Denny, as he stood quietly waiting for his answer, came
under neither classification--he was neither pitifully timid nor more
pitifully bold--that the Judge omitted the usual pompous formula, or
merely that in his eager contemplation of the boy's hurt face he
forgot for once his perfectly rehearsed part.
No preoccupation, however, marred the businesslike statement of his
terms, but even while he named the amount which he was willing to risk
upon Young Denny's arid, rocky acres, and the rate of interest which
he felt compelled to demand, his brain was racing far ahead of the
matter in hand. It was the Judge himself who engineered the half
hour's delay which resulted in the fullest possible audience for their
appearance that morning. While he had never attended it himself,
except now and then by chance, he knew too well the infallibility of
that little knot of regulars who watched Old Jerry's daily departure
to have any fears that the first of that day's many thrills would go
unseen or unsung. And he timed their arrival to a second.
Old Jerry was in the doorway, ready for his straight-backed descent of
the worn steps, when Judge Maynard pulled his smooth gaited pair to a
restive standstill before the office and gave the reins into Young
Denny's keeping. The throng of old men upon the sidewalk was at the
point of opening ranks to allow him to pass through to his tattered
buggy, which stood at the roadside, a bare half-length ahead of the
Judge's polished equipage. And now those same ranks broke in wild
disorder and then closed tighter even than before, while they shifted
and struggled for a better view.
They forgot the ceremonious solemnity of the moment and the little,
birdlike figure upon the top step trying not to show too plainly upon
his face a sense of his own importance--they forgot everything but the
portend of the scene which the Judge was handling in so masterful a
fashion.
The latter's descent from his seat to the ground was deliberate, even
for him; his silent nod to those wide-eyed, loose-jawed old men upon
the sidewalk was the very quintessence of secretive dignity, and yet
had he taken up his position there on the corner of the uneven
boardwalk and cried aloud his sensation, like a bally-hoo advertising
the excellence of his own particular side-show, he could not have
equaled the results which the very profundity of his silence
achieved.
There was a momentous promise in his gravity, a hint of catastrophe in
the tilt of his head. Like two receding waves the tight ranks opened
before him, clearing a path for his heavy-footed advance to the
post-office doors--a lane of bulging eyes and clicking tongues such as
Old Jerry in all his days had never provoked. And the latter stood
there stock still in the middle of the entrance, too dazed at first to
grasp the whole meaning of the situation, until he, too, was swept
aside, without so much as a glance or a word, by one majestic sweep of
the Judge's hand.
Old Jerry's sparrowlike, thinly, wistful face flamed red, and then
faded a ghastly white, but no one seemed conscious at that moment of
the ignominy of it all. It was hours later that they recalled it and
realized that they had looked upon history in the making. No one
noticed the old man's faltering descent of the steps, or saw that he
paused in his slow way to the buggy to turn back and stand looking
about him in a kind of bewildered desperation. For the gaze of all had
swung from the Judge's broad, disappearing back to the face of the boy
who was sitting in the buckboard, totally unconscious of that battery
of eyes, smiling to himself.
He even chuckled aloud once--Young Denny did--a muffled, reasonless
sort of a chuckle, as if he did not even know they were there. It was
almost as though he were playing straight into the Judge's own plan,
for the effect of the mirth upon the group on the walk was electrical.
It sent a shiver of anticipation through it from end to end. And then,
like the eyes of one man, their eyes swung back again from the ragged
bruise across the boy's chin to meet the Judge as he reappeared.
Yet not one of them so much as dared to whisper the question that
was quivering upon the lips of all and burning hungrily in their
faded eyes. Once more the wide lane opened magically for him--but
again Judge Maynard's measured progress was momentarily barred.
Curiosity may have prompted it, and then again it may have been that
he was betrayed by the very fury of his desperate, eleventh hour
effort to assert his right to the center of that stage--the right
of long-established precedent--yet even those two long files of
old men gasped aloud their dismay at his temerity when Old Jerry
thrust his way forward and planted himself for a second time
squarely in the great man's path.
Half way from the office doors to the yellow-wheeled buckboard, in the
very middle of the walk, he stood and stretched out a tentatively
restraining hand, just as mild-voiced, white-haired Dave had done
years before. And in his high, cracked falsetto, that was tremulously
bitter for all that he struggled to lift it to a plane of easy
jocularity, he exclaimed:
"Now see here, Jedge; what's the meanin' of all this? You ain't turned
kidnapper, hev you?"
There came a heavy hush, while the Judge stood and stared down at the
thin face trying to smile confidently up at him--a hush that endured
while Judge Maynard swept him from head to foot with one shriveling
glare and then walked around him without a word--walked around him
just as he might have walked around the hitching post at the roadside,
or any other object that chanced to bar his way! And this time Old
Jerry's face twitched and went whiter even than before.
Nobody laughed, not even after the yellow-wheeled buckboard with its
strangely assorted pair of passengers had sped from sight toward the
county seat and a legal adjustment of still another mortgage on the
Bolton acres. Not a word was spoken until Old Jerry, too, had
clambered silently into his own creaking buggy and crawled slowly off
up the hill, with a squealing accompaniment of ungreased axles.
And even then, in the argument which began with a swirl of conjecture
and ended, hours later, in a torrent of bitter personalities farthest
of all from the first question under consideration, they avoided a
mention of that regrettable incident just as for some time after its
occurrence they avoided each other's eyes, as if they felt somehow
that theirs was, after all, the real guilt.
Upon one point alone did they agree; they were unanimous that if Young
Denny Bolton's bearing that morning--the angle at which he held his
chin, and the huge cut that adorned it, and his causeless mirth--was
not entirely damning, it was at least suspicious enough to require
more than a little explanation. But that verdict, too, was none other
than the very one which the Judge had already planned for them.
CHAPTER IX
Old Jerry drove his route that morning in a numbed, trancelike
fashion; or, rather, he sat there upon the worn-out leather seat with
the reins looped over the dash, staring straight ahead of him, and
allowed the fat old mare to take her own pace. It was she who made the
customary stops; he merely dug absent-mindedly beneath the seat
whenever she fell to cropping grass at the roadside, and searched
mechanically for the proper packet of mail. And twice he was called
back to correct mistakes which he admitted were his own with an
humbleness that was alarming to the complainant. In all the days of
his service he had never before failed to plead extenuating
circumstances for any slip that might occur--and to plead with much
heat and staccato eloquence. But then, too, in all those years no day
had ever equalled the bitter awakening of that morning.
As he reviewed it all, again and again, Old Jerry began to understand
that it was not the public rebuff which had hurt so much; for there
was that one of the night previous, when the Judge had cut him off in
the middle of his eager corroboration of Jed The Red's history, which
had not left a trace of a sting twelve hours later. It was more than
wounded vanity, although hurt pride was still struggling for a place
in his emotions against a shamed, overwhelming realization of his own
trifling importance, which could not hold its own against the first
interloper, even after years of entrenchment. Judge Maynard's first
thrill had been staged without a hitch; he had paved the way for the
personal triumph which he meant to achieve that night, but he had
accomplished it only at a cost--the loyalty of him who had been, after
all, his stanchest supporter.
From that moment Old Jerry's defection from the ranks must be dated,
for it was in those bitter hours which followed the yellow-wheeled
buckboard's early morning flight down the main street that the old man
woke to the fact that his admiration for the Judge was made of
anything but immortal stuff. He weighed the Judge in the balance that
morning, and half forgot his own woe in marveling at the discrepancies
which he discovered.
Self-deceit may or may not be easy of accomplishment. Maybe it is
merely a matter of temperament and circumstance, after all. But it is
a certainty that the first peep at one's own soul is always the most
startling--the most illuminating, always hardest of all to bear. And
once stripped of that one garment of grandeur, which he had conjured
out of his own great hunger for attention, Old Jerry found a
ruthless, half-savage joy in tearing aside veil after veil, until he
found himself gazing straight back into the eyes of his own
spirit--until he saw the pitiful old fraud he really was, naked there
before him.
Just as well as though he had been a party to it he understood the
Judge's crafty exhibition of Young Denny's maimed face that morning;
he knew without a trace of doubt just what the Judge, in his ominous
silence, had meant to insinuate, and what the verdict would be that
night around the Tavern stove. What he could not understand quite was
why all of them were so easy to convince--so ready to believe--when
only the night before they had sat and heard the Judge's recital of
Jed The Red's intimate history for the benefit of the newspaper man
from the metropolis which, to name it charitably, had been anything
but a literal translation of facts.
Groping back for one single peg upon which to hang the fabric of their
oft-reiterated prophesy was alarmingly profitless. There had been
nothing, not even one little slip, since Old Denny Bolton's passing on
that bad night, years before. And from that realization he fell to
pondering with less leadenness of spirit upon what the real facts
could be which lay behind Young Denny's sudden transformation. For
that also was too real--too evident--for any eyes to overlook.
It was not until long after the hour which witnessed the return flight
of the yellow-wheeled buckboard through the village street, leaving
behind an even busier hum of conjecture than before, that he awoke to
a realization that his opportunity for a solution of the riddle was at
least better than that of the wrangling group that had turned traitor
before the post-office steps.
Long before he reached the top of the grade that ran up to the bleak
house alone on the crest, he was leaning out of his seat, trying to
penetrate the double gloom of rain and twilight; but not until he had
reined in his horse was he positive that there was no shadowy figure
standing there waiting for his arrival.
He could not quite understand the sensation which the boy's absence
waked in him at that instant. Days afterward he knew it had been
lonesomeness--a rather bewildering loneliness--for no matter what his
reception chanced to be along the way, Young Denny's greeting had been
infallibly regular.
And another emotion far less difficult to understand began to stir
within him as he sat motionless for a time scanning the shapeless bulk
of the place, entirely dark save for a single light in the rear room.
For the first time he saw how utterly apart from the rest of the town
those unpainted old farm buildings were--how utterly isolated. The
twinkling lights of the village were mere pin-points in the distance.
Each thick shadow beneath the eaves of the house was blacker than he
had ever noticed before. Even the soft swish of the rain as it seeped
from the sodden shingles, even the very familiar complaint of loose
nails lifted by the wind under the clapboards, set his heart pumping
faster. All in an instant his sensation-hungry old brain seized upon
each detail that was as old as he himself and manufactured, right
there on the spot, a sinister something--a something of unaccountable
dread, which sent a delightful shiver up and down his thin, bony, old
back.
For a while he waited and debated with himself, not at all certain
now that he was as keen for a solution of the riddle of that cut
which had adorned Young Denny's chin as he had been. And yet, even
while he hesitated, feeding his imagination upon the choicest of
premonitory tit-bits, he knew he meant to go ahead. He was magnifying
the unfathomed peril that existed in his erratic, hair-trigger old
brain alone merely for the sake of the complacent pride which
resulted therefrom--pride in the contemplation of his own intrepid
dare-deviltry.
He could scarcely have put into words just what reception he had
imagined was awaiting him; but, whatever it might have been, Young
Denny's greeting was full as startling. A worn, dusty, shapeless
leather bag stood agape upon the table before the window, and Denny
Bolton paused over the half-folded garment in his hands to wheel
sharply toward the newcomer as the door creaked open.
For one uncomfortable moment the old adventurer waited in vain for any
light of welcome, or even recognition, to flash up in the boy's steady
scrutiny. Then the vaguest of smiles began to twitch at the corners of
Denny's lips. He laid the coat back upon the table and stepped forward
a pace.
"Hello!--Here at last, are you?" he saluted. "Aren't you pretty late
tonight?"
Old Jerry swallowed hard at the cheery ease of the words, but his
fluttery heart began to pump even faster than when he had sat outside
in the buggy debating the advisability of his further advance. That
warning premonition had not been a footless thing, after all, for this
self-certain, vaguely amused person who stood steadily contemplating
him was not the Denny Bolton he had known twenty-four hours
before--not from any angle or viewpoint.
Behind the simulated cheer of his greeting there was something else
which Old Jerry found disturbingly new and hard to place. In his
perplexity the wordless accusation that morning had been correct at
that. And Young Denny was smiling widely at him now--smiling openly.
The old man shuffled his feet and shifted his gaze from the open wound
upon the boy's face as though he feared his suspicion might be read in
his eyes. Then he answered Denny's question.
"I--I cal'late I be late--maybe a little," he admitted.
Denny nodded briskly.
"More than a little," he corrected. "I expected you to be along even
earlier today! An hour or two, at least."
Even while he was speaking Young Denny turned back to the packing of
the big bag on the table. Old Jerry stood there, still shifting from
one foot to the other, considering in growing wonder that silent
preparation, and waiting patiently for a further explanation of what
it meant. At last, when he could no longer endure the suspense, he
broke that silence himself.
"Packin' up for a little trip, be you?" he ventured mildly.
There was no progress made or satisfaction gained from Young Denny's
short nod. Again the little man bore it as long as he was able.
"Figurin' on bein' gone quite a spell?" he ventured again.
And again the big-shouldered figure nodded a silent affirmative. Old
Jerry drew himself up with an air of injured dignity at that
inhospitable slight; he even took one step backward toward the door;
but that one step, in the face of his consuming curiosity, was as far
as he could force himself to go.
"I--I kinda thought you might be leavin'. Why, I--kinda suspicioned it
this morning when I seen you ridin' townward with the Jedge."
The boy stuffed the last article into the bulging bag and turned. Old
Jerry almost believed that the lack of comprehension in Young Denny's
eyes was real until he caught again that hint of amusement behind it.
But when Denny started toward him suddenly, without so much as a word,
the old man retreated just as suddenly, almost apprehensively, before
him.
"You say you was expectin' me," he faltered unsteadily, "but--but if
there wa'n't anything special you wanted to see me about, I--I reckon
I better be joggin' along. I just kinda dropped in, late's it was, to
tell you there wa'n't no mail, and to say--to tell you----"
He stopped abruptly. He didn't like the looks of Denny Bolton's eyes.
They were different than he had ever seen them before. If their
inscrutability was not actually terrifying, Old Jerry's active
imagination at that moment made it so. And never before had he noted
how huge the boy's body was in comparison with his own weazened frame.
He groped stealthily behind him and found the door catch. The cool
touch of the metal helped him a little.
"I--I may be a trifle late--jest a trifle," he hurried on, "but I been
hustlin' to git here--that is, ever sense about five o'clock, or
thereabouts. There's been something I been wantin' to tell you. I--I
jest wanted to say that I hoped it wa'n't anything I might have said
or--or kinda hinted at, maybe, nights down to the Tavern, that's druv
you out. That's a mighty mean, gossipy crowd down there, anyway,
always kinda leadin' a man along till he gits to oversteppin' hisself
a little."
It was the first declaration of his own shortcomings that he had ever
voiced, an humble confession that was more than half apology born of
that afternoon's travail of spirit; but somehow it rang hopelessly
inadequate in his own ears at that minute. And yet Young Denny's head
came swiftly forward at the words; his eyes narrowed and he frowned as
though he were trying to believe he had heard correctly. Then he
laughed--laughed softly--and Old Jerry knew what that laugh meant. The
boy didn't believe even when he had heard; and his slow-drawled,
half-satirical question more than confirmed that suspicion.
"Wasn't at all curious, then, about this?" he inquired, with a
whimsical twist to the words.
He touched his chin with the tips of his fingers. Old Jerry's
treacherous lips flew open in his eagerness, and then closed barely
in time upon the admission that had almost betrayed him.
He was sorry now, too, that he had even lingered to make his apology.
That disturbing glint was flaring brighter than ever in Young Denny's
eyes. Merely because he was afraid to turn his back to pass out, Old
Jerry stood and watched with beadily attentive eyes while the boy
crossed and took a lantern from its peg on the wall behind the stove
and turned up the wick and lighted it. That unexplained preparation
was as fascinating to watch as its purport was veiled.
"You must be just a little curious about it--just a little bit?" Denny
insisted gravely. "I thought you'd be--and all the others, too. That's
why I was waiting for you--that and something in particular that I did
want to ask you, after I'd made you understand."
If the first part of his statement was still tinged with mirth, the
second could not possibly have been any more direct or earnest.
Without further explanation, one hand grasping his visitor's thin
shoulder, he urged him outside and across the yard in the direction of
the black bulk of the barn. The rain was still coming down steadily,
but neither of them noticed it at that moment. Old Jerry would have
balked at the yawning barn door but for that same hand which was
directing him and urging him on. His apprehension had now turned to
actual fright which bordered close on panic, and he heard the boy's
voice as though it came from a great distance.
"----two or three things I'd like to have you understand and get
straight," Denny was repeating slowly, "so that--so that if I asked
you, you could see that--someone else got them straight, too."
Old Jerry was in no mental condition to realize that that last
statement was untinged by any lurking sarcasm. He was able to think of
but one thing.
The hand upon his shoulder had loosened its grip. Slowly the little
man turned--turned with infinite caution, and what he considered was a
very capable attitude of self-defense. And for a moment he refused to
believe his own eyes--refused to believe that, in place of the threat
of sudden death which he had expected, Young Denny was merely standing
there before him, pointing with his free hand at a dark, almost damp
stain upon the dusty woodwork behind the stalls. It flashed through
his brain then that Denny Bolton had not merely gone the way of the
other Boltons--it was not the jug alone that had stood in the kitchen
corner, but something far worse than that.
"I got to humor him," he told himself, although he was shivering
uncontrollably. "I got to keep a grip on myself and kinda humor him."
And aloud, in a voice that was little more than a whisper, he
murmured:
"What--what is it?"
"Couldn't you guess--if you had to?"
Denny made the suggestion with appalling calm. Old Jerry clenched his
teeth to still their chattering.
"Maybe I could--maybe I could;" and his voice was a little stronger.
"I--I'd say it was blood, I reckon, if anyone asked me."
Without a word the boy set the lantern down and walked across the barn
to lay one hand upon the flank of the nervous animal in the nearest
stall.
"That's what it is," he stated slowly; and again he touched the wound
on his chin gingerly. "From this," he went on. "I came in last night
to feed--and I--I forgot to speak to Tom here, and it was dark. He--he
laced out and caught me--and that's where I landed, there against the
wall."
The servant of the "Gov'mint" nodded his comprehension--he nodded it
volubly, with deep bows that would have done credit to a dancing
master, lest his comprehensions seem in the least bit veiled with
doubt. He even clicked his tongue sympathetically, just as the plump
newspaper man had done.
"Quite a tap--quite a tap!" he said as soothingly as his uncertain
tongue would permit; but he took care to keep a safe distance between
himself and his guide when Denny stooped and lifted the lantern and
led the way outside.
Now that he was free from that detaining hand upon his shoulder, he
contemplated the advisability of a sudden dash for the buggy and
flight behind the fat white mare. Nothing but the weakened condition
of his own knees and a lack of confidence in her ability to carry him
clear kept him from acting instantly upon that impulse. And then the
summoning voice of the great blurred figure which had been zigzagging
across the grass before him checked him at the very moment of
decision.
Young Denny had stopped beside a sapling that stood in a direct line
with the kitchen window, and was pointing down at a heap of broken
crockery that lay at its foot.
"And if anyone was to ask you," he was deliberately inquiring, "what
do you suppose you would say that had been?"
Old Jerry knew! He knew without one chance for doubt; but never before
had the truth seemed more overwhelmingly dreadful or surcharged with
peril. A dozen diplomatic evasions flashed through his mind, and were
all condemned as inadequate for that crisis. He knew that candor was
his safest course.
"Why, I--I'd say it looked mighty like a--a broken jug," he quavered,
with elaborate interest. "Jest a common, ordinary jug that's kinda
got broke, somehow. Yes, sir-e-e, all broke up, as you might say!"
His shrill cackle of a voice caught in his throat, and grew husky, and
then broke entirely. Even Young Denny, absorbed as he was in his
methodical exhibition of all the evidence, became suddenly aware that
the little figure beside him was swallowing hard--swallowing with
great, noisy gulps, and he lifted the lantern until the yellow light
fell full upon the twitching face below him, illuminating every
feature. And he stared hard at all that the light revealed, for Old
Jerry's face was very white.
"Jest a little, no-account jug that's got busted," the shrill,
bodiless voice went chattering on, while its owner recoiled from the
light. "Busted all to pieces from hittin' into a tree!" And then,
reassuringly, on a desperate impulse: "But don't you go to worryin'
over it--don't you worry one mite! I'm goin' to fix it for you. Old
Jerry's a-goin' to fix it for you in the morning, so's it'll be just
as good as new! You run right along in now. It's kinda wet out
here--and--and I got to be gittin' along toward home."
Absolute silence followed the promise. Young Denny only lowered the
lantern--and then lifted it and stared, and lowered it once more.
"Fix it!" he echoed, his voice heavy with wonder. "Fix it?"
Then he noted, too, the chattering teeth and meager, trembling body,
and he thought he understood.
"You'd better come along in," he ordered peremptorily. "You come along
inside. I'll rake up the fire and you can warm up a bit. I--I didn't
think, keeping you out here in the rain. Why, you'll feel better after
you've had a little rest. You ought not to be out all day in weather
like this, anyway. You're too--too----"
He was going to say too old, but a quick thought saved him. Old Jerry
did not want to accompany him; he would have done almost anything else
with a light heart; but that big hand had fallen again upon his
shoulder, and there was no choice left him.
Young Denny clicked the door shut before them and pulled a chair up
before the stove with businesslike haste. After he had stuffed the
fire-box full of fresh fuel and the flame was roaring up the pipe, he
turned once more and stood, hands resting on his hips, staring down at
the small figure slumped deep in its seat.
"I didn't understand," he apologized again, his voice very sober.
"I--I ought to have remembered that maybe you'd be tired out and wet,
too. But I didn't--I was just thinking of how I could best show
you--these things--so's you'd understand them. You're feeling better
now?"
Furtively, from the corners of his eyes, Old Jerry had been watching
every move while the boy built up the fire. And now, while Denny stood
over him talking so gravely, his head came slowly around until his
eyes were full upon that face; until he was able to see clearly, there
in the better light of that room, all the solicitude that had softened
the hard lines of the lean jaw. It was hard to believe, after all that
he had passed through, and yet he knew that it could not be
possible--he knew that that voice could not belong to any man who had
been nursing a maniacal vengeance behind a cunningly calm exterior.
There was no light of madness in those eyes which were studying him
so steadily--studying him with unconcealed anxiety. Old Jerry could
not have told how it had come about; but there in the light, with
four good solid walls about him, he realized that a miracle had
taken place. Little by little his slack body began to stiffen;
little by little he raised himself. Once he sighed, a sigh of
deeper thankfulness than Young Denny could ever comprehend, for
Young Denny did not know the awfulness of the peril through which
he had just passed.
"Godfrey" he thought, and the exclamation was so poignantly real
within him that it took audible form without his knowledge. "Godfrey
'Lisha, but that was a close call! That's about as narrer a squeak as
I'll ever hev, I reckon."
And he wanted to laugh. An almost hysterical fit of laughter
straggled for utterance. Only because the situation was too precious
to squander, only because he would have sacrificed both arms before
confessing the terror which had been shaking him by the throat, was he
able to stifle it. Instead, he removed his drenched and battered hat
and passed one fluttering hand across his forehead, with just the
shade of unsteadiness for which the affair called.
"Yes, I'm a-feelin' better now," he sighed. "Godfrey, yes, I'm a sight
better already! Must 'a' been just a little touch of faintness, maybe.
I'm kinda subject to them spells when I've been overworked. And I hev
been a little mite druv up today--druv to the limit, if the truth's
told. Things ain't been goin' as smooth's they might. Why--why, they
ain't nobody'd believe what's been crowded into this day, even if I
was to tell 'em!"
He filled his lungs again and shoved both feet closer to the oven
door.
"But that fire feels real nice," he finished; "real nice and
comfortin', somehow. And maybe I could stop just a minute." The old
hungry light of curiosity was kindling again, brighter than ever
before, in the beady little eyes. "As you was remarkin', back a
stretch, you'd been a-waitin' for me to come along. Was they--was they
something you wanted to see me about?"
CHAPTER X
The perplexed frown still furrowed Young Denny's forehead. He felt
that the fire had wrought a most remarkably swift cure of all that he
had feared, but the anxiety faded from his eyes. White head perked
forward, balanced a little on one side, birdlike, Old Jerry was
waiting for him to pick up the thread which had been broken so long.
And now it was the big-shouldered boy who faltered in his words,
uncertain just how to begin.
"I--I don't know just how to ask you," he started heavily. "I'm--I am
going away. I'm figuring on being gone quite a while, I think. First,
just after I had decided to go, some time last night, I made up my
mind to ask you to take care of the stock till I came back. I thought
maybe it wouldn't be too hard for you--with you coming by at night,
anyhow. There's just the one cow and the team, and the hens to feed.
And then I--I got to thinkin' that maybe, too, you'd be able to do
something else for me, if I sort of explained how things were.
There--there wasn't anyone else I could think of who'd be likely to
want to do me a favor."
He paused and licked his lips. And Old Jerry, too, furtively touched
his with the tip of his tongue. He was waiting breathlessly, but he
managed to nod his head a little, encouragingly, as he leaned closer.
"And that was what I was really waiting for," the slow voice went on
ponderously. "I saw this morning--anybody could have seen--what the
Judge meant them all to believe along the street when we drove
through. Somehow things have changed in the last twelve hours. I sort
of look at some things differently than I did, and so it was funny,
just funny to watch him, and I'm not so blind that I don't know what
his story will be tonight down at the Tavern. Not that I care what
they say, either. But there is some one who couldn't help believin'
it--couldn't believe anything else--after what happened last night."
He stopped, groping for words to finish. "And so I--I waited for you
to come," he went on lamely. "I took you outside and showed you how it
really happened, so that--so that you could tell _her_--the truth."
He nodded over his shoulder--nodded once out across the valley in the
direction of John Anderson's small drab cottage huddled in the shadow
under the hill. And now, once he had fairly begun, all the diffidence,
all the self-consciousness went from his voice. It was only big and
low and ponderous, as always, as he went back and told the old man,
who sat drinking it in, every detail of that night before, when he
had stooped and risen and sent the stone jug crashing through the
window--when he had turned, with blood dripping from his chin, to find
Dryad Anderson there in the doorway, eyes wide with horror and
loathing. Not until he had reached that point did Old Jerry move or
hint at an interruption.
"But why in time didn't you tell her yourself?" he asked then. "Why
didn't you explain that old Tom hit you a clip out there in the
dark?"
Young Denny's face burned.
"I--I tried to," he explained simply. "I--I started toward her,
meaning to explain, but I tripped, there on the threshold, and went
down on my knees. I must have been a little sick--a little giddy. And
when I got up again she--she was gone."
Old Jerry nodded his head judicially. He sucked in his lips from sheer
delight in the thrill of it all, and nodded his head in profound
solemnity.
"Jest like a woman--jest like a woman, a-condemnin' of a man without a
bit of mercy! Jest like 'em! I ain't never been enticed yet into
givin' up my freedom; but many's the time I've said--says I----"
The boy's set face checked him; made him remember. This was no mimic
thing. It was real; too real to need play-acting. And with that
thought came recollection. All in a flash it dawned on him that this
was no man-created situation; it must have something greater than that
behind it.
That morning had seen his passing from the circle to which he had
belonged as long as the circle had existed. All through that dreary
day he had known that he could never go back to it. Just why he could
not say, but he felt that that decision was irrevocable. And for that
whole day he had been alone--more utterly, absolutely alone than he
had ever been in his whole life--yet here was a place awaiting him,
needing him. For some reason it was not quite so hard to look straight
back into the eyes of that soul which he had discovered that day; it
wasn't so hard, even though he knew it now for the pitiful old fraud
it really was.
His thin, leathery face was working spasmodically. And it was
alight--aglow with a light that came entirely from within.
"Could you maybe explain," he quavered hungrily; "could you kinda tell
me--just why it is--you're a-askin' me? It--it ain't jest because you
hev to, entirely; now, is it? It ain't because there ain't nothin'
else left you to do?"
Denny Bolton sensed immediately more than half of what was behind the
question. He shook his head.
"No," he answered steadily. "No, because I'm going to try to tell her
again, myself, tonight. It's only partly because maybe I--I won't be
able to see her before I go--and part because she--she'd believe you,
somehow, I think, when she wouldn't believe any of the rest."
The white-haired old man sighed. His stiffened body slackened as he
shifted his feet against the stove.
"Why--why, I kinda hoped it was something like that," he murmured; and
he was talking more to himself than to Denny. "I kinda hoped it
was--but I never had no reason to believe it."
His voice lifted until it was its shriller, more natural falsetto.
"I wouldn't 'a' believed myself today, at twelve o'clock noon," he
stated flatly. "No, sir-e-e! After takin' stock of myself, as you
might say, the way I done this morning, I wouldn't 'a' believed myself
on oath!"
His feet dropped noisily to the floor, and he sat bolt upright again.
"But she's a-goin' to believe me! Godfrey, yes, she'll believe me when
I git through tellin' her!"
His pale eyes clung to the boy's face, tinged with astonishment before
so much vehemence.
"And ain't it kinda struck you--ain't it sorta come to you that
she wa'n't quite fair, either, any more than the rest of us,
a-thinkin'--a-thinkin' what she did, without any real proof?"
Young Denny did not have time to reply.
"No, I reckon it ain't," Old Jerry rushed on. "And I don't know's I've
got much right criticizing either. Not very much! I've been a tidy
hand at jedgin' other folks' matters until jest lately. Some way I
ain't quite so handy at it as I was. And I kinda expect she's goin' to
be sorry she even thought it, soon enough, without my tryin' to make
her any more so. She's goin' to be mighty uncomfortable sorry, if
she's anything like me!"
He rose and shuffled across to the door, and stopped there. Denny
could not understand the new thrill there was in his cracked voice,
nor the light in those pale eyes. But he knew that the old man before
him had been making something close akin to an eleventh-hour
confession; making it out of a profound thankfulness for the
opportunity. With the same gesture with which he bade the old man
wait, his big hand went inside his shirt, and came out again. And he
reached out and pressed something into Old Jerry's knotty fingers.
"I--I was sure you'd do it," he told him. "I knew you would. And I
want you to take this, too, and keep it. I don't want to go away like
this, but I have to. If I didn't start right now I--I might not go at
all. I hate to leave her alone--in this town. That's half of what the
Judge let me have today on this place. It's not much, but it's
something if she should need anything while I'm gone. I thought you
might--see that she was all right--till I got back?"
The servant of the "Gov'mint" stood and stared down at the limp little
roll of bills in his hand; he stared until something caught in his
throat and made him gulp again noisily. But his face was shamelessly
defiant of the mist that smarted under his eyelids when he looked up
again.
"Take care of her?" he whispered. "Me take care of her for you?
Why--why, Godfrey--why, man----"
He dashed one hand across his eyes.
"I'm a old gossipy fool," he exclaimed. "Nothin' but a old gossipy
fool; but I reckon you don't hev to _count_ them bills over before you
leave 'em with me. Not unless you want to. I've been just an ordinary,
common waggle-tongue. That's what I really come for in such a hurry
tonight, once I'd thought of it. Jest to see if I couldn't nose around
into business that wa'n't no concern of mine. But I'm gittin' over
that--I'm gittin' over that fast! Learning a little dignity of
bearin', too, as you might say. And I don't deny I ain't a little
curious yet--more'n a little curious. But I want to tell you this:
There's some folks that lies mostly for profit, and some that lies
largely for their own amusement, and they both do jest about as much
damage in the long run, and I ain't no better, jest because I never
made nothin' outen mine. But if you could kinda drop me a line, maybe
once in a while, and tell me how you're gittin' on, I'd be mighty glad
to hear. An' it wouldn't do no harm, either." He nodded his head, in
turn, in the direction of the drab cottage across the valley.
"Because--because she's goin' to be waitin' to hear--she's goin' to be
sorry, and kinda wonderin'. I know--well, jest because I know!"
Still he lingered, with his fingers on the door catch. He shoved out
his free hand.
"I--I suppose we'd ought to shake hands, hedn't we," he faltered;
"bein' as it's kinda considered the reg'lar and customary thing to do
on such occasions?"
Denny was smiling as his hand closed over those clawlike fingers; he
was smiling in a way that Old Jerry had never seen before. Because the
noise in his throat was growing alarmingly louder every moment, the
latter went on talking almost wildly, to cover that weakness which he
could not control.
"I hope you git on," he said. "And I reckon you will. It's funny--it's
more'n that--and I don't know where I got the idea. But it's kinda
come to me, somehow, that maybe it was that account in the paper--that
story of Jeddy Conway--that's set you to leavin'. It ain't none of my
business, and I ain't askin' no questions, but I do want to say that
there never was a time when you couldn't lick the everlastin' tar
outen him. And you've growed some since then. Jest a trifle--jest a
trifle!"
The boy's smile widened and widened. Then he laughed aloud softly and
nodded his head.
"I'll send you the papers," he promised. "I'll send you all of them."
Old Jerry stood with his outstretched hand poised in midair while
he realized that his chance shot had gone home. And suddenly,
unaccountably, he began to chuckle; he began to cackle noisily.
"I might 'a' knowed it," he whispered. "I ought to hev knowed it all
along. Now, you don't hev to worry--they ain't one mite of a thing I
ain't a-goin' to see to while you're away. You don't want nothin' on
your mind, because you're goin' to hev a considerable somethin' on
your hands. And I got to git along now. Godfrey, but it's late for me
to be up here, ain't it? I got to hustle, if I ever did; and there
ain't too much time to spare. For tonight--tonight, before I git
through, I aim to put a spoke in the Jedge's wheel, down to the
Tavern, that'll make him think the axles of that yello'-wheeled gig of
his'n needs greasin'. Jest a trifle--jest a trifle!"
He opened the door and slammed it shut behind him even before the
boy could reply. Still smiling whimsically, Young Denny stood and
listened to the grating of the wheels as the buggy was turned about
outside--heard the old rig groan once, and then complain shrilly
as it started on its way. But no one witnessed Old Jerry's wild
descent to the village that night; no one knew the mad speed he
made, save the old mare between the shafts; and she was kept too busy
with the lash that whistled over her fat flanks to have given the
matter any consistent thought.
Old Jerry drove that scant mile or two this night under the spur of
his one greatest inspiration; and while he drove he talked aloud to
himself.
"And I was a-goin' to fix it for him," he muttered once, "I was
a-goin' to fix that old busted jug in the morning. Godfrey, I must
'a' been flustered!" He shrilled in uncontrollable glee at the
recollection. And then again, later and far more gravely:
"I'm a-gittin' more religious every livin' day. I'm gittin' more
religious jest from standin' around and kinda watchin' how things is
made to work out right, jest when you've about decided that the Lord
ain't payin' as much attention to details as he might."
He knew that there had to be a light in the windows of the Tavern
office; he knew that he had to be in time. That was the finger of a
Something behind the whole day's developments which was directing it
all so masterfully. And because he was so certain of it all--because
he was positive that he was the agent who had been selected to mete
out justice at last--he found himself possessed of a greater courage
than he had ever known before as he clambered down from his seat and
mounted the worn steps.
A rush of chill air swept the group about the sprawling stove as
he opened the door and made each member lift his head, each after a
fashion that was startlingly indicative of the man himself. For
Judge Maynard wheeled sharply as the cold blast struck him--wheeled
with head flung back challengingly, and a harsh rebuke in every
feature--while old Dave Shepard turned and merely shivered. He just
shivered and flinched a little from the draft, appealingly. The
rest registered an ascending scale of emotions betwixt and between.
Just as he knew he would find them they sat. Judge Maynard had the
floor; and it was an easy thing to read that he had all but reached
the crisis of his recital. Any man could have read that merely from
the protest in the faces of the rest. And yet Old Jerry simply stood
there and swept the group with serene and dangerous geniality.
"Evenin', folks," he saluted them mildly.
His mildness was like a match to the fuse. Judge Maynard pounded his
fat knee with a fatter fist, and exploded thunderously:
"Shut that door!" he roared. "Shut that door!"
Old Jerry complied with amazing alacrity. The very panels shivered
with the force of the swing that slammed it close. The Judge should
have known right there--he should have read the writing on the
wall--and yet he failed to do that thing. Instead, he turned back once
more to his audience--back to his interrupted tale, and left Old Jerry
standing there before the door, ignored.
"As I was sayin'." He cleared his throat. "As I was sayin' when this
unnecessary interruption occurred, I realized right from the moment
when I opened the door and saw him standing there in front of me,
grinning, and his chin cut wide open, that there was something wrong.
I am a discerning man--and I knew! And it didn't take me long to
convince him--not very long!--that there were other communities which
would find him more welcome than this one. Maybe I was harsh--maybe I
was--but harsh cases require harsh remedies. And because he didn't
have the money, I offered to let him have enough to carry him out of
town, and something to keep him about as long as he'll last now, I'm
thinking, although that place of his isn't worth as much as the paper
to write the mortgage on.
"I knew it had come at last--but, at that, I didn't get anything that
I wanted to call real proof until after we'd drawn up the papers and
signed 'em, and were about ready to start back. Then, when we were
coming down the steps of the clerk's office, I got all the proof I
wanted, and a little more than that. He--he stumbled just about then,
and would have gone down on his face if I hadn't held him up. And he
was laughing out loud to himself, chuckling, with one fist full of
money fit to draw a crowd. And he pulled away from me just when I was
trying to force him into the buggy--pulled away and sort of leered up
at me, waving that handful of bills right under my nose.
"'Oh, come now, Judge,' he sort of hiccoughed, 'this ain't the way for
two old friends to part. This ain't the way for me to treat an old
friend who's given me this. I want to buy you something--I want to buy
you at least one drink--before I go. Come on, now, Judge. What'll you
have?' says he."
They had all forgotten Old Jerry's interruption; they had forgotten
everything else but the Judge's recital, that was climbing to its
climax. That room was very quiet when the speaker paused and waited
for his words to sink in--very quiet until a half-smothered giggle
broke the stillness.
There was an unholy glee in that mirth--a mocking, lilting note of
actual joy which rang almost profane at such a moment. Man for man it
brought that circle erect in the chairs; man for man they sat and
stared at the grotesque figure which was rocking now in a paroxysm of
laughter too real for simulation. In a breathless hush they turned
from the offender back to the judge, waiting, appalled, for the storm
to break.
Judge Maynard's round moon-face went purple. Twice he tried to speak
before he sat silent, annihilation in his eyes, until Jerry's outbreak
had subsided. Then he lifted one forefinger and pointed, with all the
majesty such a gesture could ever convey, to the empty chair--the
chair which Old Jerry should have been occupying in becoming silence
at that moment.
"Have you gone crazy?" he thundered. "Have you--or are you just
naturally witless? Or was there something you wanted to say? If there
isn't--if you've no questions to ask--you get over to that chair and
sit down where you belong!"
It was then that the rest of the circle realized that something had
gone wrong--most mightily wrong! According to all precedent, the
little, white-haired man should have shrunk back and cowered beneath
that verbal lash, and obeyed without a glance. They all realized that
there was imminent a climax unforeseen by all--all but the Judge; and
he was too blind with rage to see.
Very meekly Old Jerry bore his thundered rebuke--too meekly. But after
the judge had finished he failed to move; he merely stood there,
facing the town's great man. And in his attitude there was something
of infantile, derisive, sparrowlike impudence as he peered back into
the Judge's face--something that was very like the attitude of an
outraged, ruffled old reprobate of a parrot rearing himself erect.
Old Jerry made no haste. It was a thing which required a nice
deliberation. And so he waited--waited and prolonged the moment to its
last, sweetest second. Once more he chuckled, to himself this
time--just once, before he began to speak. That old Tavern office had
never been so deathly still before.
"A question?" he echoed at last, thoughtfully. "A question? Well,
Jedge, there was one thing I was a-goin' to ask you. Jest one triflin'
thing I was kinda curious to know. Why, I was a-goin' to ask you, back
a spell--What did you hev? It kinda interested me, wonderin' about it.
But now--now that I've heard your story in full, I reckon I'll hev to
change that question a mite. I reckon they ain't nothin' left but to
ask you--How many did you hev? How many, Jedge? For, Jedge, you're
talkin' most mighty wild tonight!"
And that silence endured--endured even after the huge man had
half-risen, purple features gone white, and then dropped heavily back
into his chair before that rigid figure in its sodden garments which
had turned from him toward the rest of the circle of regulars.
Old Jerry made his formal exit that night--he knew that he was
resigning his chair--but the thing was very cheap at the price.
[Illustration: "WHAT YOU NEED, GENTLEMEN, IS A TRIFLE WIDER READIN'--JUST
A TRIFLE! FOR YOU AIN'T BEIN' WELL POSTED ON FACTS!"]
"An' I reckon, too," he went on deliberately, and there was a
wicked fleer of sarcasm tinging the words, "I reckon I'll hev to
kinda apologize to you gentlemen for interruptin' your evenin's
entertainment, as you might say. I'm sorry I ain't able to remain,
for it's interestin'. I don't know's I've ever heard anything that
was jest as excitin' an' thrillin', but I've got something more
important needin' my attention this evenin'--meanin' that I ain't got
nothin' in particular that's a-callin' me! But it's no more'n my
plain duty for me to tell you this: You'd ought to follow the
papers a mite closer from now on. It's illuminatin'--it's broadenin'!
What you need, gentlemen, is a trifle wider readin'--jest a
trifle--jest a trifle! For you ain't bein' well posted on facts!"
Nobody moved. Nobody was capable of stirring even. Old Jerry bowed to
them from the doorway--he bowed till the water trickled in a stream
from the brim of his battered hat.
And this time, as he passed out, he closed the door very gently behind
him.
CHAPTER XI
It would have been hard for her to have explained just why it was so,
but Dryad Anderson had been sitting there in the unlighted front room
of the little once-white cottage before Judge Maynard's boxlike place
on the hill, watching hour after hour for that light to blink out at
her from the dark window of Denny Bolton's house on the opposite
slope. Ever since it had grown dark enough for that signal to be seen,
which had called across to her so many nights, she had been waiting
before the table in front of the window--waiting even while she told
herself that it could not appear. It was not Saturday night; there was
no real reason why she should be watching, unless--unless it was hope
that held her there.
Only in the last few hours since twilight had she admitted to herself
the possibility that such a hope lurked behind her vigil. Before then,
when the thought had first come to her that Denny might cry out to her
through the night, with that half-shuttered light, she had stifled it
with a savageness that left her shaking, panting and dizzy from its
bewildering intensity.
Time after time she told herself that it would go unheeded by her, no
matter how long or how insistently it beckoned, if by the hundredth
chance it should flare up beyond the shadows, but as minutes dragged
interminably by into equally interminable hours, the strained
fierceness of that whispered promise grew less and less knifelike in
its hardness--less and less assured.
Somehow, ever since the first light of that gray day had discovered
her sitting there in almost the same position in which she now sat,
eyes straining out across the valley, pointed chin cupped in her
palms, that fearful, almost insane passion which had held each nerve
and fiber of her taut as tight-stretched wire through the entire
sleepless night, had begun to give way to something even less easy to
endure.
All the terror which had checked her that evening when she swung the
door open and stood poised on the threshold, a low laugh of sheerest
delight in the costume she had worn across for him to see ready to
burst from parted lips--all the horror that had held her incapable of
motion until Denny had swung around and found her there, and lifted
his arms and attempted to speak, had given way, in the first hours
that followed, to a flaming scorn, a searing contempt for him and for
his weakness that had lost him his fight.
All through that night which followed her panic flight from the huge,
heavy-footed figure that had groped out for her, called to her, and
dropped asprawl her own small cloak in the doorway, Denny Bolton's
blood-soiled face and drunkenly reckless laugh had been with her,
feeding that rage which scorched her eyes beneath their lids--that
burned her throat and choked her.
Little drops of blood oozed out upon her lips--strangely brilliant
crimson drops against that colorless background--where her teeth sank
deep in the agony of disillusionment that made each pulse-beat a
sledge-hammer blow within her brain. Her small palms were etched blue
under the clenched fingers where the nails bit the flesh. And yet--and
yet, for all the agony of it which made her lift her blanched face
from time to time throughout the night--a face so terribly strained
that it was almost distorted--and set her gasping chokingly that she
hated him, hated him for a man who couldn't fight and keep on
fighting, even when the odds were great--when the light of that new,
dreary day had come streaking in across her half-bowed head, something
else began to take the place of all that bitterness and scorn.
And throughout the day she had still been struggling against it,
struggling with all the tense fierceness of which her spirit was
capable--her spirit that was far too big for the slim body that housed
it. Yet that thought could not be shaken off. She couldn't forget it,
couldn't wipe out the recollection of that great, gaping wound that
had dripped blood from his chin. She tried to close her eyes and shut
it out as she went from task to task that day, and it would not fade.
Somehow it wasn't that man at all whom she remembered as the afternoon
dragged by to its close; it wasn't the big-shouldered body nervelessly
asprawl upon the floor that filled her memory. Instead a picture of an
awkward, half-grown boy flashed up before her--a big, ungainly,
terribly embarrassed boy who turned from watching the mad flight of a
rabbit through the brush to smile at her reassuringly, even though his
face was torn raw from her own nails.
That was the point at which the tide of her chaotic thoughts began to
waver and turn. Long before she realized what she was doing she had
fallen to wondering, with a solicitude that made moist and misty once
more her tip-tilted eyes and softened the thin line of her lips,
whether or not that bruise had been washed out, cleansed and cleanly
bandaged.
When she did realize what that thought meant, it had been too long
with her to be routed. She was too tired to combat it, anyway, too
tired with the reaction of that long, throbbing night to do more than
wonder at herself. Twilight came and the gray mist that had been over
the hills for hours dissolved into rain. With the first hint of
darkness that the storm brought with it she began to watch--to peer
out of the window whenever her busy footsteps carried her past it, at
the bleak place across the hollow. Before it was fairly night she
began to understand that she was not merely watching for the light,
but hoping, praying wordlessly that it might shine. And when her work
was finished she had taken her place there, her slim body in its scant
black skirt and little white blouse hunched boyishly forward as always
across the table.
Even that girl who, after the hours which had been almost cataclysmic
for her, could scarcely have been expected to be able to comprehend it
clearly yet--even she read the meaning of the slackened cords of her
body, of her loosened lips and wet eyes. As long as she could she had
fed the flame within her soul--fed it with every bitter thought and
harsh judgment which her brain could evolve--and yet that flame had
slackened and smouldered and finally died out entirely. Self-shame,
self-scorn even, could not rekindle it.
Her lips were no longer white and straight and feverish with contempt;
they were damp and full again, and curved and half-open with
compassion. The ache was still there in her breast--a great gnawing
pain which it seemed at that moment time could never remove, but it
was no longer the wild hatred which made her pant with a desire to
make him suffer, too, just as she had suffered that night through.
The pain was just as great, but it was pity now--only pity and an
unaccountable yearning to draw that bruised face down against her and
croon over it.
In spite of the numbness, in spite of the lassitude which that
burnt-out passion had left behind in brain and body, she knew what it
meant. She understood. She had hated his weakness; she still hated his
lack of manhood which had made him fail her. That hatred would be a
long time dying now--if it ever did perish. But she couldn't hate
_him_! She looked that fact in the face, dumb at first at the
awakening. She couldn't hate him--not the man he was! There was a
distinction--a difference very clear to her woman-brain. She could
despise his cowardice; she could despise herself for caring still--but
the caring still went on. Half-vaguely she realized it, but she knew
the change had come. The girlishness was gone from it forever. She had
to care now as a woman always cares--not for the thing he was, but in
spite of it.
"I ought to hate him," she told herself once, aloud. "I know I ought
to hate him, and yet--and yet I don't believe I can. Why, I--I can't
even hate myself, as I did a little while back, because I still
care!"
It was a habit that had grown out of her long loneliness--those
half-whispered conversations with herself. And now only one conviction
remained. Again and again she told herself that she could not go to
meet him that night--could not go, even if he should call to her. And
that, too, she put into whispered words.
"Even if he lights the window, I can't--I couldn't! Oh, not tonight!
He won't--he won't think of it. But I couldn't let him touch
me--until--until I've had a little time to forget!"
But she was watching still--watching with small, gold-crowned head
nodding heavily, eyes half-veiled with sinking lids--when that
half-shaded window in the dark house glowed suddenly yellow with the
light behind it. She was still hoping, praying dumbly that it might
be, when Young Denny lifted the black-chimneyed lamp from its bracket
on the kitchen wall that night, after he had stood and listened with a
smile on his lips to Old Jerry's hurried departure, and carried it
into the front room which he scarcely ever entered except upon that
errand.
At first she did not believe. She thought it was only a trick of her
brain, so tired now that it was as little capable of connected thought
as her worn-out body was of motion. Hardly breathing she stared until
she saw the great blot of his body silhouetted against the pane for a
moment as he crowded between the lamp, staring across at her, she
knew.
She rose then, rose slowly and very cautiously as though she feared
her slightest move might make it vanish. Young Denny's bobbing
lantern, swinging in one hand as he crossed before the house and
plunged into the thicket that lay between them, was all that convinced
her--made her believe that she had seen aright.
"I can't go--I can't!" she breathed. And then, lifting her head,
vehemently, as if he could hear:
"I want to--oh, you know I want to! But I can't come to you
tonight--not until I've had a little longer--to think."
Almost before she had finished speaking another voice answered, a
soft, dreamy voice that came so abruptly in the quiet house that it
made her wheel like a startled wild thing. She had forgotten him for
the time--that little, stooped figure at its bench in the back room
workshop. For hours she had not given him a thought, and he had made
not so much as a motion to make her remember his presence. She could
not even remember when his sing-song, unending monologue had ceased,
but she realized then that he had been more silent that night than
ever before.
Earlier in the evening when she had lighted his lamp for him and set
out his lump of moist clay, and helped him to his place on the high
stool, she had thought to notice some difference in him.
Usually John Anderson was possessed of one or two unvarying moods.
Either he plunged contentedly into his task of reproducing the
multitude of small white figures around the walls, or else he merely
sat and stared up at her hopelessly, vacantly, until she put the clay
herself into his hands. Tonight it had been different, for when she
had placed the damp mass between his limp fingers he had laid it aside
again, raised astonishingly clear eyes to hers and shaken his head.
"After a little--after a little while," he had said. "I--I want to
think a little first."
It had amazed her for a moment. At any other time it would have
frightened her, but tonight as she stroked his bowed head, she told
herself that it was nothing more than a new vagary of his anchorless
mind.
But that same strangely clear, almost sane glow which had puzzled her
then was still there when she turned. It was even brighter than
before, and the slow words which had startled her, for all their
dreamy softness, seemed very sane as well.
"You have to go," John Anderson answered her faltering, half-audible
whisper. "You have to go--but you'll be back soon. Oh, so soon! And
I'll be safe till you come!"
Dryad flashed forward a step, both hands half-raised to her throat as
he spoke, almost believing that the miracle for which she had ceased
even to hope had come that night. And then she understood--she knew
that the bent figure which had already turned back to its bench had
only repeated her words, parrotlike; she knew that he had only pieced
together a recollection of the absence which her vigil before the
window had meant on a former occasion and repeated her own words of
that other night.
And yet her brain clamored that there was more behind it all than mere
witless repetition. John Anderson was smiling at her, too, smiling
like a benevolent wraith. She saw that his pile of clay was still
untouched, but there was no hint of petulant perplexity in his face,
nothing of the terrified impotence which the inactivity of his fingers
had always heralded before. He was just smiling--vaguely to be sure
and a little uncertainly--but smiling in utter contentment and
satisfaction, for all that.
Very slowly--wonderingly, she crossed to him and put both arms about
his white head and drew it against her.
"I think you knew," she said to him, unsteadily. "I think you are able
to understand better than I can myself. And I know, too, now. I do
have to go--I must go to him. But he need not even know, until I tell
him some day--that I was with him tonight."
The old man pulled away from her clasp, gently but very insistently.
And he nodded--nodded as though he had understood. She paused and
looked back at him from the doorway, just as she had always
hesitated. He was following her with his eyes. Again he shook his
head, just as positively as he might have, had he been the man he
might have been.
"Some day," he reiterated, serenely, "some day! And she'll know
then--some day I'll tell her--that I was with her tonight."
She had forgotten the rain. It was coming down heavily, and it was
dark, too--very, very dark. She stopped a while, as long as she dared,
and waited with the rain beating cold upon her uncovered head and bare
throat until her eyes saw the path a little more clearly. It took her
a long time to feel her way forward that night. And even when she came
within sight of Denny's lantern, even when she was near enough to see
him through the thicket ahead of her, in the little patch of light,
she had not decided what she meant to do.
But with that first glimpse of him squatting there in the small
cleared space it came to her what her course should be. She
realized that if it was an impossibility for her to go to him, she
could at least let him know she had been there--let him know that he
had not been entirely alone while he waited. She even smiled to
herself--smiled with wistful, half-sad, elfen tenderness as she, too,
huddled down without a sound, there in the wet bushes opposite him,
and decided how she would tell him.
Denny Bolton never quite knew how long he waited in the rain before he
was certain that there was no use waiting longer. More than half the
night had dragged by when he reached finally into the pockets of his
coat and searched for a scrap of paper. Watching from her place in the
thicket near him, she recognized the small white card which he
discovered--she even reached out one hand instinctively for her
invitation from the Judge, which she had told him had never arrived
and for which she had hunted in vain throughout the following days.
With an unaccountable gladness because he knew straining at her
throat, she watched him draw the lantern nearer and read again the
words it bore before he turned it over and wrote, laboriously, with
the thick pencil that he used to check logs back in the hills, some
message across its back.
It was a message to her, she knew; and she knew, too, that he was
going now. Deliberately she reached out then and found a rotten branch
beside her. Young Denny's head shot up as it cracked between her
hands--shot swiftly erect while he stared hard at that wall of
darkness which hid her. And swiftly as she fled, like some noiseless
night creature of the woods, his sudden, plunging rush almost
discovered her.
Back in the safety of the blackness she stood and saw him bend over
the place where she had been crouching; she saw him put his hand upon
the patch of dead ferns which her body had crushed flat, and knew that
he found it still warm. She even held up her face, as though she were
giving him her lips--she reached out her arms to him--when she saw him
rise from an examination of her foot-prints in the mold, smiling his
slow, infinitely grave smile as he nodded his head over what he had
seen.
Back over the path she had come she followed the dancing point of his
lantern, sometimes almost upon him, sometimes lagging far behind when
he stopped and strained his ears for her. All recollection of the
night before was gone from her mind, wiped out as utterly as though it
had never existed. Nothing but a great gladness possessed her, a joy
that amounted almost to mischievous glee whenever he stood still a
moment and listened.
Not until she had waited many minutes after he stooped and slipped the
card beneath the door did she come out from the cover of the woods.
But she raced forward mad
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