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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Once to Every Man, by Larry Evans
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Once to Every Man
+
+Author: Larry Evans
+
+Illustrator: Anton Otto Fischer
+
+Release Date: August 9, 2009 [EBook #29646]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS 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 madly then, and flung the door open, and stooped
+for it where it lay white against the floor.
+
+All the mischievous glee went from her face in that next moment. Bit
+by bit it faded before the advance of that same strained whiteness
+that had marred it, hours before. All the wistfulness that made her
+face so childlike, all the hunger that made the hurt in her breast
+came back while she read, over and over, the words which Denny had
+written for her across the back of her card, until she could repeat
+them without looking at it. And even then she only half-understood
+what they meant. Once she opened the door and peered out into the
+blackness, searching for the lantern that had disappeared.
+
+"Why--why he's gone! He came to tell me that he was going away," she
+murmured, dully. And then, still more dully:
+
+"And I didn't tell him I was sorry. I've let him go without even
+telling him how sorry I was--for the hurt upon his chin!"
+
+Perhaps it was the silence that made her turn; perhaps she simply
+turned with no thought or reason at all, but she faced slowly about at
+that moment, just in time to see John Anderson nod and smile happily
+at something he alone could see--just in time to hear him sigh softly
+once, before his arms went slack upon his work-bench and his head
+drooped forward above them.
+
+The bit of a card fluttered to the floor as both her tight-clenched
+fists lifted toward her throat. The softest of pitying little moans
+came quavering from her lips. She needed no explanation of what that
+suddenly limp body meant! And she understood better now, too, that
+untouched lump of clay upon the boards beside his bowed head. John
+Anderson's long task was finished. He had known it was finished, and
+had been merely resting tonight--resting content before he started
+upon that long journey, before he followed that face, tumbled of hair
+and uplifted of lip, which seemed always to be calling to him.
+
+The slim-bodied girl whose face was so like what that other woman's
+face had been went slowly across to him where he sat. After a while
+she slipped her arm about his wasted shoulders, just as she had done
+so often on other nights. A racking sob shook her when she first tried
+to speak--and she tried again.
+
+"You kept faith, didn't you, dear?" she whispered to him. "Oh, but you
+kept faith with her--right--right up to the end. Please God--please
+God, I may get my chance back again--to try to keep it, too. You've
+gone to her--and--and I'm glad! You waited a long time, dear, and you
+were very patient. But, oh, you've left me--you've left me all
+alone!"
+
+The tears came then. Great, searing drops that had been hopelessly
+dammed back the night before rolled down her thin cheeks. She stooped
+and touched the silvered head with her lips before she groped her way
+into the other room and found her chair at the table.
+
+"He knew I was there with him," she tried to whisper. "He knew I was,
+I know! But I wish I could tell him I'm sorry. Oh, I wish I could!"
+
+And Old Jerry found her so, head pillowed upon her outstretched arms,
+her hair in a marvelous shimmering mass across her little shoulders
+when he came the next morning, almost before the day was fairly begun,
+to tell her all the things there were for him to tell.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Monday morning was always a busy morning in Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth
+Street gymnasium; busy, that is to say, along about that hour when
+morning was almost ready to slip into early afternoon. The reason for
+this late activity was very easy to understand, too, once one realized
+that Hogarty's clientele--especially that of his Monday mornings--was
+composed quite entirely of that type of leisurely young man who rarely
+pointed the nose of his tub-seated raceabout below Forty-second
+Street, except for the benefits of a few rather desultory rounds under
+Hogarty's tutelage, a shocking plunge beneath an icy shower, and the
+all pervading sense of physical well-being resultant upon a half
+hour's kneading of none too firm muscles on the marble slabs.
+
+It was like Jesse Hogarty--or Flash Hogarty, as he had been styled by
+the sporting reporters of the saffron dailies ten years back, when it
+was said that he could hit faster and harder out of a clinch than any
+lightweight who ever stood in canvas shoes--to refuse to transfer his
+place to some locality a bit nearer Fifty-seventh Street, even when it
+chanced, as it did with every passing year, that he drew his
+patrons--at an alarmingly high rate per patron--almost entirely from
+far uptown.
+
+"This isn't a turkish bath," Flash Hogarty was accustomed to answer
+such importunities. "If you are just looking for a place to boil out
+the poison, hunt around a little--take a wide-eyed look or two! There
+are lots and lots of them. This isn't a turkish bath; it's a
+gymnasium--a _man's_ gymnasium!"
+
+That was his invariable formula, alike to the objections of the
+youthful, unlimited-of-allowance, more or less hard-living sons that
+it "spoils the best part of the week, you know, Flash, just running
+'way down here," and the equally earnest and far more peevish
+complaints of the ticker tired, just-a-minute-to-spare fathers that it
+cost them about five thousand, just to take an hour to work off a few
+pounds.
+
+But they kept on coming, in spite of their lack of time and Hogarty's
+calm refusal to consider their arguments--some of the younger men
+because they really did appreciate the sensation of flexible muscles
+sliding beneath a smooth skin, some of them merely because they liked
+to hear Hogarty's fluently picturesque profanity, always couched in
+the most delightfully modulated of English, when the activity of a
+particularly giddy week-end brought them back a little too shaky of
+hand, a little too brilliant of eye and a trifle jumpy as to pulse.
+Hogarty had a way of telling them just how little they actually
+amounted to, which, no matter how wickedly it cut, never failed to
+amuse them.
+
+The older generation dared do nothing else, even in the face of the
+ex-lightweight's scathingly sarcastic admiration of their constantly
+increasing waist-line--or lack of one. For their lines were largely a
+series of curves exactly opposite to those on which Nature had
+originally designed them.
+
+They continued to come; they ran down-town in closed town cars, padded
+heavily across the sidewalk like sad bovines going to the slaughter,
+to reappear an hour or two later stepping like three-year-olds,
+serenely, virtuously joyous at the tale of the scales which indicated
+a five-pound loss. And the Saturday and Sunday week-end out of town
+which presently followed, with the astoundingly heavy dinners that
+accompanied it, brought them back in a week, sadder even than before.
+
+Monday morning was always a very busy morning in Hogarty's--but never
+until along about noon. And because he knew how infallible were the
+habits of his patrons, Hogarty did not so much as lift his eyes to the
+practically empty gymnasium floor when a clock at the far side of the
+room tinkled the hour of eleven. The two boys who were busily
+scrubbing with waxing-mops the floor that already glistened like the
+unruffled surface of some crystal pool were quite as unconcerned at
+the lack of activity as was their employer. They merely paused long
+enough to draw one shirt sleeve across the sweat-beaded foreheads--it
+was a very early spring in Manhattan and the first heat was hard to
+bear--and went at their task harder than ever.
+
+Hogarty had one other reason that morning which accounted for his
+absolute serenity. From Third Avenue to the waterfront any one who
+was well-informed at all--and there was no one who had not at least
+heard whispers of his fame--knew that the thin-faced, hard-eyed,
+steel-sinewed ex-lightweight who dressed in almost funeral black and
+white and talked in the hushed, measured syllables of a professor
+of English, loved one thing even more than he loved to see his own
+man put over the winning punch in--say the tenth. It was common
+gossip that a set of ivory dominoes came first before all else.
+
+No man had ever ventured to interrupt twice the breathless interest
+with which Hogarty was accustomed to play his game. It did not promise
+to be safe--a second interruption. And Hogarty was playing dominoes
+this particular Monday morning, at a little round, green-topped table
+against the wall opposite the door, peering stealthily at the
+upturning face of each piece of a newly dealt hand, when the clock
+struck off that hour. But if Hogarty was oblivious to everything but
+the game, his opponent was far from being in that much to be envied
+state. Bobby Ogden yawned--yawned from sheer ennui--although he tried
+to hide that indication of his boredom behind a perfectly manicured
+hand, while he scowled at the dial.
+
+Ogden was one of the Monday morning regulars--one of the crowd which
+usually arrived in a visibly taut-nerved condition at an entirely
+irregular and undependable hour. An attack of malignant malaria,
+contracted on a prolonged 'gator hunt in the Glades, coupled with the
+equally malignant orders of his physician, alone accounted for his
+presence there at that unheard of o'clock.
+
+There were purplish semi-circles still painfully too vivid beneath
+his eyes; his pallor was still tinged with an ivory-like shade of
+yellow. And he fidgeted constantly in the face of Hogarty's happy
+deliberation, stretching his heliotrope silk-clad arms and tapping
+flat, heel-less rubber-soled shoes on the floor beneath the table in
+a fashion that would have irritated any but the blandly unconscious
+man across the table from him to a state of violence.
+
+Ogden's quite perfectly lined features were smooth with the smoothness
+of twenty years or so. His lack of stability and poise belonged also
+to that age and to a physique that managed to tilt the scale beam at
+one hundred and eighteen--that is, unless he had been forgetting
+rather more rashly than usual that liquids were less sustaining than
+solids, when one hundred and ten was about the figure.
+
+He was playing poorly that morning--playing inattentively--with his
+eyes always waiting for the hands to indicate that hour which was most
+likely to herald the arrival of the advance guard of the crowd of
+regulars. Hogarty himself, after a time, began to feel, vaguely, his
+uneasiness and lack of application to the matter in hand, and made
+evident his irritation by even longer pauses before each play. He
+liked a semblance of opposition at least, and he lifted his head,
+scowling a little at Ogden's last, most flagrant blunder, to find that
+his antagonist had moved without so much as looking at the piece he
+had slipped into position.
+
+The boy wasn't looking at the table at all. He sat twisted about in
+his chair, staring wide-eyed at the figure that had pushed open the
+street door and was now surveying the whole room with an astonishingly
+calm attention to detail. Ogden was staring, oblivious to everything
+else, and with real cause, for the figure that had hesitated on the
+threshold was like no other that had ever drifted into Hogarty's place
+before. His shoulders seemed fairly to fill the door-frame, for all
+that bigger men than he was had stood on that same spot and gone
+unnoticed because of size alone. And his waist appeared almost
+slender, and his hips very flat, merely from contrast with all that
+weight which he carried high in his chest.
+
+But it was not the possibilities of the newcomer's body that held
+Ogden's fascinated attention. In point of fact, he did not notice that
+at all, until some time later. Denny Bolton's long, tanned face was
+entirely grave--even graver than usual. Just a hint of wistfulness
+that would never quite leave them showed in his eyes and lurked in the
+line of his lips--an intangible, fleeting suggestion of expectation
+that had waited patiently for something that had been very long in the
+coming. And the black felt hat and smooth black suit which he wore
+finished the picture and made the illusion complete. His face and
+figure, even there in the doorway of Hogarty's Fourteenth Street
+place, could have suggested but one thing to an observant man. He
+might have been a composite of all the New England Pilgrim Fathers who
+had ever braved a rock-bound coast.
+
+And Bobby Ogden was observing. Utterly unconscious of Hogarty's
+threatening storm of protest, he sat and gazed and gazed, scarcely
+crediting his own eyes. Domino poised in hand, Hogarty had turned in
+preoccupied resignation back to a perplexed contemplation of whether
+it would be better to play a blank-six and block the game or a
+double-blank and risk being caught with a handful of high counters,
+when Ogden reached out and clutched him by the wrist.
+
+"Shades of Miles Standish!" that silk-shirted person gasped. "In the
+name of the Mayflower and John Alden, and hallowed Plymouth Rock,
+look, Flash, look! For the love o' Mike look, before he moves and
+spoils the tableau!"
+
+Hogarty lifted his head and looked.
+
+Denny Bolton's eyes had returned from their deliberate excursion about
+the gymnasium just in time to meet halfway that utterly impersonal
+scrutiny. For a long moment or two that mutual inspection endured;
+then the boy's lips moved--open with a smile that was far graver than
+his gravity had been--and he started slowly across the floor toward
+the table. Hogarty half rose, one hand outstretched as if to halt him,
+but for some reason which the ex-lightweight scarcely understood
+himself, he failed to utter the protest that was at his tongue's end.
+And Young Denny continued to advance--continued, and left in the rear
+a neatly defined trail where the heavy nails of his shoes marred the
+sacred sheen of that floor.
+
+Within arm's reach of the table he stopped, his eyes flitting
+questioningly from Hogarty's totally inscrutable face to the tense
+interest and enjoyment in Bobby Ogden's features, and back again.
+Hogarty's hard eyes could be very hard--hard and chilling as chipped
+steel--and they were that now. He was only just beginning to awake to
+a realization of that profaned floor, but the smile upon Denny's
+mouth neither disappeared nor stiffened in embarrassment before that
+forbidding countenance. Instead he held out his hand--a big,
+long-fingered, hard-palmed hand--toward the ex-lightweight proprietor.
+And when he began to speak there was nothing but simple interrogation
+in the almost ponderous voice.
+
+"I--I reckon," he said slowly, "that you must be Jesse Hogarty--Mr.
+Jesse Hogarty?"
+
+Flash Hogarty looked at him, looked at that outstretched hand--looked
+back at his steady eyes and the smile that parted his lips. And
+Hogarty did a thing that made even Bobby Ogden gasp. He bowed
+gracefully and reached out and silently shook hands. When he spoke,
+instead of the perfectly enunciated, picturesquely profane rebuke
+which the silk-shirted boy was waiting to hear, his voice was even
+smoother and softer, and choicer of intonation than usual.
+
+"Quite so," he stated. "Quite free from error or embarrassing mistake,
+sir. I am Mr. Jesse Hogarty. You, however, if I may be permitted that
+assertion, have me rather at a disadvantage, sir."
+
+He bowed again, once more elaborately graceful. Bobby Ogden hugged his
+knees beneath the table, for he knew from the very suavity of that
+reply all that was brewing. Hogarty's silken voice went on.
+
+"Regrettable, sir, and most awkward. You, no doubt, have no objection,
+however, to making the introduction complete?"
+
+The smile still hovered upon Denny's lips. Ogden noted, though, that
+it had changed. And he realized, too, that it had not been a
+particularly mirthful smile, even in the first place. Again Young
+Denny's eyes met those of the other boy for one moment.
+
+"I'm Denny Bolton," he replied just as deliberately. "Denny Bolton,
+from Boltonwood--or--or I reckon you've never heard of that place. I'm
+down from the hill country, back in the north," he supplemented.
+
+Hogarty turned away--turned back to the green-topped table and played
+the double-blank with delicate precision.
+
+"Of course," he agreed softly. "Quite right--quite right! And--er--may
+I inquire if it was something of importance--something directly
+concerning me--which has resulted in this neighborly call?"
+
+He did not so much as lift his eyes from the dominoes beneath his
+fingers. If he had he would have seen, as Ogden saw, that Denny's
+smile faded away--disappeared entirely. But when he replied the boy's
+voice was unchanged.
+
+"I don't know's it's particularly important to you," he answered.
+"That's what I came down for--to see. I was directed--back a day or
+two I was told that maybe if I looked you up you'd have some opening
+for me, down here. I was told you were looking for a--a good
+heavyweight fighter!"
+
+Bobby Ogden threw back his head to laugh. And instead he just sat
+there with his mouth wide open, waiting. He felt sure that there was a
+better moment coming. Hogarty fiddled with the dominoes and seemed to
+be considering that information with due deliberation and from every
+angle.
+
+"I see," he murmured at last. "Surely. Quite right--quite right! And I
+may, I believe, safely assure you that I have several fine openings in
+the establishment for young men--for just the right sort of young men,
+of course. May I--er--inquire if you wish employment by the--er--week,
+or just in your spare time, to put it so?"
+
+The question was icily sarcastic. Denny's answer came sharp upon its
+heels. His voice was just as measured, just as inflectionless as
+Hogarty's had been.
+
+"If you hire them here by the week," he said, "or for their spare
+time, I--I reckon I've come to the wrong establishment. I was only
+asking you for a chance to show you whether I was any good or not. I
+was told you'd be just as interested to find out as I was myself.
+Maybe--maybe I've made a bad mistake!"
+
+Bobby Ogden was sorry he had waited to laugh. There was a hardness in
+the big-shouldered figure's words that he did not like; a directly
+simple, unmistakable rebuke for the sneer concealed in Hogarty's
+question that could not be misinterpreted. And something utterly bad
+flared up in the lean-faced black-clad proprietor's eyes--something
+of enmity that seemed to Ogden all out of proportion with the
+provocation. All the smooth suavity disappeared from his speech just
+as chalk marks are wiped out by a wet sponge. And Hogarty came
+swiftly to his feet.
+
+"Maybe you were--maybe you did make a bad mistake!" he rasped out in a
+dead, colorless monotone that scarcely moved his lips. "But no man
+ever came into this place yet, and went out again to say he didn't get
+his chance. I know a few specimens who make a profession of pleading
+that. They're quitters--and they assay a streak of yellow that isn't
+pay dirt!"
+
+His voice dropped in register. It just missed being hoarse. With a
+rapidity that was almost bewildering he began to give orders to the
+two boys who were still phlegmatically waxing the floor. And the
+English-professor intonation was gone entirely.
+
+"You, Joe!" he called, "get out the rods; set 'em up and rope her off!
+Legs, you chase out and find Sutton, if he's not in back. You'll run
+into him at Sharp's, most likely. Tell him to come a-running. Tell him
+a new one's drifted in from the frontier--and thinks he needs to be
+shown. Move, you shrimp!"
+
+Before he had finished speaking he had started toward the locker
+rooms at the rear. Denny he ignored as though he did not exist. He
+went without a sound in his rubber-soled shoes. Bobby Ogden, waking
+suddenly from his trancelike condition, leaped to his feet and ran
+after him. Hogarty halted at the pressure of the boy's pink-nailed
+fingers on his arm and wheeled to show a face that was startlingly
+white and strained.
+
+"Why, you great big kid!" Bobby Ogden flung at him. "You big infant!
+You're really sore! Don't you know he didn't mean anything. He's only
+a kid himself--and you egged him into it!"
+
+"Is he?"
+
+From that gently rising inflection alone Ogden knew that interference
+was absolutely hopeless.
+
+"Is he? Well, he's old enough to seem to know what he wants. And he's
+going to get it--see? He's going to get it--and--get--it--good! No man
+ever flung it into my face that I didn't give him a chance--not and
+got away with it."
+
+Hogarty glanced meaningly down at the restraining hand upon his sleeve
+and Ogden removed it hastily. He stood in dismayed indecision until
+the ex-lightweight had disappeared before he turned toward Young
+Denny, who had been watching in silence his effort at intervention.
+Denny had not moved. Ogden's almost girlishly modeled face was more
+than apprehensive as he stepped up to him.
+
+"He's mad," he stated flatly. "You've got him peeved for keeps. And I
+guess you've let yourself in for quite a merry little session, too,
+unless--unless"--he hesitated, peering curiously in Denny's grave
+face, "unless you want to make a nice quiet little exit before he
+comes back with Sutton. You can, you know, and--and it may save you
+quite a little--er--discomfort in the long run. Sutton--well, the
+least I can say of Sutton is that he's inclined to be a trifle
+rough!"
+
+Ogden saw that slow smile returning; he saw it start far back in the
+steady eyes and spread until it touched the corners of the other boy's
+lips again.
+
+"You mean--leave?" Young Denny asked.
+
+Ogden nodded significantly.
+
+"That's just what I do mean--only a great deal more so!"
+
+"But I--I couldn't very well do that now--could I?"
+
+The silk-shirted shoulders shrugged hopelessly.
+
+"Well, since you ask me," he said, "judging from what I've already
+seen of your methods, I--I'd say most emphatically no. I've done all I
+can when I advise you that now is the one best hour to make your
+getaway. It wouldn't be exactly a glorious retreat from the field, but
+it wouldn't be so painful, either. Just remember that, will you? I'm
+to fit you out with some fighting togs, I suppose, if you'll just come
+along."
+
+He turned to follow in the direction which Hogarty had taken, and then
+paused once more.
+
+"Beg pardon for the omission, Mr. Bolton," he added, and he smiled
+boyishly. "My name's Ogden--Bobby Ogden. Glad to become acquainted
+with you, I'm sure. And now, if you will follow on, I'll do my best
+for you. Would you mind walking on your toes? You see, there are just
+two things most calculated to get Flash's goat. One of 'em's marring
+up his floor with heavy boots, and the other is butting in when he's
+playing dominoes. You couldn't have known it, of course, but he can't
+stand for either of them. And together I am afraid they have got you
+in pretty bad. You're sure you can't swallow your pride, and just beat
+it quietly while the chance is nice and handy? Maybe you ought to
+think of your family--no?"
+
+Denny's smile widened. He shook his head in refusal. He knew he was
+going to like Ogden--like him for the same reason that he had liked
+the fat, brown-clad newspaper man in Boltonwood--because of the
+charming equality of his attitude and the frankness in his eyes.
+
+"No," he decided, "I--I'm afraid I can't. I didn't mean to stir him up
+so, either, only--only I thought, just for a minute or two, that he
+was laughing at me. I think I'd rather stay and see it out. But you
+mustn't worry about me--I wouldn't if I were you."
+
+Again Ogden shrugged resignedly. On tiptoe Denny followed him to the
+locker-rooms in the rear, and at a word of direction began to remove
+his clothes. While he plunged head-foremost into a bin in search for a
+pair of white trunks, Ogden kept up a steady stream of advice
+calculated to save the other at least a small percentage of
+punishment.
+
+"Sutton's big," he exclaimed jerkily, head out of sight, "but he isn't
+fast on his feet. That's why they call him Boots. He steps around as
+though he had on waders--hip-high ones. But he's lightning hitting
+from close in--in-fighting they call it--where most big fighters don't
+shine. That's because he's had Flash's coaching. You want to keep away
+from him--keep him at arm's length, and maybe he won't do too much
+harm. I--I'd let him do all the leading, if I were you, and--and kind
+of run ahead of him." The voice came half-smothered from the cluttered
+bin of equipment. "That isn't running away from him because you're
+afraid, you understand. It's just playing him to tire him out, you
+know!"
+
+It was silent for a moment while Bobby Ogden burrowed for the
+necessary canvas shoes. Then a hushed laugh broke that quiet and
+brought the latter bolt upright. With the trunks in one hand and the
+rubber-soled slippers in the other, Ogden stood and stared, only half
+understanding that the big boy before him was laughing at him for his
+solicitude and trying to reassure him with that same mirth.
+
+"Funny, is it?" he snorted aggrievedly. "So very--very--funny? Well, I
+only hope you'll be able to laugh that way again--say even in a month
+or two!"
+
+"I wasn't laughing at you," Young Denny told him soberly. "I--I was
+just thinking how strange it seemed to have somebody worried over
+me--worried because they were afraid I might get hurt. Most little
+mix-ups I've gone into have worried folks--lest I wouldn't."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+When he had first looked up from the green-topped table and seen him
+standing there in the entrance of the gymnasium Ogden had only sensed
+the bigness of Denny Bolton's body--only vaguely felt the promise
+which his smooth black suit concealed. It was the face that had
+interested him most at that moment, and yet he had not even noticed
+the half healed cut that ran almost to the point of the chin. Young
+Denny's grave explanation of his quiet mirth caused him to look
+closer--made him really wonder now what had been its cause. There was
+a frankly inquisitive question half-formed behind his lips, but when
+he turned to find Denny sitting stripped to the waist, waiting for the
+garments which he held in his hands, he merely stood and stared. Bobby
+Ogden had seen many men stripped for the ring. It took more than an
+ordinary man to make him look even once--but he could not take his
+eyes off this boy before him. Once he whistled softly between his
+teeth in unconcealed amazement; once he walked entirely around him,
+exclaiming softly to himself. Then he remembered.
+
+"Here, get into these," he ordered abruptly, and thrust the things
+into Denny's waiting hands.
+
+While Denny was obeying he continued to circle and to admire
+critically.
+
+"Man--man!" he murmured. "But you're sure put together right!" He was
+silent for a moment while he punched back and shoulders with a
+searching thumb. "Silk and steel," he went on to himself. "And not a
+lump--not a single knot! Oh, if you only knew how to use it; if you
+only knew the moves, wouldn't we give Flash the heart-break of his
+life! Now wouldn't we?"
+
+Denny finished lacing his flat shoes and stood erect, and even Ogden's
+chattering tongue was silent. It was very easy now to see why that big
+body had seemed shoulder-heavy. From the shoulder points the lines ran
+unbroken, almost wedgelike, to his ankles. He was flat and slim in the
+waist as any stripling might have been. All hint of bulkiness was
+gone. He seemed almost slender, until one started to analyze each
+dimension singly, such as the breadth of his back, or the depth of his
+chest. Then one realized that it was only the slimness of fine-drawn
+ankles, the swelling smoothness of hidden sinews which created that
+impression. And Ogden's quick eye caught that instantly.
+
+"I'd have said one-ninety," he stated judicially. "At least as much as
+that, or a shade better, before you undressed. Now I'd put it
+under--what do you weigh, anyhow?"
+
+He slid the weight over the bar after Young Denny had stepped upon the
+white scales.
+
+"One sixty-five--sixty-eight--seventy, and a trifle over," he
+finished. "Man, but you're built for speed! You ought to be lightning
+fast."
+
+At that instant the boy called Legs opened the door and thrust in his
+head.
+
+"The chief says if you're coming at all," he droned apathetically,
+"you might just as well come now."
+
+Ogden threw a long bathrobe over his charge's shoulders as the latter
+started forward. He wanted to note the effect which the sudden display
+of that pair of shoulders and set of back muscles would have upon
+Flash Hogarty's temper. As they crossed the long room Denny's grave
+lack of concern was made to seem almost stolid in contrast with the
+heliotrope silk-shirted boy's excessive nervousness.
+
+"Now remember what I told you," he whispered hoarsely. "Keep away from
+him--keep away and let him do the rushing--for he's got a punch that's
+sudden death! You can tire him out. He's old and his wind is gone."
+
+The brass rods had been set up in their sockets in the floor and the
+space which they outlined in the middle of the room roped off and
+carpeted with a square of hard, brown canvas. The man called Boots
+Sutton was already in his corner, waiting, and his attitude toward the
+whole affair was very patently that of sheer boredom. He barely lifted
+his eyes as Young Denny crawled through the ropes at the opposite
+corner, behind the officiously fluttering Ogden. This was merely part
+of his every day's work; he spent hours each week either instructing
+frankly confessed amateurs or discouraging too-confident, would-be
+professionals. It was only because of the strangely venomous harshness
+with which Hogarty had given him his orders while he was himself
+dressing that he vouchsafed Denny even that one glance.
+
+"I want you to get him," Hogarty snarled. "I want you to get him right
+from the jump--and get him!--and keep on getting him! Either make him
+squeal--make him quit--or beat him to death!"
+
+But if Sutton failed to note the play of those muscles that bunched
+and quivered and ran like live things beneath the skin of the boy's
+back, when Bobby Ogden threw off the enveloping wrap with an
+ostentatious flourish and knelt to lace on his gloves, that disclosure
+was not entirely lost upon Hogarty. Watching from the corners of his
+eyes, Bobby saw him scowl and chew his lip as his head came forward a
+little. And immediately he turned to speak again in a whisper to
+Boots, squatting nonchalantly in his corner.
+
+"There's no need, mind, of being careless," he cautioned. "He--he
+might have a punch, you know, at that. Some of 'em do--a lucky one
+once in a while. Just watch him a trifle--and hand it to him good!"
+
+Sutton nodded and rose to his feet. Watch in hand, Hogarty vaulted the
+ropes, and Ogden, with a last whispered admonition, bundled up the
+bathrobe and scuttled from the ring.
+
+At that moment Young Denny's bulkily slender body was even more
+deceptive. Sutton, even when trained to his finest, would have
+outweighed him twenty pounds. Now that margin was nearer thirty, and
+added to that, he was inches less in height. He was shorter of neck,
+blocky, built close to the ground. And the span of his ankle was
+nearly as great as that of Denny's knee.
+
+Comparing them with detail-hungry eyes, Bobby Ogden saw, however, that
+from the waist up the boy's clean, swelling body totally shadowed the
+other's knotted bulk; he noted that, with arm outstretched, heel of
+glove against Sutton's chin, Denny's reach was more than great enough
+to hold the other away from him. Hard on the heels of that thought
+came the realization that that was a fine point of the game utterly
+outside of the boy's knowledge.
+
+It was quiet--oddly, peacefully quiet for a second--in that long room.
+Then in obedience to a nod from Hogarty the lanky boy called Legs
+languidly touched a bell, and all that peaceful silence was shattered
+to bits. Ogden shouted aloud, without knowing it, a shrill, dismayed
+cry of warning, as Sutton catapulted from his corner; he shouted and
+shut his eyes and winced as if that rushing attack had been launched
+at himself. But he opened them again--opened them at the sound of a
+sickening smash of glove against flesh--to see Denny blink both eyes
+as his whole body rebounded from that blow.
+
+Ogden waited, forgetting to breathe, for the boy to go down; he waited
+to see his knees weaken and his shoulders slump forward. But instead
+of shriveling before that pile-driver swing, he realized that Denny
+somehow was weathering the storm of blows that followed it; that
+somehow he had managed to keep his feet and was backing away, trying
+to follow faithfully his instructions.
+
+Just as Ogden had pictured it would be, it all happened. Foot by foot
+Sutton drove him around the ring. There was no opening for Denny to
+return a blow--nothing but a maze of battering fists to be blocked and
+ducked and covered. Even the speed, the natural speed of lithe muscles
+for which Bobby had hoped, and hopelessly expected, was entirely
+lacking in every motion. Heavy-footed, ponderous, Young Denny gave way
+before that attack. Sutton, always reputed slow, was terribly,
+brutally swift of movement in comparison with the boy's faltering
+uncertainty.
+
+Twice and a third time in the first minute of fighting Boots feinted
+aside his guard with what seemed childish ease and then drove his
+glove against the other's unprotected face. Time after time he
+repeated the blow, and at each sickening smack that answered the crash
+of leather against flesh Bobby Ogden gasped aloud and marveled. For at
+each jolt Denny merely blinked his eyes as he recoiled--blinked, and
+retreated a little more slowly than before.
+
+At the bell Ogden was through the ropes and dragging him to his
+corner. A little trickle of blood was gathering on the point of
+Denny's chin where the glove had opened afresh the half-healed cut on
+his cheek; he was shaking his head as he waved aside the wet towel in
+Ogden's hands.
+
+"Man, but you're some bear for punishment!" Ogden chattered, strangely
+weak himself beneath his belt. "If you only had a little speed--just a
+little! Why, he sent over a dozen to your chin that ought to have laid
+you away. But you're playing him right! You're working him, and if you
+can manage to hang on you'll get him in the end. Just keep away--keep
+away and let him wear himself out. But--oh, if you did have it. Just
+one real punch!"
+
+Young Denny continued to shake his head--continued to shake it
+doggedly.
+
+"Do--do you mean that that is as hard as he is likely to hit?" he
+queried slowly. "Do you mean--he was really trying--hard?"
+
+Ogden stopped urging the wet towel upon him and stood and gazed at him
+with something close akin to awe in his eyes.
+
+"Hard!" he echoed in a small voice. "Hard! How hard do you expect a
+man to hit?"
+
+"Then your plan was wrong," Young Denny told him. "Of course," he
+hastened to soften that abrupt statement, "of course it would work all
+right, only--only I'm not much good at that kind of fancy work. I--I
+just have to wade right in, when I want to do any damage, because I'm
+slow getting away from a man. I can't punch--not hard--when I'm
+backing off. But now I aim to show you how hard I expect a man to hit,
+just as soon as they ring that bell!"
+
+Hogarty was leaning over Sutton in the opposite corner, frowning and
+talking rapidly.
+
+"What's the matter, Boots?" he demanded anxiously. "Haven't lost your
+kick, have you?"
+
+Sutton gazed contemplatively down at his gloved hands and up again
+into his employer's face.
+
+"Who'd you say that guy was?" he countered. "Where's he blowed in
+from--again?"
+
+"A rube--down from the hills he called it. Just some come-on,"
+Hogarty repeated his former information, "who thinks because he's
+cleaned up main street and licked the village blacksmith that
+he's a world-beater. Why, Boots? You aren't worried, are you?"
+
+The contemplative gleam in Sutton's eyes deepened.
+
+"Because," he stated thoughtfully, "just because there's some
+mistake--or--or he's made of brass. I--I hit him pretty hard, Flash--and
+do you know what he done? Well, he blinked. He--blinked--at--me. I
+never hit any man harder."
+
+Hogarty's face had lost a little of its inscrutability. He flashed one
+sharp glance across at Young Denny in the other corner as he stepped
+back out of the ring and his frown deepened a little after that brief
+scrutiny. For the boy's body, squatting there, crouched waiting for
+the bell, was taut in every sinew, quivering with eagerness.
+
+"You just failed to place 'em right, I guess," he reassured Boots.
+"Take a little more time, and get him flush on the bone. You can slow
+up a little. He isn't even fast enough to run away from you."
+
+Again Hogarty nodded to the boy called Legs, and again the gong rang.
+Five minutes earlier it would have been hard for Bobby Ogden to have
+explained just what it was which he had half dreamed might lurk in
+those rippling muscles that bunched and ran beneath Denny's white
+skin. For want of a better name he had named it speed. And now, at the
+tap of the bell, he watched and recognized.
+
+Swift as was Sutton's savage rush across the canvas, he had hardly
+left his corner in the ropes before Young Denny was upon him. The boy
+lifted and sprang and dropped cat-footed in the middle of the ring,
+hunched of shoulder and bent of knee to meet the shocking impact. It
+was bewilderingly rapid--terrifyingly effortless--this explosive,
+spontaneous answer of every muscle to the call of the brain. Just as
+before, Sutton feinted and saw his opening and swung. Young Denny knew
+only one best way to fight; he knew only that he had to take a blow in
+order to give one, and Sutton's fist shot home against his unprotected
+chin. He blinked with the shock, just as he had blinked before, and
+swayed back a little. Sutton had swung hard--he had swung from his
+heels--and he was still following that blow through when Denny snapped
+forward again.
+
+It wasn't a long swing, but it was wickedly quick. From the waist it
+started, a short, vicious jolt that carried all the boy's weight
+behind it, and the instant that Denny whipped it over Sutton's chin
+seemed to come out to meet it--seemed almost to lift to receive it.
+And then, as his head leaped back, even before his body had lifted
+from the floor, the boy's other hand drove across and set him spinning
+in the air as he fell. He went down sideways, a long, crashing fall
+that dropped him limp in the corner which he had just left.
+
+For a moment Denny crouched waiting for him to rise. Then he realized
+that Sutton would not rise again--not for a time. He saw Hogarty leap
+over the ropes and kneel--saw the boy Legs rush across with ammonia
+and water--and he understood. Ogden was at his side, pounding him upon
+the shoulder and shrieking in his ear. His eyes lifted from the face
+of the fallen man to that of the heliotrope silk-shirted person beside
+him.
+
+"He's not really badly hurt, is he?" he inquired slowly. "I--I didn't
+hit him--too hard?"
+
+Ogden ceased for a moment thumping him on the back.
+
+"Hurt!" he yelped. "Didn't hit him too hard! Why, man, he's stiff,
+right now. He's ready for the coroner! Gad--and I was pitying you--I
+was----"
+
+Young Denny shook him off and crossed and knelt beside the kneeling
+Hogarty. And at that moment Sutton opened his eyes again and stared
+dully into the ex-lightweight's face. After a time recognition began
+to dawn in that gaze--understanding--comprehension. Once it shifted to
+Denny, and then came back again. He made several futile efforts before
+he could make his lips frame the words.
+
+Then, "Amateur," he muttered, and he managed to rip one glove from a
+limp hand and hurl it from him as he struggled to sit erect.
+"Amateur--hell! A-a-a-h, Flash, what're you tryin' to hand me?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Denny had begun to get back into his clothes, pausing now and then to
+dabble tentatively at the freshly broken bruise with the wet towel
+which Ogden had at last forced him to accept, when the door of the
+dressing-room opened, and Hogarty stepped briskly inside and closed
+the door behind him.
+
+The ex-lightweight ignored entirely the covertly delighted grin that
+lit up Bobby Ogden's features at his appearance. His own too-pale,
+too-thin lips were curved in a ghost of a smile; his face had lost all
+its dangerous tautness, but the greatest change of all lay there in
+his eyes. Their flaring antagonism had burnt itself out. And when
+Hogarty spoke it was once more in his smoothly perfect, delightfully
+measured, best professor-of-English style, for all that his opening
+remark was couched in the vernacular.
+
+"Mr. Bolton," he began to the boy sitting quiet before him, "it looks
+as though we would have to hand it to you--which I earnestly desire
+you to believe I am now doing, with both hands. It may eventually
+prove that I lost a most valuable assistant through this morning's
+little flurry. I am not quite certain yet as to that as Boots is not
+sufficiently himself to give the matter judicious consideration.
+
+"He still thinks I crossed him for the entertainment's sake--which is
+of little immediate importance. What I did come in for was to listen
+to anything at all that you may have to tell me. You'll admit, of
+course, that while your explanation as to your errand was strictly to
+the point, it was scarcely comprehensive. My own unfortunate temper
+was, no doubt, largely the cause of your brevity."
+
+He hesitated a moment, clearing his throat and gazing blankly at the
+grinning Ogden.
+
+"As Ogden here has of course told you, I'm--well, rather touchy when
+interrupted at my favorite pastime, and especially so when I am trying
+to get a few minutes relaxation with a pin-headed person who insists
+upon playing without watching the board.
+
+"But you spoke of wanting an opportunity of--er--entering the
+game professionally. I'm not admitting you're a world-beater,
+understand--or anything like that! You've just succeeded in
+putting away a man who was as formidable as the best of them,
+five years ago. And five years isn't today, by any means. I've been
+looking for a real possibility to appear for so long that I've
+grown exceedingly sensitive at each fresh failure. And yet--and yet,
+if you did have the stuff----!"
+
+Again he stopped and Denny, watching, saw the proprietor's face glow
+suddenly with a savage sort of exultation. His eyes, half-veiled
+behind drooping lids that twitched a little, went unseeingly over the
+boy's head as though they were visualizing a triumph so long
+anticipated that it had become almost a lost hope. Again that promise
+of something ominous blackened the pupils--something totally dangerous
+that harmonized perfectly with the snarl upon his lips.
+
+Hogarty's whole attitude was that of a man who wanted to believe and
+yet who, because he knew that the very measure of his eagerness made
+him doubly easy to convince, had resolved not to let himself accept
+one spurious proof. And all his skepticism was shot through and
+through with hate--a deadly, patient sort of hatred for someone which
+was as easy to see as it was hard for the big-shouldered boy to
+understand.
+
+There was craft in the ex-lightweight's bearing--a gentleness almost
+stealthy when he leaned forward a little, as if he feared that the
+first abrupt move or word on his part would frighten away that timid
+hope.
+
+"I believe that you said some one sent you. You--you did not mention
+the name?"
+
+Denny leaned over and picked up his coat from a chair beside the
+bench, searching the pockets until he found the card which the plump,
+brown-clad newspaper man had given him. Without a word he reached out
+and put it in Hogarty's hands.
+
+It bore Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth Street address across its face.
+Hogarty turned it over.
+
+"Introducing the Pilgrim," ran the caption in the cramped handwriting
+of Chub Morehouse's stubby fingers. And, beneath, that succinct
+sentence which was not so cryptic after all:
+
+"Some of them may have science, and some of them may have speed, but
+after all it's the man who can take punishment who gets the final
+decision. Call me up, if this ever comes to hand."
+
+Very deliberately Hogarty deciphered the words, lifted a vaguely
+puzzled face to Young Denny, who waited immobile--and then returned
+again to the card. He even nodded once in thorough appreciation of the
+title which Morehouse had given the boy; he smiled faintly as he
+remembered Denny as he had stood there in the entrance of the big
+room, a short while before, and realized how apt the phrase was. Then
+he began to whistle, a shrill, faint, monotonous measure, the
+calculating glitter in his eyes growing more and more brilliant.
+
+"So!" he murmured thoughtfully. "So-o-o!"
+
+And then, to Denny:
+
+"Was there--did he make any comment in particular, when he gave you
+this?"
+
+The boy's eyes twinkled.
+
+"He--made several," he answered. "He said that there was a man at that
+address--meaning you--that would fall on my neck and weep, if I
+happened to have the stuff. And he warned me, too, not to think that
+Jed The Red fought like a school boy, just because he was a
+second-rater--because he didn't, nothing like that!"
+
+Hogarty laughed aloud. That sudden, staccato chuckle was almost
+startling coming from his pale lips. It hushed just as quickly as it
+had begun.
+
+"Jed The Red, eh?" he reiterated softly, and he began tapping the card
+with his fingertips. "I see, or at least I am commencing to get a
+glimmer of those possibilities which Mr. Morehouse may have had in
+mind. And now I think the one best thing to do would be to call him
+up, as he has here requested. As soon as you finish dressing Ogden
+here will show you the rest of the works, if you'd care to look around
+a little. It is entirely likely that we shall want to talk with you
+directly."
+
+He wheeled abruptly toward Ogden who had been listening without a
+word, the broad grin never leaving his lips. It was the silk-shirted
+boy to whom Hogarty addressed the rest of that sentence.
+
+"And you," he said, and his voice shed with astounding completeness
+all its syllabled nicety. "You try to make yourself useful as well as
+pestilential. Get him a bit of adhesive for that cut. It looks as bad
+as though a horse had kicked him there.
+
+"And the rest of your mob will be swarming in here in a few minutes,
+too. You can tell them that Sutton is--er--indisposed this morning,
+and that they'll have to play by themselves."
+
+He nodded briefly to Denny and opened the door. But he stopped again
+before he passed out.
+
+"There's one other question, Mr. Bolton," he said over his shoulder.
+"And please believe that I am not usually so inquisitive. But I'm more
+than a little curious to know why you did not present this card
+first--and go through the little informal examination I arranged for
+you afterward? It would have insured you a far different reception.
+Was there any special reason, or did you just overlook it?"
+
+Denny dabbed again at the red drop on his chin.
+
+"No, I didn't exactly forget it," he stated ponderously. "But, you
+see, I kind of thought if I just told you first that I wanted to see
+if I had any chance, you wouldn't make any allowances for me because
+I----"
+
+Hogarty's second nod which cut him short was the quintessence of crisp
+satisfaction.
+
+"I understand," he cut in. "Perfectly! And quite right--quite right!"
+
+The ex-lightweight proprietor was sitting with his chin clasped in
+both palms, still staring at the half facetious words of introduction
+which the plump newspaper man had penciled across that card, when the
+door of the small office in the front of the gymnasium was pushed open
+a crack, some scant fifteen minutes after his peremptory summons had
+gone out over the wire, and made him lift his head.
+
+His eyes were filmed with a preoccupation too profound to be dispelled
+by the mock anxiety upon the chubby round countenance which Morehouse
+thrust through that small aperture between door and frame, or his
+excessively overdone caution as he swung the door wider and tiptoed
+over the threshold, to stand and point a rigidly stubby finger behind
+him at the trail of nail prints which Young Denny's shoes had left
+across the glistening wax an hour or so earlier.
+
+"Jesse," he whispered hoarsely, "some one has perpetrated here upon
+the sacred sheen of your floor a dastardly outrage! I merely want you
+to note, before you start running the guilty one to earth, that I am
+making my entrance entirely in accordance with your oft-reiterated
+instructions. I am not he!"
+
+For all the change which it brought about in Hogarty's face that
+greeting might have been left unspoken. He vouchsafed the fat man's
+elaborate pantomime not so much as the shadow of a smile, nodded once,
+thoughtfully, and let his eyes fall again to the card between his
+elbows on the table-top.
+
+"Come in, Chub," he invited shortly. "Come in." And as a clamor of
+many voices in the outer entrance heralded the arrival of the rest of
+Ogden's crowd: "Here comes the mob now. Come in and close the door."
+
+Morehouse, still from head to toe a symphony in many-toned browns,
+shed every shred of his facetiousness at Hogarty's crisply repeated
+invitation. He closed the door and snapped the catch that made it fast
+before he crossed, without a word, and drew a chair up to the opposite
+side of the desk.
+
+"Your hurry call just caught me as I was leaving for lunch," he
+explained then. "And I made pretty fair time getting down here, too.
+What's the dark secret?"
+
+The black-clad proprietor lifted his lean jaw from his hands and gazed
+long and steadily into the newspaper man's eyes, picked up the bit of
+pasteboard which bore the latter's own name across its front and
+flipped it silently across the table to him. Morehouse took it up
+gingerly and read it--reversed it and read again.
+
+"Nice little touch, that," he averred finally. "Rather neat and tasty,
+if I do say it myself. 'Introducing The Pilgrim!' Hum-m-m. You can't
+quite appreciate it of course, but--oh, Flash, I wish you could have
+seen that big boy standing there in the door of that little backwoods
+tavern, just as I saw him, about a week ago! Why, he--he was----"
+
+"He's come!" Hogarty cut in briefly.
+
+Morehouse's chin dropped. He sat with mouth agape.
+
+"Huh?" he grunted. "He's--he's come where?"
+
+Where his facetiousness had failed him Morehouse's round-eyed
+astonishment, a little tinged with panic, was more than successful.
+Hogarty permitted himself to smile a trifle--his queer, strained
+smile.
+
+"He is here," he repeated gravely, and the words were couched in his
+choicest accents. "He came in, perhaps, an hour ago. That is his
+monogramed trail across the floor which caught your eye. Oh, he's
+here--don't doubt that! I'll give you a little review of the manner of
+his coming, after you tell me how you ever happened to send him--why
+you gave him that card? What's the answer to it, Chub?"
+
+That same light of savage hope and cruelly calculating enmity, all so
+strangely mixed with a persistent doubt, which Young Denny had seen
+flare up in the ex-lightweight's eyes a little while before, back in
+the dressing-room, began to creep once more across Hogarty's face.
+
+"You know how long I've been waiting for one to come along, Chub," he
+went on, almost hoarsely. "You know how I've looked for the man who
+could do what none of the others have done yet, even though he is only
+a second-rater. Twice I thought I had a newcomer who could put The Red
+away--and put him away for keeps--and I just fooled myself because I
+was so anxious to believe. I've grown a trifle wary, Chub, just a
+trifle! Now, I'd like to hear you talk!"
+
+Morehouse sat and fingered that card for a long time in absolute
+silence--a silence that was heavy with embarrassment on his part. He
+understood, without need of explanation, for whom that chill hatred
+glowed in the spare ex-lightweight's eyes--knew the full reason for
+it. And because he knew Hogarty, too, as few men had ever come to know
+him, he had often assured himself that he was thankful not to be the
+man who had earned it.
+
+That knowledge had been very vividly present when, a few days
+before, on the platform of the Boltonwood station, he had requested
+Denny Bolton to give him back his card for a moment, after listening
+to the boy's grave explanation of the raw wound across his cheek,
+and on a quite momentary impulse written across its back that short
+sentence which was so meaty with meaning. Every detail of Hogarty's
+country-wide search for a man who could whip Jed The Red was an open
+secret, so far as he was concerned; he was familiar with all the
+bitterness of every fresh disappointment, but he had never seen
+Hogarty's face so alive with exultant hope as it was at that moment.
+
+And Morehouse was embarrassed and sorry, and ashamed, too, of what
+seemed now must have been a weak surrender to an impulse which, after
+all, could have been born of nothing but a too keen sense of humor.
+Hogarty's face was more than eager. It was white and strained.
+
+"Flash," he began at last, ludicrously uncomfortable, "Flash, I'm
+sorry I wrote this, for I always told you that if I ever did send any
+one to you he'd be a live one and worth your trouble. Right this
+minute I can't tell why I did it, either, unless I am one of those
+naturally dangerous idiots with a perverted sense of what is really
+funny. Or maybe I didn't believe he'd ever get any farther from home
+than he was that morning when I gave him this card. That must have
+been it, I suppose. Because I never saw him in action. Why, I never so
+much as saw him kick a dog!
+
+"I'm telling you because I don't want you to be disappointed
+again--and yet I have to tell you, too, that right at the time I wrote
+this stuff, Flash, just for a minute or two, I believe I did almost
+think he might be an answer to your riddle. Maybe that was because he
+had already licked Jed The Red once, and I should judge, made a very
+thorough job of it at that. That must have influenced me some. But let
+me tell you all the story and maybe you'll understand a little
+better--something that I can't say for myself right at this very
+instant."
+
+Morehouse began at the very beginning, looking oftener at the card
+between his fingers than at Hogarty's too brilliant eyes, which were
+fairly burning his face.
+
+"In the first place, Flash," he went on, "you know as well as I do
+that The Red isn't a real champion and never will be. He has the build
+and the punch, and he's game, too--you'll have to hand him that. But
+stacked up against the men who held the title ten years ago he'd last
+about five rounds--if he was lucky. I don't know why that is, either,
+unless he is so crooked at heart that he loses confidence even in
+himself when he has to face a real man. But the public at this minute
+thinks he is as great as the greatest. The way he polished off The
+Texan had convinced them of that--and we--well, the paper always tries
+to give them what they want, you know.
+
+"Now that was the reason I ran up north last week, after I'd got a tip
+that Conway hailed originally from a little New England village back
+in the hills--one of those towns that are almost as up-to-date today
+as they were fifty years ago. It looked like a nice catchy little
+story, which I will, of course, admit I could have faked just as well
+as not. But it was the cartoons I wanted. You can't really fake
+them--not after you've once known the real thing. And as it happens I
+have known it, for I came from a village up that way myself.
+
+"And, then, I was curious, too. I've always had a private opinion that
+if chance hadn't pitchforked Conway into the prize-ring he'd have made
+a grand success as a blackjack artist or a second-story man. But I
+wanted the pictures, and it wasn't a very difficult matter either to
+get them. You see I knew just where I'd find what I wanted, and things
+panned out pretty much as I thought they would.
+
+"It didn't take more than a half hour to spread the report that Conway
+was practically the only really famous man in the country today, and
+in a fair way to make his own home town just as celebrated. It may
+sound funny to you, for you don't know the back-country as I do, but
+just that short article in the daily, coupled with a few helpful hints
+from me that I was looking for all the nice, touching incidents of his
+boyhood days, with the opinions of the oldest inhabitants, and maybe a
+few of their pictures to be used in a big Sunday feature, brought them
+all out: the old circle of regulars which always sits around the
+tavern stove nights, straightening out the country's politics and
+attending strictly to everybody's affairs but their own.
+
+"Eager? Man, it was a stampede! I reckon that every male inhabitant
+within a radius of five miles was there when I opened the meeting with
+a few choice words--every man but one, and he comes in just a little
+later in this tale. They surely did turn out. It was as perfect a
+mass meeting as any I've ever seen, but the crowd itself didn't get
+much of a chance to talk--not individually anyhow. They were simply
+the chorus of 'ayes' which the town's big man paused now and then for
+them to voice.
+
+"He did the talking, Flash. They called him 'Judge'--they most always
+do in those towns. He most certainly monopolized the conversation, and
+while he gave his monologue, I sat and got the best of them down on
+paper. They thought I was taking notes. I'll show you his picture some
+day. He's the meanest man I ever met yet--and I've met a few!
+Puffy-faced and red, and too close between the eyes. Fat, too! Somehow
+I'm ashamed of being plump myself, since meeting him.
+
+"He did all the talking, and from the very first time he opened his
+mouth I knew he was lying. You can always tell a professional liar; he
+lies too smoothly, somehow. Well, to judge from his story Conway was
+the only unspotted cherub child that had ever been born and bred in
+that section. Oh, yes, _he'd_ seen the promise in Conway; _he_ knew
+that Conway was to be the pride and joy of the community, right from
+the first. _He'd_ always said so! Why, _he_ was the very man who had
+given him his first pointers in the game, when he was cleaning up all
+the rest of the boys in town, just by way of recreation. If I'd never
+had a suspicion before I'd have known just from those slick sentences
+of his that Conway had never been anything in that village but a
+small-sized edition of the full-blown crook he is today.
+
+"But I didn't have any reason to contradict him, did I? He was doing
+all that I could ask, and more. For there wasn't a man in that whole
+crowd who dared to sneeze until he got his cue from the Judge. But
+that fat man got his jolt finally, just the same, and got it good,
+too.
+
+"He had just finished telling how Conway had cleaned up the village
+kids, irrespective of size, whenever he felt the need of exercise, and
+was looking around at the circle behind him to give them a chance to
+back him up, when it happened. I told you a minute ago that I wished
+you could have seen that boy, as I saw him that night, standing there
+in that tavern doorway. You see, he'd come in so quietly that nobody
+had heard him--come in just in time to hear the Judge's last words.
+And when the Judge turned around he looked full into that boy's eyes.
+
+"Oh, he got his, good and plenty! I didn't watch him very closely
+because it was hard for me to take my eyes off the white face of that
+boy at the door. But I did see that he went pretty nearly purple for a
+minute, and I heard him gurgle, too, he was that surprised, before he
+caught his breath. Then he stuck out one hand and tried to bluff it
+out.
+
+"'There's one of 'em, right now,' he sang out; but he should have
+known that a man who's sure of his ground doesn't have to shout to
+make his point. 'There's Young Denny Bolton,' he said, 'who went to
+school with him, right here in this town. _Ask him_ if Jeddy Conway
+was pretty handy as a boy!' And he laughed, Flash--commenced to
+chuckle! Oh, there was no misunderstanding what he meant to insinuate.
+'Ask him--but maybe he's still a little mite too sensitive to talk
+about it yet--eh, Denny?'
+
+"He thought he could bluff it--bluff me, with that boy standing there
+in the doorway calling him a liar as if I didn't know it all, yet at
+that minute I couldn't help but ask that boy a question. I think it
+was mostly because I wanted to hear what the voice of a man with a
+face like his would sound like, for he hadn't opened his lips to
+answer that fat hypocrite's insinuation.
+
+"So I asked him if he had known Conway well--asked him if he had had a
+few set-to's with him himself. I'm not going to forget how he looked
+when he turned toward me, either. I'm not going to forget the look on
+his face as he swung around. And I'm remembering his voice pretty
+fairly well, too, right now!
+
+"'Maybe,' he answered me, and he almost drawled the words. 'Maybe I
+did,' he said.
+
+"Why, Flash, he couldn't have said more if he had talked for a week.
+He'd said all there was to say, now, hadn't he? But it let the Judge
+out, just the same, for he just gave the circle behind him the the
+high sign and set the crowd to laughing for a minute or two, until the
+tension was relieved. I didn't laugh myself. There didn't seem to be
+much of a joke about it after seeing that boy's eyes. It was
+Bolton--Young Denny, they called him--and I got his story, their side
+of it at least, after he shut the door behind him.
+
+"It's another thing I'd be more likely to understand than you would,
+Flash, because you've never lived in a village like that, and I have.
+Back a hundred years or so the first settlement had been named for his
+family--Boltonwood, they'd called it--but I guess the strain must have
+petered out. From all I could gather the Boltons had been drinking
+themselves to death with unfailing regularity and dispatch for several
+generations back, and I heard a choice detailed description, too, of
+the way the boy's own father had made his final exit--heard it from
+that moon-faced leading citizen who did all the talking--that made me
+want to kick him in the face. I don't know yet why I didn't. I was
+sitting on the tavern desk with my feet on a level with his face. I
+should have bashed him a good one. It's one of the lost opportunities
+which I'll always regret, unless maybe I take a Saturday off some day
+and run up and beat him up proper!
+
+"He gave me a nice little account of how the boy's dad had gone over,
+screaming mad, with the town's elite standing around saying, 'I told
+you so,' and that big scared kid kneeling beside his bed, trying to
+pray--trying to make it easier for him.
+
+"Did you ever see a flock of buzzards circling, Flash, waiting for
+some wounded thing beneath them to die? No? Well, I have, and it isn't
+a pretty sight either. That was what they made me think of that night.
+And I learned, too, how they'd been waiting ever since for that boy to
+go the way his father had traveled before him; they even told me that
+the same old jug still stood in the kitchen corner, and would have
+pointed out his tumble-down old place on the hill, where they had let
+him go on living alone, only it was too dark for any one to see.
+
+"Odd, now wasn't it? But it didn't come to me at that moment. I never
+gave it a thought that there was a man who had licked Conway once and
+might do it again. But I didn't forget him; I wanted to, that night,
+but I couldn't. And I guess I was still thinking about him when some
+one touched my arm the next morning, while I was waiting for the
+train, and I turned around and found him standing there beside me.
+
+"Flash, have you noticed how grave he is--kind of sober-quiet? Have
+you? That comes from living too much alone. And he's only a kid, after
+all--that's all, just a kid. He startled me for a moment, but the
+minute I looked at him that morning I knew he had something on his
+mind, and after I'd tried to make it a little easier for him I gave
+him a chance to talk.
+
+"He had a big raw welt across one cheek--a wicked thing to look at!
+You've noticed it, I see. Well, he stood there fingering it a little,
+trying to think of a way to begin gracefully. Then he got out the
+paper with the account of Jed The Red's last go in it and jumped right
+into the middle of all that was bothering him. He hunted out the
+statement of Conway's share of the purse and asked me if it was true.
+I told him it was--that I'd written it myself. And then he asked me,
+point blank, how _he_ could get a chance at Conway. He--he said Conway
+had never been able to whip him, Flash--said he didn't believe he ever
+could!
+
+"Now, I'm sentimental--I know that. But I manage to keep my feet on
+the ground now and then just the same. And so I want to say right
+here that it wasn't his words that counted with me. Why, I'd have
+laughed in his face only for the way he said them! As it was, I said
+too much. But I thought of you then--I couldn't help it, could I? It
+hit me smash between the eyes! His face had been reminding me of
+something--something I couldn't place until that minute. Flash, do
+you know what he made me think of? Do you? Well, he looked like a
+halftone print of the Pilgrim Fathers--the kind that they hang on the
+walls in the district schools. And it got me--got me!--maybe you
+know why. I don't. But I wrote it on this card, under your address,
+and gave it to him.
+
+"I would have laughed at him only he was so mighty grave and quiet.
+One doesn't make a practice of laughing at men who are as big as he
+is--not when they carry themselves like that. I kept my funny feelings
+to myself, if I had any, while I spent a minute or two sizing him up.
+And that brought me back to his chin--back to that big, oozing cut. I
+had been waiting for an opportunity to ask him about it, and didn't
+know myself how to go about it. Just from that you can realize how he
+had me guessing, for it takes quite some jolt to make me coy. So I
+followed his own lead finally and blurted the question right out,
+without any fancy conversational trimmings, and he told me how it had
+happened.
+
+"One of his horses had kicked him. You look as though you could have
+guessed it yourself! He didn't tell you, did he, Flash? No-o-o? Well,
+that was it. He said he had gone blundering in on them the night
+before, to feed, without speaking to them in the darkness. It isn't
+hard to guess what had made him absent-minded that night. You can't
+know, just from seeing it now, how bad that fresh cut was, either. It
+looked bad enough to lay any man out, and I told him so. But he said
+he had managed to feed his horses just the same--he'd worked them
+pretty hard that week in the timber!
+
+"It wasn't merely what he said, you see; it was the way he said it.
+I've made more fuss before now over pounding my finger with a tack
+hammer. And I did a lot of talking myself in that next minute or two.
+A man can say a whole lot that is almost worth while when he talks
+strictly to himself. It wasn't alone the fact that he had been able to
+get back on his feet and keep on traveling after a blow that would
+have caved in most men's skulls that hit me so hard. The recollection
+of what his eyes had been like that night before, when he had handed
+the Judge the lie without even opening his lips, helped too--and the
+way he shut his mouth, there on the station platform, when I gave him
+an opening to say his little say concerning the village in general. He
+just smiled, Flash, a slow sort of a smile, and never said a word.
+
+"Man, he knew how to take punishment! Oh, don't doubt that! I realized
+right then that he had been taking it for years, ever since they had
+counted his father out, with the whole house yelling for the stuff to
+get him, too. He'd been hanging on, hoping for a fluke to save him.
+He'd been hanging on, and he didn't squeal, either, while he was doing
+it. Not--one--yip--out--of--him!
+
+"So I made him give me back the card and I wrote the rest of this
+stuff across the back of it. And again I'll tell you, Flash, right
+now, I'm not sure why I did it. But I'll tell you, too, just as I told
+myself a few mornings ago, back there on that village station
+platform, that if I were Jed The Red and I had my choice, I wouldn't
+choose to go up against a man who had been waiting five years for an
+opening to swing. No--I would not! For he's quite likely to do more or
+less damage. I never thought he'd turn up, and I don't know whether I
+am sorry or not. But now that he's here, what are you going to do
+about it?
+
+"It's my fault, but whatever you do I want to ask you not to do one
+thing. I want you to promise not to try to make a fool of the boy,
+Flash? You're, well--a little bit merciless on some of 'em, you know.
+It's not his fault, and I--why, damn it, I haven't met a man in years
+I like as I do that big, quiet, lonesome kid! Now, there's your story.
+It explains the whole thing, and my apologies go with it. What are you
+going to do?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Jesse Hogarty had been listening without moving a muscle--without once
+taking his two brilliant eyes from Morehouse's warm face--even when
+Morehouse refused to look back at him as he talked.
+
+"'Introducing The Pilgrim,'" he murmured to himself, after a moment of
+silence, and the professor of English accent could not have been more
+perfect, "The Pilgrim! Hum-m-m, surely! And a really excellent name
+for publicity purposes, too. It--it fits the man."
+
+Then he threw back his head--he came suddenly to his feet, to pace
+twice the length of the room and back, before he remembered. When he
+reseated himself he was gnawing his lip as if vexed that he had showed
+even that much lack of self-control. And once more he buried the point
+of his chin in his hands.
+
+"Do, Chub?" he picked up the other's question silkily. "What am I
+going to do? Well, I believe I am going to pay my debts at last. I
+think I am going to settle a little score that has stood so long
+against me that it had nearly cost me my self-respect."
+
+That lightning-like change swept his face again, twisting his lips
+nastily, stamping all his features with something totally bad. The man
+who had never been whipped by any man, from the day he won his first
+brawl in the gutter, showed through the veneer that was no thicker
+than the funereal black and white garb he wore, no deeper than his
+superficially polished utterance which he had acquired from long
+contact with those who had been born to it.
+
+"I'm going to pay my debts," he slurred the words dangerously, "pay
+them with the same coin that Dennison slipped to me two years ago!"
+
+Little by little Morehouse's head came forward at the mention of that
+name. It was of Dennison that the plump newspaper man had been
+subconsciously thinking ever since he had entered Hogarty's immaculate
+little office; it was of Dennison that he always thought whenever he
+saw that bad light kindling in the ex-lightweight's eyes. Dennison was
+the promoter who had backed Jed The Red from the day when the latter
+had fought his first fight.
+
+And, "You don't mean," he faltered, "Flash, you don't mean that you
+think that boy can stop----"
+
+Hogarty's thin voice bit in and cut him short.
+
+"Think?" he demanded. "Think? I don't have to think any more! I
+know!"
+
+For a second he seemed to be pondering something; then he threw up his
+head again. And his startlingly sudden burst of laughter made
+Morehouse wince a little.
+
+"Don't make a fool of him, Chub?" he croaked. "Be merciful with the
+boy! Man, you're half an hour late! I did my best. Oh, I'm bad--I know
+just how bad I can be, when I try. But he called me! Yes, that's what
+he did--he as much as told me that I wasn't giving him a chance to get
+his cards on the table. So I ran him up against Sutton. And I did more
+than that. I told Boots to get him--told him to beat him to death--and
+I meant it, too! And do you know what happened? Could you guess? Well,
+I'll tell you and save you time.
+
+"He went in and took enough punishment from Boots in that first round
+to make any man stop and think. He put up the worst exhibition I ever
+saw, just because he was trying to fight the way Ogden had coached
+him, instead of his own style. That was the first round; but it didn't
+take him very long to see where he had been wrong. There wasn't any
+second round--that is, not so that you could really notice it.
+
+"He was waiting for the bell, and the gong just seemed to pick him up
+and drop him in the middle of the ring. And Sutton went to him--and he
+caught Boots coming in! Why, he just snapped his right over and
+straightened him up, and then stepped in and whipped across his left,
+and Boots went back into the ropes. He went back--and he stayed
+back!"
+
+Swiftly, almost gutturally, Hogarty sketched it all out: Young Denny's
+calm statement of his errand, his own groundless burst of spleen, and
+the outcome of the try-out which had sent him hurrying back to Denny's
+dressing-room with many questions on his tongue's tip and a living
+hope in his brain which he hardly dared to nurse.
+
+Hogarty even recalled and related the late delivery of the card of
+introduction which Morehouse was now nervously twisting into misshapen
+shreds and, word for word, repeated the boy's grave explanation of his
+reason for that tardiness.
+
+"He bothered you, did he?" he asked. "Well, he had me guessing, too,
+right from the first word he spoke. There was something about him that
+left me wondering--thinking a little. But I'm understanding a whole
+lot better since you finished talking. You're right, too, Chub--you're
+all of that! Five years is a long time to wait for a chance to swing.
+I ought to know--I've waited half that long myself. That was the way
+he started for Boots, that second round. Oh, it was deadly--it was
+mighty, mighty wicked. And now, to top it all, it's The Red for whom
+he was looking, too. I wish it wasn't so easy; I sure do! It's so
+simple I almost don't enjoy it. Almost--but not quite!"
+
+Once more he shot to his feet and began pacing up and down the room.
+Morehouse sat following him to and fro with his eyes, trying to
+comprehend each step of this bewildering development which was
+furthest of all from what he had expected. He had listened with his
+face fairly glowing with appreciation to the ex-lightweight's account
+of Denny's coming. It was all so entirely in keeping with what he had
+already known of him. But the glint died out of his eyes after a time;
+even his nervously active fingers stopped worrying the bit of
+cardboard on the table.
+
+"Granted that he could turn the trick, Flash," he suggested at last,
+"even admitting that he might be able to stop Conway after a few
+months of training to help him out, do you suppose he'd be willing to
+hang around and fight his way up through the ranks, until he forced
+'em to let him have his match? It's usually a two year's job, you
+know, at the very least.
+
+"I don't know why, Flash, but somehow the more I think of it, the
+surer I grow that there is something more behind his wanting that
+fight than we know anything about. It isn't just a grudge; it isn't
+just because of the dirty deal which that village has been giving him,
+either. I've been wondering--I'm wondering right now why he asked me
+if that account of the purse was true or not. Because men don't fight
+the way you say he fought, Flash, just for money. They fight hard,
+I'll admit, but not that way!"
+
+There was a living menace in Hogarty's steady tread up and down the
+room. He wheeled and crossed, turned and retraced his steps
+noiselessly, cat-footed in his low rubbed-shod shoes. And he turned a
+gaze that was almost pitying upon the plump man's objection.
+
+"Two years--to get ready?" he asked softly. "Chub, do you think I'd
+wait two years--now? Why, two months is too long, and that is the
+outside limit which I'm allowing myself in this affair. You're a
+little slow, Chub--just a bit slow in grasping the possibilities,
+aren't you? Think a minute! Put your mind upon it, man! I've told you
+I am going to pay Dennison off--and pay him with the same coin that he
+handed me. Doesn't that mean anything at all?"
+
+He stopped short, crossed to the table and stood with his fingertips
+bracketed upon its surface. Morehouse knew Hogarty--knew him as did
+few other men, unless, perhaps, it was those who, years before, had
+faced him in the ring. And at that moment Hogarty's eyes were mere
+slits in his face as he stood and peered down into the newspaper man's
+upturned features, his mouth like nothing so much as a livid scar
+above his chin. There was nothing of mirth in those eyes, nothing of
+merriment in that tight mouth, and yet as he sat and gazed back up at
+them, Morehouse's own lips began to twitch. They began to relax. That
+wide grin spread to the very corners of his eyelids and half hid his
+delighted comprehension behind a thousand tiny wrinkles.
+
+"I wonder," he breathed, "I wonder now, Flash, if you are thinking
+about the same thing I am? For if you are--well, you're too sober
+faced. You are that! It's time to indulge in a little hysterics."
+
+And he began to chuckle; he sat and shook with muffled spasms of
+absolute joy as the thing became more and more vivid with each new
+thought. Even Hogarty's answering smile, coming from reluctant lips,
+had in it something of sympathetic mirth.
+
+"That's just what I am thinking," he said. "Just that! It's what I
+meant when I said I was going to pay him--with his own coin. When a
+man plays another man crooked, he expects that other man to come back
+at him some day; he is looking for him to do that. But there is one
+thing he doesn't expect--not usually. He isn't looking for him to work
+the same old game. It is something new he's looking to guard against.
+
+"And that is where Dennison is weak--in that spot and one other. He
+doesn't know even yet that when I fell for his game I fell hard enough
+to wake me up. He thinks I haven't a suspicion but what it was just an
+accident that laid Sutton out, two years back--just a lucky punch of
+The Red's that went across and spoiled our perfect frame-up. And he
+hasn't a suspicion that I know he was sure The Red was going to clean
+up Sutton, just as surely as they went to the ring together.
+
+"That is where he is weak. When a man is a crook he wants to be a real
+crook--and a real one is suspicious of everybody, even of himself."
+
+He lifted one hand and pounded gently upon the polished surface of the
+table.
+
+"The old days are done--dead--when a man got his reputation, and a
+chance at the big ones simply by fighting his way up from the bottom.
+I can give a man a bigger reputation in a week, with five thousand
+dollars' worth of real advertising, than he'd be able to get in a
+lifetime the old way. And training?----"
+
+He jerked his head over one shoulder toward the dressing-rooms beyond
+the closed door.
+
+"Right now he is just where I want him. Why, he looks like a pitiful
+dub if you hold him back. Order him to wait--and it's heart-breaking
+to watch him suffer. In one month I can teach him all he'll ever need
+to know about blocking and getting away. And the rest? Well, you'll
+get a chance to see just what happens when he really goes into action.
+I tell you it makes you stop and think.
+
+"And I don't care what _he_ is fighting for; I don't care what he
+wants. Pleasure or profit, it's all one to me. It's you I need most
+right now, Chub. I know you have always been a little particular about
+soiling your hands. A shady deal never appealed to me so much, either,
+but I'm not exactly bashful about this one. That part of it will be my
+own private affair. You handle the publicity end--merely hail Bolton
+as a comer, when the time is ripe. Are you--are you in on it?"
+
+Morehouse thoughtfully scratched his head.
+
+"I have been a trifle fastidious, haven't I?" he murmured, and
+unconsciously he mimicked Hogarty's measured accents. "But I hardly
+believe that any sensitive scruples of mine would annoy me much in
+this matter. I don't know but what I'd just as soon squash a snake
+with a brick, even if I knew it was somebody's beloved performing
+pet.
+
+"That, as you say, is your side of the question. As for me--well,
+every time I remember that popeyed unctuous fat party they called the
+'Judge' chanting Conway's innocent childhood, with that big, lonesome
+kid standing there in the doorway listening and trying to understand,
+I begin to sizzle. It is time that Conway was licked--and licked
+right!
+
+"Oh, I'm in on it--I want to be there! But," he stopped and made a
+painstaking effort to fit the torn card together again, "but I have an
+idea that Bolton may be the one to hold out. There are some honest
+people, you know, who are honest all the time. He might not
+understand the necessity of--er--a little professional fixing, so to
+speak."
+
+"Will he have to be in on it?" Hogarty countered instantly. "Will he?
+Not to any great extent, he won't. According to my plan he fights
+straight. Don't you suppose I know a straight man when I see one, just
+as well as you do?
+
+"Here's the whole thing--just as I'll put it up to Dennison before
+it's dark tonight. It's Dennison's own plan, too, in the first place,
+so he hasn't any kick coming. We'll match Bolton against one of the
+fairly good ones--Lancing, say--in about two weeks. Lancing gets his
+orders to open up in the sixth round and go down with the punch--and
+stay down! That's plain enough, isn't it? Well, Bolton is fighting
+under the name of 'The Pilgrim,' and you step up the next morning and
+give him two columns--you hail him as a real one, at last.
+
+"We'll match him with The Texan then. Conway whipped him back a week
+or two, but he had his hands full doing it. The Texan--and I ought to
+know--is open to reason if the figure is big enough to be persuasive.
+We'll see to that.
+
+"He gets his orders, too--just as if they were really necessary! About
+the twelfth he lies down to sleep. Why, it's so simple it's real art!
+I'll just hold Bolton back until those rounds. I'll make him take it
+slow--and then send him in to clean up! Dennison is shy a match right
+this minute for The Red; they're all a little doubtful about him. The
+Pilgrim will be the only logical man in the world to send against
+him--that is, according to your sporting columns. And Dennison, of
+course, being on the inside, knows he is really nothing but a
+dub--knows it is simply a plain open and shut proposition. That is to
+say--he _thinks_ he knows!"
+
+Jesse Hogarty paused and the corners of his lips twitched back to show
+his teeth, but not in laughter.
+
+"It's the same little frame-up that he sent against Boots and me," he
+finished. "He ought to be satisfied, hadn't he? And I'll have him on
+the street the next morning--I'll put him where he'll be glad to
+borrow a dollar to buy his breakfast with!"
+
+For a long time they stared back into each other's face: Hogarty taut
+at the table side, Morehouse slouched deep in his chair. The latter
+was the first to break that pregnant silence. He was nodding his head
+in thoughtful finality when he lifted himself to his feet.
+
+"You've got me," he stated. "You've got me snared! Not that I give two
+hoots about what happens to Dennison, mind! I don't--although I must
+admit that the prospect of his starving to death is a lovely one to
+contemplate. And I'd die happy, I think, if I could see The Red
+trimmed, and trimmed with conscientious thoroughness. But those
+aren't my reasons for going hands with you in this assassination.
+
+"I know a hunch when I see one. I ought to, for I've spent the
+contents of my little yellow envelope often enough trying to make one
+come true. And I'm in with you, Flash, till the returns are all in
+from the last district, but it's because I know that there is
+something more than either of us dream of behind that boy's wanting to
+meet Conway. He has something on his mind; he wants something, and
+wants it real bad. And I like him--I liked him right from the
+beginning--so I'll stick around and help. Maybe I'll find out what it
+is that's been bothering him, too, before I get through. But I wish I
+wasn't of such an inquiring turn of mind. It keeps one too stirred
+up."
+
+He stopped to grin comically.
+
+"Any objection, now that I've sworn allegiance, Flash, if I go out and
+present myself?"
+
+Hogarty's whole tense body began to relax, his lean face softened and
+his eyes lost much of their hardness and glitter as he shook his head
+in negation.
+
+"That's a little detail of the campaign which I had already assigned
+to you," he replied, and the inflection of his voice was perfect. "Not
+that I have any fears of his going the way of his forefathers,
+however, because I haven't. And if my assurance on that point
+perplexes you, you might ask him to have one drink and watch his eyes
+when he refuses you.
+
+"But I would like to have you look out for him for a while. If you
+don't Ogden will--Ogden likes him, too--and he is too frivolous to be
+trusted."
+
+Hogarty reached out one long arm and dropped a hand heavily upon
+Morehouse's shoulder. He was smiling openly now--smiling with a
+barefaced enjoyment which the plump newspaper man had never before
+known him to exhibit. And he continued to smile, while he stood there
+in the open door and watched Morehouse mince on tiptoe across the
+polished floor to the corner where Ogden was officiously presenting
+each member of the Monday morning squad of regulars, as they returned
+from the dressing-rooms, to the big-shouldered boy in black, whose
+face was so very grave.
+
+Hogarty smiled as he closed his office door, after he had seen
+Morehouse slip his hand through the crook of Young Denny's arm, in
+spite of Bobby Ogden's yelp of protest, and clear a way to the outer
+entrance with one haughty flip of his free hand.
+
+Hours later that same day, when the tumult in the long main room of
+the gymnasium had hushed and the apathetic Legs and his helper had
+turned again to their endless task of grooming the waxed floor,
+Dennison, the manager of Jed The Red, sitting in that same chair which
+Morehouse had occupied, cuddling one knee in his hands, fairly basked
+in that same smile. The purring perfection of Hogarty's discourse was
+enticing. The absurd simplicity of his plan, which he admitted must,
+after all, be credited to the astuteness of Dennison himself, was more
+than alluring. But that smile was the quintessence of hypnotic
+flattery.
+
+It savored of a delightful intimacy which Jesse Hogarty accorded to
+few men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+In all that hill town's history no period had ever before been so
+filled with sensation as was that one which opened with the flight of
+Judge Maynard's yellow-wheeled buckboard along the main street of
+Boltonwood to herald the passing of the last of the line of men who
+had given the village its name.
+
+One by one, in bewildering succession, climax after climax had piled
+itself upon those which already had left the white-haired circle of
+regulars about the Tavern stove breathless with fruitless argument and
+footless conjecture.
+
+Old Jerry's desertion from the ranks of the old guard over which the
+Judge had ruled with a more than despotic tongue, bursting with
+bomblike suddenness in their midst that very same night which had seen
+Young Denny's dramatic departure, had complicated matters to an
+inconceivable degree. For, after all, he was the one member of the
+circle to whom they had all been unconsciously looking for a
+comprehensive answer to the question which the Judge's crafty
+exhibition of the boy's bruised face had created.
+
+He enjoyed what none of the others could claim an absolutely
+incontestable excuse for visiting the old, weatherbeaten farmhouse on
+the hill above town--and in his official capacity they felt, too, that
+he might venture a few tentative inquiries at least, which, coming
+from any one else, might have savored of indelicacy.
+
+Not but what the circle had enjoyed Judge Maynard's masterly recital,
+for it had held them as one man. But they were hungry also for
+facts--facts which could convince as well as entertain. Even the Judge
+himself had planned upon Old Jerry's co-operation; he had had it in
+mind to be patronizingly lenient that night; that is, after that first
+rebuke which was to leave him the undisputed master of the situation.
+
+To reach the really great heights of which the evening's triumph was
+capable the old mail carrier's collaboration had been almost
+indispensable. They had been waiting with hungry impatience for him.
+And then Old Jerry had appeared--he made his entrance and his
+exit--and departing had left them gasping for breath.
+
+Old Jerry had not waited to view the effect of his mad defiance of the
+town's great man. It is doubtful if he had given that side of the
+issue one passing thought, but his triumphant withdrawal from the
+field had robbed the situation of not one bit of its decisiveness.
+Quiet followed his going, a stillness so profound that they heard him
+cackling to himself in insane glee as he went down the steps. And that
+hush had endured while they waited in a delicious state of tingling
+suspense for the first furious sentences which should preface his
+lifelong banishment from the circle itself.
+
+For years they had whispered, "Just wait, he'll come to it--he'll go
+just like the rest." And so Young Denny's final weakening had not been
+so unexpected as it might have been. And more than once, too, when the
+Judge's harsh censure of him who had always been his stanchest
+supporter had left Old Jerry cringing in his place beside the stove,
+they had all felt the justice if not a premonition of final
+retribution to come. It was the debonaire dare-deviltry of Old Jerry's
+defiance rather than its unexpectedness which had proved its greatest
+sensation. That day's one supreme moment--the only one which had not
+suffered from too acute anticipation--came while they waited for the
+Judge's denial, that denial which was never spoken.
+
+The town's great man had slumped back in his chair in a kind of
+stunned trance while the apoplectic purple of his earlier wrath faded
+from his face. He did open his mouth, but not in any effort to speak.
+It was only to lick his thick lips and gurgle noisily in his fat
+throat. He tried to rise, too, and failed in his first attempt--and
+tried again.
+
+They had all realized what it was that made his knees wabble as he
+crossed to the door; they understood what had drained his face of all
+its color. Every man of them knew why the latch rattled under his
+shaking figure. The Judge had been afraid, not merely morally
+frightened, but abjectly, utterly terrified in the flesh--afraid of
+the threat in the insolent bearing of the little, shriveled man who
+had passed out into the night a moment before.
+
+It could have been funny. It might have been sublimest farce-comedy,
+had they not lacked the perspective necessary for its appreciation.
+But it was enough that they realized that the demagogue had come
+crashing down--enough that, watching his furtive disappearance that
+night, they learned how pitiful a coward a blusterer really can be.
+
+Old Jerry's own actions in those days which followed had furnished
+rich food for conjecture. The fact that it had been the little
+mail-carrier himself who had ridden in the carriage beside the slim
+girl with the tumbled hair, at the head of the dreary procession that
+toiled slowly up to the bleak cemetery behind the church, had, indeed,
+been worthy of some discussion. The spendthrift prodigality of the
+white roses which rumor whispered he had gone to place the next day
+over the new mound of raw earth had not gone unspoken. Even the
+resemblance of the girl who John Anderson had named Dryad in his
+hunger for the beautiful--even the likeness of her face with its
+straight little nose and wistfully curved lips, to the features of
+that small, rain-stained statue of the white and gold slip of a woman
+who had been his wife, came in for its share of the discussion, too.
+
+But all those topics which were touched upon in the nights that
+followed were, at best, of only secondary importance. Inevitably the
+circle about the stove swung back to a consideration of that first
+day's major climax, until the very discord of opinion which hitherto
+had been the chief joy of those nightly sessions bade fair to prove
+their total disruption.
+
+For the circle of regulars were leaderless now; there was no longer a
+master mind to hold in check the flood of argument and rebuttal, or
+preserve a unity of disagreement. Where before they had been
+accustomed to take up each new development and pursue it until it
+reached a state either too lucid for further consideration or an
+insolvable problem that dead-locked conversation, a half dozen
+different arguments sprang up each night, splitting the circle into
+wrangling factions which trebled the din of voices and multiplied
+ten-fold the new note of bitter personalities which had taken the
+place of former incontrovertible logic.
+
+Judge Maynard's iron discipline was gone, and the old guard faced a
+quite probable dissolution in the first week or two which followed his
+going. More from habit than anything else they had waited that next
+night for him to come and clear his throat pompously and open the
+evening's activities. And the Judge failed to appear, failed just as
+signally as had Old Jerry.
+
+And yet it was not the absence of the former which had left them
+leaderless. Not one of them had realized it the night before--but that
+second night they knew!
+
+By his very rebellion Old Jerry had won the thing which years of
+faithful service had failed to bring. He had dethroned the despot, and
+the honors were his by right of conquest.
+
+The circle knew that the Judge would never return; after one hour of
+fruitless waiting that was a certainty. But night after night they
+continued to gather, stubbornly, persistently hopeful that Old Jerry
+would come back. And in the meantime they almost forgot, at times,
+Young Denny who had gone the way of his fathers as they had so truly
+prophesied; they only touched a little uncomfortably upon the problem
+of the slim, yellow-haired girl alone in the battered cottage at the
+edge of the town, while they reviewed with startlingly fertile detail
+and a lingering relish that came very close to being hero-worship,
+his last brief remarks which had left the Judge a wreck of his former
+magnificence.
+
+If Old Jerry realized all this that had come to pass he gave no
+outward sign of such knowledge. He even forgot to pause impressively
+upon the top step of the post-office those days, as he always had
+formerly, before he made his straight-backed descent with the pouches
+slung over one shoulder. There were mornings when he came perilously
+near to ignoring altogether the double line which, with a new
+deference, greeted his daily passage to the waiting buggy, and yet
+there was not one who dared so much as to whisper that there was
+anything in his air of preoccupation that savored of studiously
+planned forethought. But it is doubtful if he did realize the change
+that had taken place, at least in that first week or two, for Old
+Jerry had much of a strictly private nature to occupy his mind.
+
+He was never quite able to remember the things he had said that
+morning to the girl with the too-white face and tumbled hair, huddled
+in the half-light at the table before the window, or to recall in any
+sort of a connected, coherent sequence his own actions in those first
+few days which followed it.
+
+It aggravated him for a day or two, this inability to piece out the
+details; it brought a peevish frown to his thin face and a higher,
+even more querulous note to his shrill falsetto voice, which, while
+they hardly understood it, nevertheless resulted in an even
+profounder hush in those respectful ranks. He couldn't even
+revisualize it clearly enough for his own private edification--for the
+joy of seeing himself as others had seen him.
+
+Nothing remained but a picture of Dryad Anderson's face--the face that
+had tried so hard to smile--which she had lifted to him that first
+morning when he entered the front room of the little drab cottage at
+the edge of town. That was limned upon his brain in startlingly
+perfect detail still--that and one other thing. The memory of John
+Anderson's pitifully wasted form huddled slack upon the high stool,
+arms outstretched and silvered head bowed in a posture of utter
+weariness, remained with him, too, clinging in spite of every effort
+to dislodge it.
+
+That whole week had not served to wipe it out. Day after day, as Old
+Jerry drove his route with the reins taut in his nervous hands, it
+floated up before him. And even when he wound the lines about the
+whipstock, letting the old mare take her own pace, and leaned back,
+eyes closed, against the worn cushions, the interior of that back-room
+shop with its simple, terribly inert occupant and countless rows of
+tiny white statues, all so white and strangely alike, crept in under
+the lids.
+
+Old Jerry's mail route suffered that week; his original "system" of
+mail distribution, of which he had always been so jealously proud,
+went from bad to very, very bad, and from that to an impossible worse;
+and yet, while it became a veritable lottery for the hillsfolk who
+were dependent upon him whether they would receive the packet of mail
+which really belonged to a two-mile distant neighbor or none at all,
+in one respect the rural service improved immensely, and the
+improvement--and strangely enough, too--was as directly a result of
+that stubborn image of John Anderson's bowed head which persisted in
+haunting the mind of the servant of the Gov'mint as was the alarming
+growth of his lack of dependability.
+
+Day by day Old Jerry grew less and less prone to let the leisurely
+white mare take her own pace. Instead, he sat stiffly erect a great
+portion of the time, driving with one eye cocked calculatingly upon
+the course of the sun, and his mind running far ahead of him, to the
+end of the day's route, when he would have to turn in at the
+cross-road that toiled up the grade to the wind-racked old Bolton
+place on the hill north of town.
+
+They had always had a forbidding aspect--Young Denny's black,
+unpainted farmhouse and dilapidated outbuildings--even when he had
+been certain that just as surely as he reached the crest he would find
+the boy's big body silhouetted against the skyline, waiting for him,
+they had not been any too prepossessing. Now they never served to
+awake in him anything but actual dread and distrust.
+
+Old Jerry laid it to the lonesomeness of the place--to the bleak
+blindness of the shaded windows and the untenanted silence--but he
+took good care that no loitering on his part would be to blame for his
+arrival at the house after dusk.
+
+No one, not even he himself, knew how strong the temptation was that
+week to make tentative advances of peace to the members of the circle
+of Tavern regulars, for the more he dwelt upon it the finer the
+dramatic possibilities of the thing seemed. But he had misread in the
+hushed respect of his former intimates a chill and uncompromising
+disapproval, and he had to fall back upon a one-sided conversation
+with himself as the next best thing.
+
+"I wa'n't brought up to believe in ghosts," he averred to himself more
+than once. "Ghosts naturally is superstition--and that ain't accordin'
+to religion, not any way you look at it. But allowing that there could
+be ghosts--just for the sake of argument allowing that there is--now
+what would there be to hinder him from just kinda settlin' down up
+there, as you might say? It's nice and quiet, ain't it? Sort of out of
+the way--and more or less comfortable, too?"
+
+At that point in the mumbled monologue the white-haired driver of the
+buggy usually paused for a moment, tilting his head, birdlike, to one
+side, wrapped in thought. There were those shelves lined with
+countless white figures which also had to be considered.
+
+"He must've worked mighty steady," he told himself time and again in a
+voice that was small with awe. "He must hev almost enjoyed workin' at
+'em, to hev finished so many! And he kept at it nearly all the time, I
+reckon. And now, that's what I'm a-gettin' at! Now I want to ask how
+do we know he's a-goin' to quit now--how do we know that? We don't
+know it! And Godfrey 'Lisha, what better place would he want than that
+back kitchen up there? Ain't there a table right there by the window,
+all a-waitin' for him--an'--an'----"
+
+Invariably he broke off there, to peer furtively at the sun, before he
+whipped up his horse.
+
+"Git along!" he admonished her earnestly, then, "Git along--you!
+Nobody believes in ghosts--leastwise, I don't. But they ain't no sense
+nor reason in just a-killin' time on the road, neither. And I ain't
+one to tempt Providence--not to any great nor damagin' extent, I
+ain't!"
+
+And yet in spite of all the uneasiness which the combination of the
+dark house and the persistent image of the little, worn-out
+stone-cutter kept alive in him, in so far as Young Denny's team of
+horses was concerned, and the scanty rest of the stock which the boy
+had left in his care, Old Jerry kept strictly to the letter of his
+agreement. At the most it meant no more than a little readjustment of
+his daily schedule, which he high-handedly rearranged to suit his
+better convenience.
+
+But all the rest which he had promised so fervidly to carry out--the
+message which he had meant to deliver the very next morning after the
+boy's departure and the explanation of Young Denny's bruised face,
+even a diplomatic tender of the damp wad of bills which Denny had
+pushed in his hand--had somehow been allowed to wait. For it had
+proved to be anything but the admirably simple thing it had seemed to
+the old man when he had volubly acquiesced to the plan.
+
+He had forgotten it that first morning. With the well-planned opening
+sentence fairly trembling upon his tongue-tip when he opened the door,
+the whole thing had been swept utterly from his mind. And in the press
+of events that followed he never so much as thought of it again for
+days. When the memory of it did return, a week later, somehow he found
+it almost impossible to introduce the subject--at least impossible to
+introduce it gracefully.
+
+That was one of the reasons for his failure to execute the mission
+entrusted to him. The other reason, which was far weightier, so far as
+Old Jerry was concerned, was even harder to define. He blamed it
+directly to the attitude of the girl with the tumbled yellow hair and
+blue eyes, which were never quite the same shade of purple. More than
+a small proportion of the remarks which he had prepared beforehand to
+deliver to her had consisted of reproof--not too harsh, but for all
+that a trifle severe, maybe--of her hasty and utterly unfair judgment
+of Young Denny. That, he had assured himself, was only just and
+merited, and could only prove, eventually, to have been for the best.
+But she never gave him a chance to deliver it. One moment of sadness
+on her part would have been sufficient excuse. If he could have
+surprised her just once gazing at him from moist, questioning eyes, he
+felt that that would have been enough proof of contrition and humble
+meekness of spirit on her part. But he never did.
+
+Instead Old Jerry had never seen so astounding a change take place in
+any human being as that which came over her day by day. By the end of
+that first week the pallor had gone entirely from her cheeks. The deep
+dark circles which had rimmed the wet eyes which she had lifted to him
+that first morning disappeared so entirely that it was hard to
+remember that they had ever been there at all. Even the lithely
+slender body seemed fuller, rounder. To every outward appearance at
+least Old Jerry had to confess to himself that he had never seen a
+more supremely contented, thoroughly happy creature than Dryad
+Anderson was at that week's end.
+
+And it irritated him; it almost angered him at times. Remembering his
+own travail of spirit, the self-inflicted agony of mind which he had
+undergone that day when he had first looked square into the eyes of
+his own soul and acknowledge his years of guilty unfairness to the
+lonely boy on the hill, he shut his lips tight upon the message he
+might have delivered and waited, stubbornly, for her to show some sign
+of repentance.
+
+For a day or two a mental contemplation of this necessarily severe
+course brought him moments of comparative peace of mind. It justified
+in a measure, at least, his own remissness, and yet even that
+mind-state at times was rudely shaken. At each day's end, after he had
+made his reluctant ascent of the hill which led up to Young Denny's
+unlighted house, and a far speedier, none too dignified return, the
+little driver of the squealing buggy made it a point to turn off and
+stop for a moment or two before the gate of John Anderson's cottage.
+At first the girl's real need of him prompted this daily detour; then,
+when the actual need no longer existed, he excused the visit on the
+plea of her lonesomeness and his promise to Denny to look after her.
+
+His own loneliness--for he had never been so lonely before in all his
+lonely life--and the other and real reason for this habit, he never
+allowed himself to scrutinize too closely. But each day he sat a
+little forward on the buggy seat as soon as he had turned the last
+sharp curve in the road and stared eagerly ahead through the afternoon
+dusk until he made out her slim figure leaning against the fence
+waiting for him. And every afternoon, after he had pulled the
+shuffling horse to a standstill, he bent down from his vantage point
+on the high seat to scan her upturned face minutely, almost craftily
+at times, for some tell-tale trace of tears on her long lashes, or a
+possible quiver of her lips, or a suspicious droop in her boyish
+shoulders. And he never discovered either the one or the other.
+
+It was at such moments that his peace of mind suffered, for no sane
+man could ever have read, by any stretching of the imagination,
+anything akin to sorrow or sadness in the low laugh with which she
+invariably met his scrutiny. It fairly bubbled joy. Each day Old Jerry
+found her only happy--offensively happy--and where he had been
+secretly watching her for one betraying sign he became uneasily
+conscious after a time that very often she, too, seemed to be scanning
+his own face as if she were trying to penetrate into the inner tumult
+of perplexities behind his seamed forehead. Some days he was almost
+certain that there was a calculating light in her steady eyes--a hint
+of half-hidden delight in something he couldn't understand--and it
+worried him. It bothered him almost as much as did the unvaried
+formula with which she greeted him every afternoon.
+
+"Have you any news for me today?" she always asked him. "Surely you've
+something new to tell me this afternoon--now, haven't you?"
+
+The tone in which she made the query was never anything but disarming;
+it was quite childishly wheedling and innocently eager, he thought.
+But reiterated from day to day it wore on his nerves after a while.
+Added to the something he sometimes thought he caught glimmering in
+her tip-tilted eyes, it made him more than a little uncomfortable. He
+fell back upon a quibble to dodge the issue.
+
+"Was you expectin' a letter?" he always countered.
+
+This daily veiled tilt of wits might have gone on indefinitely had not
+a new development presented itself which threw an entirely different
+aspect upon the whole affair.
+
+A fortnight had elapsed since Denny Bolton's mysterious departure from
+the village when it happened. As usual, after the day's duties were
+completed with his hurried return from the Bolton homestead, Old Jerry
+turned off at the crossroads to stop for a moment before the cottage
+squatting in its acre of desolate garden. He didn't even straighten up
+in his seat that afternoon to gaze ahead of him, so certain he had
+grown that she would be waiting for him, a hint of laughter in her
+eyes and the same disturbing question on her lips, and not until the
+fat animal between the shafts had stopped of her own accord before the
+straggling fence did he realize that the girl was not there. Then her
+absence smote him full.
+
+It frightened him. Right from the first he was conscious of impending
+disaster born quite entirely of the knowledge of his own guilt. The
+front door of the house was open and after fruitless minutes of
+panicky pondering he clambered down and advanced uncertainly toward
+it. His shadow across the threshold heralded his reluctant coming, and
+Dryad turned from the half-filled box upon the table over which she
+had been bending and nodded to him almost before he caught sight of
+her.
+
+That little, intimately brief inclination of the head was her only
+greeting. With hands grasping each side of the door-frame Old Jerry
+stood there and gazed about the room. It had never been anything but
+bare and empty looking--now with the few larger pieces of furniture
+which it had contained all stacked in one corner and the smaller
+articles already stored away in a half-dozen boxes, the last of which
+was holding the girl's absorbed attention, it would have been barnlike
+had it not been so small. From where he stood Old Jerry could see
+through into the smaller back-room workshop. Even its shelves were
+empty,--entirely stripped of their rows of tiny white woman-figures.
+
+He paled as he grasped the ominous import of it; he tried to speak
+unconcernedly, but his voice was none too steady.
+
+"So you're a-house-cleanin', be you?" he asked jauntily. "Ain't you
+commencin' a little early?"
+
+He was uncomfortably conscious of that interrogative gleam in Dryad's
+glance--that amused glimmer which he couldn't quite fathom--when she
+turned her head. She was smiling, too, a little--smiling with her lips
+as well as with her eyes.
+
+"No-o-o," she stated with preoccupied lack of emphasis, as she bent
+again over the box. "No--I'm packing up."
+
+Old Jerry had known that that would be her answer. He had been certain
+of it. The other interpretation--the only other possible one which
+could be put upon the dismantled room--had been nothing more or less
+than a momentary and desperate grasping at a straw.
+
+For a while he was very, very quiet, wondering just what it was in her
+mind which made her so cheerfully indifferent to his presence. She
+filled that last box while he stood there in the doorway, stood off to
+survey her work critically, and then picked up a hammer that lay on
+the table and prepared to nail down the lid.
+
+"I've hit my finger four times today," she apprised him between strokes
+as she drove the first nail home. "Four times this afternoon--and always
+the same finger, too!"
+
+The very irrelevancy of the statement, coupled with her calm serenity,
+was appalling to the old man. She didn't so much as lift her eyes when
+she told him, but when the lid was fastened she whirled suddenly with
+that impetuosity which always startled him more than a little, her
+hands tightly clasped in front of her, and fairly beamed at him.
+
+"There, that finishes everything--everything but the pots and pans,"
+she cried. "And I'll need them a little longer, anyway, won't I? But
+maybe I won't take them with me, either--they're pretty old and worn
+out. What do you think?"
+
+Old Jerry cleared his throat. He ignored her question.
+
+"Ain't--ain't this a trifle sudden," he faltered--"jest a trifle?"
+
+She shook her head again and laughed softly, as if from sheer joyous
+excitement.
+
+"No," she said. "No, I've been planning it for days and days--oh, for
+more than a week!"
+
+Then she seemed to catch for the first time the dreariness of his
+whole attitude--the dejection of his spare angular body and
+sparrowlike, anxious face.
+
+"You're sorry I'm going," she accused him then, and she leaned toward
+him a little, eyes quizzically half closed. "I knew you'd be sorry!"
+And then, swiftly, "Aren't you?"
+
+Old Jerry scraped first one foot and then the other.
+
+"I reckon I be," he admitted faintly. "Kinda surprised, too. I--I
+wa'n't exactly calculating on anything like this. It--it's kinda
+thrown me off my reckonin'! Are you--are you figurin' on goin' right
+away?"
+
+Dryad spun about and threw her head far on one side to scan the whole
+bare room.
+
+"Tomorrow, maybe," she decided, when she turned back to him. "Or the
+next day at the very latest. You see, everything is about ready now,
+and there isn't any reason for me to stay, on and on, here--is
+there?"
+
+A little tired note crept into the last words, edging the question
+with a suggestion of wistfulness. It was something not so very
+different from that for which Old Jerry had been stubbornly waiting
+throughout those entire two weeks, but he failed to catch it at that
+moment. He had heard nothing but her statement that she meant to
+remain at least another day. It made it possible for him to breathe
+deeply once again.
+
+Much could happen in twenty-four hours. She might even change her
+mind, he desperately assured himself--women were always doing
+something like that, wern't they? But even if she did go it was a
+reprieve; it gave him one last opportunity. Now, for the present, all
+he wanted was to get away--to get away by himself and think! On
+heavily dragging feet he turned to go back down the rotting
+boardwalk.
+
+"I--I'll drop in on you tomorrow," he suggested, pausing at the steps.
+"I'll stop in on my way 'round--to--to say good-by."
+
+The girl stood in the doorway smiling down at him. He couldn't meet
+her eyes. As it was he felt that their gaze went through and through
+him. And so he did not see her half lift her arms to him in a sudden
+quite wonderful gesture of contrite and remorseful reassurance. He did
+not hear the first of the impulsive torrent of words which she barely
+smothered behind lips that trembled a little. His head was bowed so
+that he did not see her eyes, and if he could but have seen them and
+nothing else, he would have understood, without the words or the
+gesture.
+
+Instead he stood there, plucking undecidedly at his sleeve.
+
+"Because I--I wouldn't like to hev you go--without seein' you again,"
+he went on slowly--"without a chance to tell you something--er--to
+tell you good-by."
+
+He didn't wait for her answer. At the far bend in the road, when he
+looked back, she was still there in the doorway watching him.
+
+He was not quite certain, but he thought she threw up one thin white
+arm to him as he passed out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+It rained that next day--a dull, steady downpour that slanted in upon
+a warm, south wind. Old Jerry was glad of the storm. The leaden
+grayness of the low-hanging clouds matched perfectly his own frame of
+mind, and the cold touch of the rain soothed his hot head, too, as it
+swept in under the buggy hood, and helped him to think a little
+better. There was much that needed readjusting.
+
+Throughout the early hours of that morning he drove with a newspaper
+spread flat upon his knees--the afternoon edition of the previous day,
+which, in the face of other matters, he had had neither the necessary
+time nor enthusiasm to examine until it was an entire twelve hours
+old. At any other time the contents of that red-headlined sheet would
+have set his pulses throbbing in a veritable ecstasy of excitement.
+
+For two whole weeks he had been watching for it, scanning every inch
+of type for the news it brought, but now that account of Young Denny's
+first match, with a little, square picture of him inset at the column
+head, fell woefully flat so far as he was concerned.
+
+Not that the plump newspaperman who had written the account of that
+first victorious bout had achieved anything but a masterpiece of
+sensationalism. Every line was alive with action, every phrase seemed
+to thud with the actual shock of contest. And there was that last
+paragraph, too, which hailed Denny--"The Pilgrim," they called him in
+the paper, but that couldn't deceive Old Jerry--as the newcomer for
+whom the public had been waiting so long, and, toward the end, so
+hopelessly.
+
+It was really a perfect thing of its kind--but Old Jerry could not
+enjoy it that morning, even though it was Denny Bolton's first
+triumph, to be shared by him alone in equal proportion. Instead of
+sending creepy thrills chasing up and down his spine it merely
+intensified his doleful bitterness of spirit. Long before noon he
+breathed a leaden heavy sigh, refolded the sodden sheet and put it
+away in the box beneath the seat.
+
+The old mare took her own pace that day. In a brain that was already
+burdened until it fairly ached there was no room for the image of the
+silver-haired stone-cutter which had made for speed on other
+occasions. He had plenty to occupy his mind which was of a strictly
+immediate nature.
+
+A dozen times that morning Old Jerry asked himself what he would tell
+Dryad Anderson that night, when he stopped at the little drab cottage
+at the route's end, ostensibly to bid her good-by. He asked himself,
+in desperate reiteration, _how_ he would tell, for he knew that the
+long delay in the delivery of Denny's message was going to need more
+than a little explanation. And when he had wrestled with the question
+until his eyes stung and his temples throbbed, and still could find no
+solution for it, he turned helplessly to the consideration of another
+phase of the problem.
+
+He fell to tormenting himself with the possibility of her having gone
+already. Everything in those bare rooms had been packed--there was no
+real reason for the girl to remain another hour. Perhaps she had
+reconsidered, changed her mind, and departed even earlier than she had
+planned, and if she had--if she had----
+
+Whenever he reached that point, dumbly he bowed his head.
+
+It was dark when he turned off the main road and started up the long
+hill toward the Bolton place--not just dark, but a blackness so
+profound that the mare between the shafts was only a half formless
+splotch of gray as she plodded along ahead. Even his dread of the
+place, which formerly had been so acute, did not penetrate the mental
+misery that wrapped him; he did not vouchsafe so much as one uneasy
+glance ahead until a glimmer of light which seemed to flash out from
+the rear of the house fairly shocked him into conscious recollection
+of it all.
+
+He sprang erect then, spilling a cataract of water from his hat brim
+in a chill trickle down the back of his neck, and barked a shrilly
+staccato command at the placid horse. The creaking buggy came to a
+standstill.
+
+He tried to persuade himself it was a reflection of the village lights
+upon the window panes which had startled him, but it was only a
+half-hearted effort. No one could mistake the glow that filtered out
+of the black bulk of the rear of the house for anything save the thing
+it was. Half way up the hill he sat there, hunched forward in a
+hopeless huddle, his eyes protected by cupped palms, and stared and
+stared.
+
+Once before, the evening of that day when the Judge's exhibition of
+Young Denny's bruised face had been more than his curiosity could
+endure, he had approached that bleak farmhouse in fear and trembling,
+but the trepidation of that night, half real, half a child of his own
+erratic imagination, bulked small beside the throat-tightening terror
+of this moment.
+
+And yet he did not turn back. The thought that he had only to wheel
+his buggy and beat as silent a retreat as his ungreased axles would
+permit never occurred to him. It was much as if his harrowed spirit,
+driven hither and yon without mercy throughout the whole day long, had
+at last backed into a corner, in a mood of last-ditch, crazy
+desperation, and bared its teeth.
+
+"If he is up there," he stated doggedly, "if he is up there,
+a-putterin' with his everlasting lump o' clay, he ain't got no more
+right up there than I hev! He's just a-trespassin', that's what he's
+a-doin'. I'm the legal custodian of the place--it was put into my
+hands--and I'll tell him so. I'll give him a chance to git out--or--or
+I'll hev the law on him!"
+
+The plump mare went forward again. There was something terribly
+uncanny, even in her relentless advance, but the old man clung to the
+reins and let her go without a word. When she reached the top she
+slumped lazily to a standstill and fell contentedly to nibbling
+grass.
+
+The light in the window was much brighter, viewed from that lessened
+distance--thin, yellow streaks of brightness that quivered a little
+from the edges of a drawn shade. An uneven wick might easily have
+accounted for the unsteadiness, but in that flickering pallor Old
+Jerry found something ominously unhealthy--almost uncanny.
+
+But he went on. He clambered down from his high seat and went doggedly
+across--steadily--until his hand found the door-latch. And he gave
+himself no time for reconsideration or retreat. The metal catch
+yielded all too readily under the pressure of his fingers, and when
+the door swung in he followed it over the threshold.
+
+The light blinded him for a moment--dazzled him--yet not so completely
+but that he saw, too clearly for any mistake, the figure that had
+turned from the stove to greet him. Dryad Anderson's face was
+pink-tinted from forehead to chin by the heat of the glowing lids--her
+lips parted a little until the small teeth showed white beyond their
+red fullness.
+
+In her too-tight, boyish blouse, gaping at the throat, she stood there
+in the middle of the room, hands bracketed on delicate hips, and
+smiled at him. And behind her the lamp in its socket on the wall
+smoked a trifle from a too-high wick.
+
+Old Jerry stood and gazed at her, one hand still clutching the door
+latch. In one great illuminating flash he saw it all--understood just
+what it meant--and with that understanding a hot wave of rage began to
+well up within him--a fierce and righteous wrath, borne of all that
+day's unnecessary agony and those last few minutes of fear.
+
+It was a hoax on her part. She had been trifling with him the day
+before, just as she had been playing fast and loose with his peace of
+mind for days. An ejaculation bordering close upon actual profanity
+trembled upon his lips, but a draft of cold air sweeping in at the
+open doorway set the lamp flickering wildly and brought him back a
+little to himself. His eyes went again to the girl in the middle of
+the floor. She was rocking to and fro upon the balls of her feet,
+every inch of her fairly pulsing with mocking, malicious delight.
+
+She waited for him to speak, and he, stiff of back and grim of face,
+stood stonily silent. She seemed all innocently unaware of his
+unconcealed disgust. The quizzical smile only widened before the
+chilly threat of his beady eyes and ruffled forehead. And then, all in
+one breath, her little pouted chin went up and she burst into a low
+gurgle of utter enjoyment of the tableau.
+
+"Well," she demanded, "aren't you ever going to say anything? Here I
+am! I--I decided to move today--there really wasn't any use of
+waiting. Aren't you surprised--just a little?"
+
+The meekness of her voice, so wholly belied by her eyes and lips and
+swaying boy-like body, only tightened the old man's mouth. He was
+still reviewing all that long day's mental torment, counting the
+wasted hours which might have been applied to a soul-satisfying feast
+upon Morehouse's red-headlined account in the paper. No veteran had
+ever marched more hopelessly into a cannon's mouth than he had
+approached the door of that kitchen.
+
+And yet a flood of thankfulness, the direct reflex of his first
+impotent rage, threatened to sweep up and drown the fires of his
+wrath. Already he wanted to slump down into a chair and rest weary
+body and wearier, relieved brain; he wanted a minute or two in which
+to realize that she was there--that his unfulfilled promise was still
+far from being actual catastrophe--and he would not let himself. Not
+yet!
+
+She had been playing with him--playing with him cat-and-mouse fashion.
+The birdlike features which had begun to relax hardened once more.
+
+"Maybe I be," he answered her question with noncommittal grimness.
+"Maybe I be--and maybe I ain't!" And then, almost belligerently: "Your
+lamp's a-smokin'!"
+
+She turned and strained on tiptoe and lowered it.
+
+"I thought you would be," she agreed, too gravely for his complete
+comfort, when she had accomplished the readjustment of the wick to her
+entire satisfaction. "For, you know, you seemed a little worried
+and--well, not just happy, yesterday, when I told you I was going to
+move I--I felt sure you would be glad to find that I hadn't gone
+far!"
+
+Old Jerry remembered at that moment and he removed his soaked hat. He
+turned, too, and drew up a chair. It gave him an opportunity to avoid
+those moistly mirthful eyes for a moment. Seated and comfortably
+tilted back against the wall he felt less ill at ease--felt better
+able to deal with the situation as it should be dealt with.
+
+For a moment her presence there had only confounded him--that was when
+the wave of righteous wrath had swept him--but at the worst he had
+counted it nothing more than a too far-fetched bit of fantastic
+mischief conceived to tantalize him.
+
+Her last statement awakened in him a preposterously impossible suspicion
+which, now that he had a chance to glance about the room, was confirmed
+instantly--absolutely. It was astounding--utterly unbelievable--and
+yet on all the walls, in every corner, there were the indisputable
+evidences of her intention to remain indefinitely--permanently.
+
+At least it gave him an opening.
+
+"You don't mean to say," he began challengingly, "you don't mean to
+tell me that you're a-figurin' on stayin' here--for good?"
+
+She pursed her lips and nodded vigorously at him until the loosened
+wisps of hair half hid her eyes. It was quite as though she were
+pleased beyond belief that he had got at the gist of it all so
+speedily.
+
+"Yes, for good," she explained ecstatically, "or," more slowly, "or at
+least for quite a while. You see I like it here! It's just like home
+already--just like I always imagined home would be when I really had
+one, anyway. There's so much room--and it's warm, too. And then, the
+floors don't squeak, either. I don't think I care for squeaky
+floors--do you?"
+
+A quick widening of those almost purple eyes accompanied the last
+question.
+
+The little white-haired figure in the back-tilted chair snorted. He
+tried to disguise it behind a belated cough, but it was quite
+palpably a snort of outraged patience and dignity. She couldn't fool
+him any longer--not even with that wide-eyed appealingly infantile
+stare. He knew, without looking closer, that there was a flare of
+mirth hidden within its velvet duskiness. And there was only one way
+to deal with such shallowness--that was with firm and unmistakable
+severity. He leaned forward and pounded one meager knee for emphasis
+as Judge Maynard had often done.
+
+"You can't do it!" he emphasized flatly, his thin voice almost
+gloatingly triumphant. "Whatever put it into your head I don't
+know--but don't you realize what you're a-doin', comin' up here like
+this and movin' in, high-handed, without speaking to nobody? Well,
+you've made yourself liable to trespass--that's what you've done!
+Trespass and house-breaking, too, I guess, without interviewin' me
+first!"
+
+The violet eyes flew wider. Old Jerry was certain that he caught a
+gleam of apprehension in them. She took one faltering step toward him
+and then stopped, irresolute, apparently. Somehow the mute appeal in
+that whole poise was too much, even for his outraged dignity. Maybe he
+had gone a little too far. He attempted to temper the harshness of
+it.
+
+"Not a-course," he added deprecatingly, "meanin' that anything like
+that would be likely to happen to you. Seein' as you didn't exactly
+understand, I wouldn't take no steps against you." And, even more
+encouragingly, "I doubt if I'd hev any legal right to proceed against
+anybody without seeing Den--without seeing the rightful owner first."
+
+He bit his tongue painfully in covering that slip, but Dryad had not
+seemed to notice it. She crossed back to the stove and in an absolute
+silence fell to prodding with a fork beneath steaming lids.
+
+"I really should have thought of that myself," she murmured pensively.
+"After seeing you return from here every afternoon, I should have
+known he--the place had been left in your care."
+
+It rather startled him--that half absent-minded statement of hers--it
+disturbed his confidence in his command of the situation. Sitting
+there he told himself that he should have realized long ago that she
+could easily watch the hill road from the door of the little drab
+cottage huddled at the end of Judge Maynard's acres.
+
+He began to feel guilty again--began to wonder just how much his daily
+visits to Denny's place had led her to suspect. But Dryad did not wait
+for any reply. She had turned once more until she was facing him, her
+lips beginning to curl again, petal-like, at the corners.
+
+"But you would have to interview the real owner first?" she inquired
+insistently. "You do think that would be necessary before you could
+make me leave, don't you?"
+
+He nodded--nodded warily. Something in her bearing put him on his
+guard. And then, before he knew how it had happened, a little rush had
+carried her across the room and she was kneeling at his feet, her face
+upflung to him.
+
+"Then you'll have to interview me,"--the words trembled madly,
+breathlessly, from her lips. "You'll have to interview
+me--because--because I own it all--all--every bit of it!"
+
+And she laughed up at him--laughed with a queer, choking, strained
+note catching in her throat up into his blankly incredulous face. He
+felt her thin young arms tighten about him; he even half caught her
+next hysterical words in spite of his amazement, and for all that they
+were quite meaningless to him.
+
+"You dear," she rushed on. "O, you dear, dear stubborn old fraud! I
+punished you, didn't I? You were frightened--afraid I'd go! You know
+you were! As if I'd ever leave until--until--" She failed to finish
+that sentence. "But I'll never, never tease you so again!"
+
+Then there came that lightning-like change of mood which always left
+him breathless in his inability to follow it. The mirth went out of
+her eyes--her lips drooped and began to work strangely as she knelt
+and gazed up at him.
+
+"I bought his mortgage," she told him slowly. "I bought it from Judge
+Maynard a week ago with part of the money he gave me for our place
+there below his. He was very generous. Somehow I feel that he paid
+me--much more than it was worth. He's always wanted it and--and
+I--there wasn't any need for me to stay there any more, was there?"
+
+Old Jerry had never seen a face so terribly earnest before--so
+hungrily wistful--but it was the light that glowed in that kneeling
+girl's eyes that held him dumb. It left him completely incapable of
+coherent thought, yet mechanically his mind leaped back to that night,
+two weeks before, when Young Denny had stumbled and gone floundering
+to his knees before her, there on that very threshold. The boy's own
+words had painted that picture for him too vividly for him to forget.
+And he knew, without reasoning it out, just from the world of pain
+there in her eyes, that she, too, at that moment was thinking of that
+limp figure--of the great red gash across its chin.
+
+"I didn't help him," she went on, and now her voice was little more
+than a whisper. "I went and left him here alone--and hurt--when I
+should have stayed, that night when he went away. And so I bought
+it--I bought it because I thought some day he might come back--and
+need me even more. I thought if he did come--he'd feel as though he
+had just--come back home! And--and just to be here waiting, I
+thought, too, might somehow help me to have faith that he would come,
+some day--safe!"
+
+The old man felt the fiercely tense little arms go slack then. Her
+head went forward and lay heavy, pillowed in her hands upon his knees.
+But he sat there for a full minute, staring down at the thick,
+shimmering mass of her hair, swallowing an unaccountable lump that
+bothered his breathing preparatory to telling her all that he had kept
+waiting for just that opportunity, before he realized that she was
+crying. And for an equally long period he cast desperately about for
+the right thing to say. It came to him finally--a veritable
+inspiration.
+
+"Why, you don't want to cry," he told her slowly. "They--they ain't
+nothing to worry about now! For if that's the case--if you've gone to
+work and bought it, why, I ain't got no more jurisdiction over
+it--none whatever!"
+
+Immediately she lifted her head and gazed long and questioningly at
+him, but Old Jerry's face was only guilelessly grave. It was more than
+that--benevolent reassurance lit up every feature, and little by
+little her brimming eyes began to clear; they began to glisten with
+that baffling delight that had irritated him so before. She slipped
+slowly to her feet and stood and gazed down at him. Old Jerry knew
+then that he would never again see so radiant a face as hers was at
+that moment.
+
+"I wasn't crying because I was worried," she said, and she managed not
+to laugh. "I've been doing that every night, all night long, for two
+weeks. That was before I understood--things! But today--this afternoon
+I found something--read something--that made me understand better.
+I--I'm just crying a little tonight because I am so glad."
+
+Old Jerry couldn't quite fathom the whole meaning of those last words
+of hers. They surprised him so that all the things he had meant to
+tell her right then of Young Denny's departure once more went totally
+out of mind. He wondered if it was the red-headlined account of his
+first battle that she had seen. No matter how doubtful it was he felt
+it was very, very possible, for at each day's end he had been leaving
+Denny's roll of papers there just as he had when the boy was at home.
+
+But the rest of it he understood in spite of the wonder of it all.
+Whenever he remembered Young Denny asprawl upon the floor it seemed to
+him a thing too marvelous for belief, and yet, recalling the light
+that had glowed radiant in that girl's eyes, he knew it was the only
+thing left to believe.
+
+He talked it over with himself that night on the way home.
+
+"She bought it so's if he ever did want to come back, he'd feel as if
+he had come back home," he repeated her words, and he pondered long
+upon them. There was only one possible deduction.
+
+"She thought he wouldn't have nothing left to buy it back when he did
+come--that he'd be started on the road all the rest of 'em traveled
+and pretty well--shot--to--pieces! That's what she thought," he
+decided.
+
+He shook his head over it.
+
+"And she didn't know," he marveled. "She didn't know how that old jug
+really got broke--because I ain't told her yet! But she's waitin' for
+him just the same--just a-waitin' for him, no matter how he comes.
+Figurin' on takin' care of him, too--that's what she was doin'--her
+that ain't no bigger'n his little finger!"
+
+The storm had blown over long before his buggy went rattling down that
+long hill, and he sat with the reins dangling neglected between his
+knees and squinted up at the stars.
+
+"I always did consider I'd been pretty lucky," he confided after a
+time to the plump mare's lazily flopping ears, "never gettin' mixed up
+in any matrimonial tangle, so to speak. But now--now I ain't quite so
+sure." A lonesome note crept into the querulous voice. "Maybe I'd hev
+kept my eyes open a little mite wider'n I did if I'd ever a-dreamed
+anybody could care like that.... Don't happen very often though, I
+reckon. Just about once in a lifetime, maybe. Maybe, if he ain't too
+blind to see it when it does come ... maybe once to every man!"
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+That next week marked the beginning of an intimacy unlike anything
+which Old Jerry had ever before known in all his life, for in spite of
+the girl's absolute proprietorship he continued his daily trips up the
+long hill, not only for the purpose of leaving Young Denny's bundle of
+papers and seed catalogues, but to attend to the stock which the boy
+had left in his care as well. It never occurred to him that that duty
+was only optional with him now.
+
+He never again attempted either, after that night, to explain his
+delinquency and deliver Young Denny's message to her. There seemed to
+him absolutely no need now to open a subject which was bound to be
+embarrassing to him. And then, too, a sort of tacit understanding
+appeared to have sprung up between them that needed no further
+explanation.
+
+Only once was the temptation to confess to her the real reason for
+Denny's sudden going almost stronger than he could resist. That was
+quite a month later, when the news of the boy's second battle was
+flaunted broadcast by the same red-headlined sheet. Then for days he
+considered the advisability of such a move.
+
+It was not some one to share his hot pride that he wanted; he had
+lived his whole life almost entirely within himself, and so his
+elation was no less keen because he had no second person with whom to
+discuss the victory. He wanted her opinion on a quite different
+question--a question which he felt utterly incapable of deciding for
+himself. It was no less a plan than that he should be present at the
+match which was already hinted at between "The Pilgrim" and Jed The
+Red--Jeddy Conway, from that very village.
+
+There were days when he almost felt that she knew of this new
+perplexity of his, felt that she really had seen that account of Young
+Denny's first fight and had been watching for the second, and at such
+times only a mumbled excuse and a hasty retreat saved him from baring
+his secret desire.
+
+"She'd think I'd gone stark crazy," he excused his lack of courage.
+"She'd say I was a-goin' into my second childhood!"
+
+Yet in the end it was the girl with the tip-tilted eyes who decided it
+for him.
+
+Spring had slipped into early summer when the day came which made the
+gossip of "The Pilgrim's" possible bid for the championship a
+certainty. It was harder than ever for Old Jerry after that. Each
+fresh day's issue brought forth a long and exhaustive comparison of
+the two men's chances--of their strength and weaknesses. The technical
+discussion the old man skipped; it was undecipherable to him and
+enough that Young Denny was hailed as a certain winner.
+
+And then as the day set for the match crept nearer and nearer, he
+began to notice a new and alarming change in the tone of that daily
+column. At first it was only fleeting--too intangible for one to place
+one's finger upon it. But by the end of another week it was openly
+inquiring whether "The Pilgrim" had as much as an even chance of
+winning after all.
+
+It bewildered Old Jerry; it was beyond his comprehension, and had he
+not been so depressed himself he would have noted the change that came
+over the girl, too, these days. He never entered the big back kitchen
+now to hear her humming softly to herself, and sometimes he had to
+speak several times before she even heard him.
+
+That continued for almost a week, and then there came a day, a scant
+three days before the date which he had hungrily underlined in red
+upon a mental calendar, which brought the whole vexing indecision to a
+precipitate head.
+
+Old Jerry read that day's column in the sporting extra with weazened
+face going red with anger--read it with fists knotted. Those others
+had been merely skeptical--doubtful of "The Pilgrim's" willingness to
+meet the champion--and now it openly scoffed at him; it laughed at his
+ability, lashed him with ridicule. And, to cap it all, it accused him
+openly of having already "sold out" to his opponent.
+
+When the little white-haired driver of the buggy reached the house on
+the hill that night he was as pale as he had been red, hours before,
+and he pleaded fatigue to excuse his too hasty departure. He did not
+see that she was almost as openly eager to have him go or that she
+almost ran across to the table under the light with the packet of
+papers as he turned away.
+
+Had he noticed he would have been better prepared the next night for
+the scene that met him when he opened her door at dusk. One step was
+all he took, and then he stopped, wide-eyed, aghast. Dryad was
+standing in the middle of the room, her hair loose about her
+shoulders, lips drawn dangerously back from tight little teeth, fists
+clenched at her throat, and her eyes flaming.
+
+Old Jerry had never before seen her in a rage; he had never before
+seen anybody so terribly, pallidly violent. As he entered her eyes
+shot up to his. He heard her breath come and go, come and go, between
+dry lips. And suddenly she lifted her feet and stamped upon the
+newspaper strewn about her on the floor--infinitesimal shreds which
+she had torn and flung from her.
+
+"It's a lie!" she gasped. "It's a lie--a lie! They said he couldn't
+win anyway; they said he had sold--sold his chance to win--and they
+lie! He's never been whipped. He's never--been--whipped--yet!"
+
+It frightened him. The very straining of her throat and the mad rise
+and fall of her breast made him afraid for her. In his effort to quiet
+her he hardly reckoned what he was saying.
+
+"Why, it--it don't mean nothin'," he stated mildly. "That newspaper
+trash ain't no account, anyway you look at it."
+
+"Then why do they print it?" she stormed. "How do they dare to print
+it? They've been doing it for days--weeks!"
+
+He felt more equal to that question. The answer fairly popped into his
+brain.
+
+"They hev to, I reckon," he said with a fine semblance of cheerfulness.
+"If they didn't maybe everybody'd be so sure he'd win that they
+wouldn't even bother to go to see it." And then, very carelessly, as
+though it was of little importance: "Don't know's I would hev thought
+of goin' myself if it hadn't been for that. It's advertisin' I
+reckon--just advertisin'!"
+
+Her fists came down from her chin; her whole body relaxed. It was that
+bewildering change of mood which he could never hope to follow. She
+even started toward him.
+
+"Wouldn't have thought of it!" she repeated. "Why--why, you don't mean
+that you _aren't_ going?"
+
+It was quite as though she had never considered the possibility of
+such a contingency. Old Jerry's mouth dropped open while he stared at
+her.
+
+"Go," he stammered, "me go! Why, it's goin' to happen tomorrow
+night!"
+
+She nodded her head in apparent unconsciousness of his astonishment.
+
+"You'll have to leave on the early train," she agreed, "and--and so I
+won't see you again."
+
+She turned her back upon him for a moment. He realized that she was
+fumbling inside the throat of the little, too-tight blouse. When she
+faced him again there was something in the palm of her outstretched
+hand.
+
+"I've been waiting for you to come tonight," she went on, "and it was
+hard waiting. That's why I tore the paper up, I think. And now, will
+you--will you give him this for me--give it to him when he has won?
+You won't have to say anything." She hesitated. "I--I think he'll
+understand!"
+
+Old Jerry reached out and took it from her--a bit of a red silk bow,
+dotted with silver spangles. He gazed at it a moment before he tucked
+it away in an inside pocket, and in that moment of respite his brain
+raced madly.
+
+"Of course I figured on goin'," he said, when his breath returned,
+"but I been a little undecided--jest a trifle! But I ought to be
+there; he might be a mite anxious if they wasn't somebody from home.
+And I'll give it to him then--I'll give it to him when he's won!"
+
+He went a bit unsteadily back to his waiting buggy.
+
+"She had that all ready to give me," he said to himself as he climbed
+up to the high seat. Tentatively his fingers touched the little lump
+that the spangly bow of red made inside his coat. "She's had it all
+ready for me--mebby for days! But how'd she know I was a-goin'?" he
+asked himself. "How'd _she_ know, when I didn't know myself?"
+
+He gave it up as a feminine whimsicality too deep for mere male
+wisdom. Once on the way back he thought of the route that would go
+mailless the next day.
+
+"'Twon't hurt 'em none to wait a day or so," he stated, and his voice
+was just a little tinged with importance. "Maybe it'll do 'em good.
+And there ain't no way out of it, anyhow--for I surely got to be
+there!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Morehouse did not hear the door in the opaque glass partition that
+walled his desk off from the outer editorial offices open and close,
+for all that it was very quiet. Ever since the hour which followed the
+going to press of the afternoon edition of the paper the huge room,
+with its littered floor and flat-topped tables, had been deserted, so
+still that the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly against the window pane at
+Morehouse's side seemed irritatingly loud by contrast.
+
+The plump newspaperman in brown was too deeply preoccupied to hear
+anything so timidly unobtrusive as was that interruption, and only
+after the intruder had plucked nervously at the elbow that supported
+his chin did he realize that he was not alone. His head came up then,
+slowly, until he was gazing back into the eyes of the little,
+attenuated old man who, head tilted birdlike to one side, was standing
+beside him in uncomfortable, apologetic silence.
+
+It surprised Morehouse more than a little. For the life of him he
+couldn't have told just whom he had expected to see when he looked up,
+but nothing could have startled him more than the presence of that
+white-haired wisp of a man with the beady eyes who fitted almost
+uncannily into the perplexing puzzle which had held him there at his
+desk until dusk. He forgot to greet the newcomer. Instead he sat
+gazing at him, wide-mouthed, and after Old Jerry had borne the
+scrutiny as long as he could he took the initiative himself.
+
+"Well, I got here," he quavered. "I been a-tryin' to get upstairs to
+see you ever since about three o'clock, and they wouldn't let me in.
+Said you was too busy to be bothered, even when I told 'em I belonged
+to the Gov'mint service. But I managed to slip by 'em at last!"
+
+He paused and waited for some word of commendation. Morehouse merely
+nodded. He was thinking--thinking hard! The voice was almost as
+familiar to him as was his own, and yet it persisted in tantalizing
+his memory. He couldn't quite place it. Old Jerry sensed something of
+his difficulty.
+
+"I'm from Boltonwood," he introduced himself, not quite so uncertainly.
+"I'm Old Jerry. Maybe you remember me--I sat just next the stove that
+night you was in town a-huntin' news."
+
+Then Morehouse remembered. Old Jerry had not had much to say that
+night, but his face and his shrill eagerness to snatch a little of the
+spotlight was unforgettable. And it was of that very night Morehouse
+had been thinking--that and the face of the big boy silent there on
+the threshold--when the interruption came. But still he uttered no
+welcome; instead there was something close akin to distinct aversion
+in his manner as he drew up a chair for the old man.
+
+Old Jerry felt the chill lack of cordiality, but he sat down. And
+after a long period of silence, in which Morehouse made no move to put
+him more at ease, he swallowed hard and went on with his explanation.
+
+"I come down to--to see Denny fight," he stated. "It kinda seemed to
+us--to me--that he'd think it strange if somebody from his home town
+wa'n't there. So I come along. And I wouldn't a bothered you at all
+today--it's gettin' late and I ain't got my ticket to get in
+yet--only--only I was worried a mite--jest a trifle--and I thought I'd
+better see you if I could."
+
+Morehouse tilted his head again.
+
+Old Jerry gave up any attempt of further excusing his intrusion and
+went straight to the heart of the matter. He unfolded a paper that
+bulged from the side pocket of his coat and spread it out on the
+desk.
+
+"It's this," he said, indicating the column that had scoffed so openly
+at Young Denny's chances. "You--you wrote it, I suppose, didn't you?"
+
+Again that impersonal nod.
+
+"Well, I just wanted to ask you if--if you really thought it was--if
+you think he ain't got no chance at all?"
+
+The eagerness of that trembling old voice was not to be ignored any
+longer. But Morehouse couldn't help but recollect the eager circle of
+"Ayes" which had flanked the Judge that other night.
+
+"What of it?" he inquired coolly. "What if he hasn't? I though Jed
+Conway was the particular pride of your locality!"
+
+Old Jerry's beady eyes widened. There was no mistaking the positive
+dislike in that round face, any more than one could misunderstand the
+antagonism of that round-faced man's words.
+
+For weeks Morehouse had been puzzling over a question which he could
+not answer--something which, for all the intimacy that had sprung up
+between himself and Denny Bolton, he had never felt able to ask of the
+boy with the grave eyes and graver lips. Even since the conference in
+Hogarty's little office, when he had agreed to the ex-lightweight's
+plan, it had been vexing him, no nearer solution than it had been that
+day when he assured Hogarty that there was more behind young Denny's
+eagerness to meet Jed Conway than the prize-money could account for.
+
+Now, that afternoon, on the very eve of that battle, he sat there in
+the thickening dusk, unconscious of the passage of time, and listened
+to the explanation that came pouring from Old Jerry's lips, haltingly
+at first, and then in a steady falsetto stream, and learned the answer
+to it.
+
+The old mail carrier didn't know what he was doing. His one desire was
+to vindicate himself in the cold eyes of the man before him. But he
+told it well and he did not spare himself.
+
+Once he though he caught a glimpse of thawing mirth in that face when
+he had finished relating how Denny had led him, reluctant and fearful,
+from the kitchen of the farmhouse to the spot of blood on the stable
+wall, and from there to the jug in a heap of fragments against the
+tree-butt. And that fleeting mirth became a warm, all-enveloping grin
+when he had detailed the climax of the Judge's prearranged sensation
+that same night.
+
+He knew then that he had set himself right, and he did not mean to go
+into it any more fully. It was the changed attitude of Morehouse that
+led him on and on. So he told, too, of Dryad Anderson's purchase of
+the bleak old place on the hill and her reason. But when it came to
+her wild fury against the paper that had dared to scoff at the boy he
+paused. For a second he calculated the wisdom of exhibiting the bit of
+a red bow that had been entrusted him. It, without a doubt, would be
+the only passport he could hope for to a share of the glory, when it
+was all over. For the time being he jealously decided to let it wait,
+and he turned back to the rumpled sheet upon the desk.
+
+"She--she'd be mighty disappointed," he finished a little lamely.
+"She's so sure, somehow, it kinda worries me. You--you do think he's
+got a little chance, don't you--jest a trifle?"
+
+It took a long time--Old Jerry's confession. It was dark before he
+finished, but Morehouse did not interrupt him by so much as the
+lifting of a finger. And he sat silent, gazing straight ahead of him,
+after the old man had finished. Old Jerry, watching him, wondered
+vaguely what made his eyes so bright now.
+
+"So that's it, is it?" the plump man murmured at last. "So that's it.
+And I never dreamed of it once. I must be going stale."
+
+He wheeled in his chair until he faced Old Jerry full.
+
+"I don't know," he said. "A half-hour before you came in I didn't like
+even to think of it. But now--chance? Well, this deadly waiting is
+over anyhow, and we'll soon know. And I wonder--now--I wonder!"
+
+With his watch flat in the palm of his hand Morehouse sat and whistled
+softly. And then he shot hastily to his feet. Old Jerry understood
+that whistle, but he hung back.
+
+"I--I ain't got my ticket yet," he protested.
+
+Morehouse merely reached in and hustled him over the threshold.
+
+"Your unabridged edition, while it has no doubt saved my sanity, has
+robbed us both of food and drink," he stated. "There's no time left,
+even for friendly argument, if you want to be there when it happens.
+You won't need any ticket this time--you'll be with me."
+
+Even at that they were late, for when they paused a moment in the
+entrance of the huge, bowl-shaped amphitheater, a sharp gust of
+hand-clapping, broken by shrill whistling and shriller cat-calls, met
+them. Far out across that room Old Jerry saw two figures, glistening
+damp under the lights, crawl through the ropes that penned in a
+high-raised platform in the very center of the building, and disappear
+up an aisle.
+
+He turned a dismayed face to Morehouse who, with one hand clutching
+his arm, was deeply engrossed in a whispered conversation with a man
+at the entrance--too engrossed to see. But when the newspaperman
+turned at last to lead the way down into the body of the house he
+explained in one brief word:
+
+"Preliminary," he said.
+
+Old Jerry did not understand. But half dragged, half led, he followed
+blindly after his guide, until he found himself wedged into a seat at
+the very edge of that roped-off, canvas-padded area. It was a single
+long bench with a narrow board desk, set elbow high, running the
+entire length in front of it. Peering half fearfully from the corner
+of his eye Old Jerry realized that there were at least a full dozen
+men beside themselves wedged in before it, and that, like Morehouse,
+there was a block of paper before each man.
+
+The awe with which the immensity of the place had stunned him began to
+lessen a little and allowed him to look around. Wherever he turned a
+sea of faces met him--faces strangely set and strained. Even under the
+joviality of those closest to him he saw the tightened sinews of their
+jaws. Those further away were blurred by the smoke that rose in a
+never-thinning cloud, blurred until there was nothing but indistinct
+blotches of white in the outer circles of seats.
+
+And when he lifted his head and looked above him, he gasped. They were
+there, too, tiny, featureless dots of white, like nothing so much as
+holes in a black wall, in the smoke-drift that alternately hid and
+revealed them.
+
+Faces of men--faces of men, wherever he turned his head! Faces
+strained and tense as they waited. That terrible tensity got under his
+skin after a while; it crept in upon him until his spine crawled a
+little, as if from cold. It was quiet, too; oddly quiet in spite of
+the dull mumble that rose from thousands of throats.
+
+Twice that hush was broken--twice when men laden with pails of water,
+and bottles and sponges, and thick white towels crowded through the
+ropes in front of him. Then the whole house was swept by a premature
+storm of hand-clapping for the men who, stripped save for the flat
+shoes upon their feet and the trunks about their hips, followed them
+into the ring.
+
+"Preliminary!" Morehouse had said, and there had been something of
+disinterested contempt in his voice. Old Jerry felt, too, the entire
+great crowd's disinterested, good-natured tolerance. They were waiting
+for something else.
+
+Twice Morehouse left his place at the long board desk and wended his
+way off through the maze of aisles. The second time he returned, after
+the third match had been finished, Old Jerry caught sight of his face
+while he was a long way off--and Old Jerry's breath caught in his
+throat. His plump cheeks were pale when he crowded back into his
+place. The old man leaned nearer and tried to ask a question and his
+dry tongue refused. The plump reporter nodded his head.
+
+Again the men came with their bottles of water--their pails--their
+towels and sponges. There was a third man who slipped agilely into the
+nearest corner. Old Jerry saw him turn once and nod reassuringly, he
+thought, at Morehouse. The little mail carrier did not know him;
+everybody else within a radius of yards had apparently recognized him,
+but he could not take his eyes off that lean, hard face. There was a
+kind of satanic, methodical deadliness in Hogarty's directions to the
+other two men inside the ropes.
+
+Even while he was staring at him, fascinated, that hand-clapping
+stormed up again, and then swelled to a hoarse roar that went
+hammering to the roof. A figure passed Old Jerry, so close that the
+long robe which wrapped him brushed his knee. When Hogarty had
+stripped the robe away and the figure went on--on up through the
+ropes--he recognized him.
+
+As Young Denny seated himself in the corner just above them Morehouse
+threw out his arm and forced Old Jerry back into his seat. Then the
+little man remembered and shrank back, but his eyes glowed. He forgot
+to watch for the coming of the other in dumb amaze at the wide expanse
+of the boy's shoulders that rose white as the narrow cloth that
+encircled his hips. Dazed, he listened to them shouting the name by
+which they knew him--"The Pilgrim"--and he did not turn away until Jed
+Conway was in the ring.
+
+He heard first the cheers that greeted the newcomer--broken
+reiterations of "Oh, you Red!" But the same heartiness was not there,
+nor the volume. When Old Jerry's eyes crept furtively across the ring
+he understood the reason.
+
+It was the same face that he had known before, older and heavier, but
+the same. And there was no appeal in that face. It was scant of brow,
+brutish, supercunning, and the swarthy body that rose above the black
+hip-cloth matched the face. Old Jerry's eyes clung to the thick neck
+that ran from his ears straight down into his shoulders until a
+nameless dread took him by the throat and made him turn away.
+
+Back in Denny's corner Hogarty was lacing on the gloves, talking
+softly in the meantime to the big boy before him.
+
+"From the tap of the gong," he was droning. "From the tap of the
+gong--from the tap of the gong."
+
+Young Denny nodded, smiled faintly as he rose to his feet to meet the
+announcer, who crossed and placed one hand on his shoulder and
+introduced him. Again the applause went throbbing to the roof; and
+again the echo of it after Jed The Red had in turn stood up in his
+corner.
+
+The referee called them to the middle of the ring. It was quiet in an
+instant--so quiet that Old Jerry's throat ached with it. The announcer
+lifted his hand.
+
+"Jed The Red fights at one hundred and ninety-six," he said, "'The
+Pilgrim' at one hundred and seventy-two."
+
+Immediately he turned and dropped through the ropes. His going was
+accompanied by a flurry in each corner as the seconds scuttled after
+him with stools and buckets.
+
+They faced each other, alone in the ring save for the referee--The
+Pilgrim and Jed The Red. Then a gong struck. They reached out and each
+touched the glove of the other.
+
+Old Jerry could not follow it--it came too terribly swift for
+that--but he heard the thudding impact of gloves as Denny hurtled
+forward in that first savage rush.
+
+"From the gong," Hogarty had ordered, "from the gong!" The Red,
+covering and ducking, blocking and swaying beneath the whirlwind of
+that attack, broke and staggered and set himself, only to break again,
+and retreat, foot by foot, around the ring. The whole house had come
+to its feet with the first rush, screaming to a man. Old Jerry, too,
+was standing up, giddy, dizzy, as he watched Conway weather that first
+minute.
+
+He had no chance to swing; with both hands covering he fought wildly
+to stay on his feet; to live through it; to block that right hand that
+lashed out again and again and found his face.
+
+Each time that blow went across it shook him to the soles of his feet;
+it lifted the cheering of the crowd to a higher, madder key; but even
+Old Jerry, eyes a little quicker already, saw that none of those blows
+landed flush upon the side of the jaw.
+
+Conway called to his aid all the ring-generalship of which he was
+capable in that opening round. Once that lightening-like fist reached
+out and found his mouth. A trickle of blood oozed red from the lips
+that puffed up, almost before the glove came away; once when he had
+seen an opening and led for The Pilgrim's own face, that wicked jolt
+caught him wide open. He ducked his head between his shoulders then.
+The shock sent him to his knees, but that upraised shoulder saved him.
+The force of that glancing smash had spent itself before it reached
+his unprotected neck.
+
+There was no let-up--no lull in the relentless advance. He was on his
+feet again, grim, grasping, reeling, hanging on! And again that
+avalanche of destruction enveloped him.
+
+He fought to drop into a clinch, for one breath's respite, his huge
+hairy arms slipping hungrily out about Denny's white body, but even as
+he snuggled his body close in, that fist lashed up between them and
+found his chin again. It straightened him, flung him back. And once
+more, before the certain annihilation of that blow, he ducked his head
+in between his shoulders.
+
+Old Jerry heard the crash of the glove against the top of his head; he
+saw Conway hurled back into the ropes. But not until seconds later,
+when he realized that the roar of the crowd had hushed, did he see
+that a change had come over the fight.
+
+Conway was no longer giving ground; he was himself driving in more and
+more viciously, for that deadly right hand no longer leaped out to
+check him. Twice just as Denny had rocked him he now jolted his own
+right over to The Pilgrim's face. At each blow the boy lashed out with
+his left hand. Both blows he missed, and the second time the force of
+his swing whirled him against the barrier. Right and left Conway sent
+his gloves crashing into his unprotected stomach--right and left!
+
+And then the tap of the gong!
+
+Hogarty was through the ropes with the bell. As Denny dropped upon the
+stool he stripped the glove from the boy's right hand and examined it
+with anxious fingers. The other two were sponging his chest with
+water--pumping fresh air into his lungs; but Old Jerry's eyes clung to
+the calamity written upon Hogarty's gray features.
+
+Everybody else seemed to understand what had happened--everybody but
+himself. He turned again to the man next him on the bench. Morehouse,
+too, had been watching the ex-lightweight's deft fingers.
+
+"Broken," he groaned. "His right hand is gone." And after what seemed
+hours Old Jerry realized that Morehouse was cursing hoarsely.
+
+In Conway's corner the activity was doubly feverish. The Red lay
+sprawled back against the ropes while they kneaded knotty legs, and
+shoulders. There was blood on his chin, his lips were cut and
+misshapen, but he had weathered that round without serious damage.
+Watching him Old Jerry saw that he was smiling--snarling confidently.
+
+Back in Denny's corner they were still working over him, but the whole
+house had sensed the dismay in that little knot of men. Hogarty,
+gnawing his lip, stopped and whispered once to the boy on the stool,
+but Young Denny shook his head and held out his hand. He laced the
+gloves back on them, over the purple, puffy knuckles.
+
+And then again that cataclysmic bell.
+
+Just as the first round had started, that second one opened with a
+rush, but this time it was Conway who forced the fighting. Like some
+gigantic projectile he drove in and caught Denny in his own corner,
+and beat him back against the standard. Again that thudding right and
+left, right and left, into the stomach. And again Old Jerry saw that
+left hand flash out--and miss.
+
+Just as The Pilgrim had driven him Conway forced Denny around the
+ring, except that the boy was heart-breaking slow in getting away. The
+Red stayed with him, beat him back and back, smothered him! With that
+deadly right no longer hunting for his jaw, he fought with nothing to
+fear, for Young Denny could not find his face even once with that
+flashing left swing.
+
+Before the round was half over The Pilgrim had gone down twice--body
+blows that did little harm; but they were shouting for The
+Red--shouting as if from a great distance, from the balconies.
+
+Again Conway drove him into a corner of the ropes, feinted for the
+stomach. Then there came that first blow that found his chin. Old
+Jerry saw Denny's body go limp as he crashed his length upon the
+padded canvas; he saw him try to rise and heard the house screaming
+for him to take the count.
+
+He rested there for a precious instant, swaying on one knee. But his
+eyes were still glazed when he rose, and again Conway, rushing, beat
+down that guarding right, and, swinging with all his shoulder weight
+behind it, found that same spot and dropped him again.
+
+Pandemonium broke loose in the upper reaches of the seats, but the
+silence of the body of the house was deathlike as he lay without
+stirring. Old Jerry gulped and waited--choked back a sobbing breath as
+he saw him start to lift himself once more. Upon his hands and knees
+first, then upon his knees alone. And then, with eyes shut, he
+struggled up, at the count of ten, and shaped up again.
+
+And Conway beat him down.
+
+Even the gallery was quiet now. The thud of that stiff-armed jolt went
+to every corner of that vast room. And the referee was droning out the
+count again.
+
+"--Five--six--seven----"
+
+Head sagging between his arms, eyes staring and sightless, The
+Pilgrim groped out and found the ropes. Once more at the end of the
+toll he lifted himself--lifted himself by the strength of his
+shoulders to his legs that tottered beneath him, and then stepped free
+of the ropes.
+
+That time, before Conway could swing, the gong saved him.
+
+Again it was Hogarty who was first through the ropes. Effortlessly he
+stooped and lifted that limp body and carried it across to the stool.
+They tried to stretch him back against the ropes behind him, and each
+time his head slumped forward over his knees.
+
+Old Jerry turned toward Morehouse and choked--licked his lips and
+choked again. And Morehouse nodded his head dumbly.
+
+"He--he's gone!" he said.
+
+Old Jerry sat and stared back at him as though he couldn't understand.
+He remembered the bit of a red bow in his pocket then; he fumbled
+inside and found it. He remembered the eyes of the girl who had given
+it to him, too, that night when she had knelt at his knees. His old
+fingers closed, viselike, upon the fat man's arm.
+
+"But she told me to give him this," he mumbled dully. "Why, she--she
+said for me to give him this, when he had _Won_."
+
+Morehouse stared at the bit of tinseled silk--stared up at Old Jerry's
+face and back again. And then he leaned over suddenly and picked it
+up. The next moment he was crowding out from behind the desk--was
+climbing into the ring.
+
+Old Jerry saw him fling fiercely tense words into Hogarty's face, and
+Hogarty stood back. He knelt before the slack body on the stool and
+tried to raise the head; he held the bit of bright web before him, but
+there was no recognition in Denny's eyes. And the old man heard the
+plump reporter's words, sob-like with excitement:
+
+"She sent it," he hammered at those deaf ears. "She sent it--she sent
+it--silk--a little bow of red silk!"
+
+Then the whole vast house saw the change that came over that limp
+form. They saw the slack shoulders begin to go back; saw the
+dead-white face come up; they saw those sick eyes beginning to clear.
+And The Pilgrim smiled a little--smiled into Morehouse's face.
+
+"Silk," he repeated softly. "Silk!" and then, as if it had all come
+back at once: "Silk--next to her skin!"
+
+And they called it a miracle--that recovery. They called it a miracle
+of the mind over a body already beaten beyond endurance. For in the
+scant thirty seconds which were left, while the boy lay back with them
+working desperately above him, it was almost possible to see the
+strength ebbing back into his veins. They dashed water upon his head,
+inverted bottles of it into his face, and emptied it from his eyes,
+but during that long half minute the vague smile never left his
+lips--nor his eyes the face of Conway across from him.
+
+And he went to meet The Red when the gong called to them again. He
+went to meet him--smiling!
+
+The bell seemed to pick him up and drop him in the middle of the ring.
+Set for the shock he stopped Conway's hurtling attack. And when The
+Red swung he tightened, took the blow flush on the side of the face,
+and only rocked a little.
+
+Conway's chin seemed to lift to receive the blow which he started
+then from the waist. That right hand, flashing up, found it and
+straightened The Red back--lifted him to his toes. And while he was
+still in the air The Pilgrim measured and swung. The left glove
+caught him flush below the ear; it picked him up and drove him
+crashing back into the corner from which he had just come.
+
+Old Jerry saw them bend over him--saw them pick him up at last and
+slip him through the ropes. Then he realized that the referee was
+holding Young Denny's right hand aloft; that Hogarty, with arms about
+him, was holding the boy erect.
+
+The little mail-carrier heard the ex-lightweight's words, as he edged
+in beside Morehouse, against the ropes.
+
+"A world-beater," he was screaming above the tumult. "I'll make a
+world-beater of you in a year!"
+
+And The Pilgrim, still smiling vaguely, shook his head a little.
+
+"Maybe," he answered faintly. "Maybe I'll come back. I don't
+know--yet. But now--now I reckon I'd better be going along home!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+It was a white night--a night so brilliant that the village lights far
+below in the hollow all but lost their own identity in the radiance of
+that huge, pale moon; so white that the yellow flare of the single
+lamp in its bracket, in the back kitchen of the old Bolton place on
+the hill seemed shabbily dull by contrast.
+
+Standing at the window in the dark front room of the house, peering
+out from under cupped palms that hid her eyes, Dryad could almost pick
+out each separate picket of the straggling old fence that bounded the
+garden of the little drab cottage across from her. In that searching
+light she could even make out great patches where the rotting
+sheathing of the house had been torn away, leaving the framework
+beneath naked and gaunt and bare.
+
+It was scarcely two months since the day when she had gone herself to
+Judge Maynard with her offer to sell that unkempt acre or so which he
+had fought so long and bitterly to force into the market. And it had
+been a strange one, too--that interview. His acceptance had been
+quick--instantaneously eager--but the girl was still marvelling a
+little over his attitude throughout that transaction, whenever her
+mind turned back to it.
+
+When she mentioned the mortgage which Young Denny had secured only a
+few days before, he had seemed to understand almost immediately why
+she had spoken of it, without the explanation which she meant to
+give.
+
+Once again she found him a different Judge Maynard from all the others
+she had known, and he had in the years since she could remember, been
+many different men to her imagination. It puzzled her almost as much
+as did his opinion upon the value of the old place, which, somehow,
+she could not bring herself to believe was worth all that he insisted
+upon paying. But then, too, she did not know either that the town's
+great man had been riding a-tilt at his own soul, for several days on
+end, and just as Old Jerry had done, was seizing upon the first
+opportunity to salve the wounds resultant.
+
+And yet this was the first day that the girl had seen him so much as
+inspect his long-coveted property; the first time she had known him to
+set foot within the sagging gate since he had placed in her hands that
+sum of money which was greater than any she had ever seen before.
+Under his directions men had commenced clearing away the rank
+shrubbery that afternoon--commenced to tear down the house itself.
+
+Time after time since morning she had entered the front room to stand
+and peer out across the valley at this new activity which the Judge
+himself was directing with an oddly suppressed lack of his usual
+violent gestures. There was something akin to apology in his every
+move.
+
+It brought a little homesick ache into the girl's throat; it set her
+lips to curving--made her eyes go damp with pity and tenderness for
+the little white-haired figure bending over his bench. He had clung so
+bravely, so stubbornly, to that battered bit of a house; to his garden
+which he had never realized had long since ceased to be anything but a
+plot of waist-high bushes and weeds. Once when she recollected those
+countless rows of poignantly wistful faces on the shelves of that
+back-room workshop she wondered if she had not been disloyal, after
+all. And she had argued it out with herself aloud as she went from
+task to task in that afternoon's gathering twilight.
+
+"But it was because of her that he stayed," she reassured herself. "It
+was because of her that he kept it, all these years. And--and so he
+couldn't mind--not very much, I think, now that they don't need it any
+longer, if I sold it so that I could keep this place--for him!"
+
+They had been long, those hours of waiting. Not a minute of those
+entire two days since Old Jerry's departure but had dragged by on
+laggard feet. And yet now, with nightfall of that third day she
+became jealous of every passing minute. She hated to have them pass;
+dreaded to watch the creeping hands of the clock on the kitchen wall
+as they drew up, little by little, upon that hour which meant the
+arrival of the night train in the village.
+
+One moment she wondered if he would come--wondered and touched dry
+lips with the tip of her tongue. And the very next, when somehow she
+was so very, very sure that there was no room for doubt, she even
+wondered whether or not he would be glad--glad to find her there. The
+gaunt skeleton of a framework showing through the torn sides of John
+Anderson's cottage almost unnerved her whenever that thought came, and
+sent her out again into the lighted back room.
+
+"What if he isn't?" she whispered, over and over again. "Why, I--I
+never thought of that before, did I? I just thought I had to be here
+when he came. But what if he--isn't glad?"
+
+An hour earlier, when the thought had first come to her, she had
+carried a big, square package out to the table before the kitchen
+window and untied with fluttering fingers the string that bound it.
+The little scarlet blouse and shimmering skirt, alive with tinsel
+that glinted under the light, still lay there beside the thin-heeled
+slippers and filmy silk stockings. She bent over them, patting
+them lovingly with a slim hand, her eyes velvety dark while she
+considered.
+
+"Oh, you're pretty--pretty--pretty!" she said in a childishly hushed
+voice, "the prettiest things in the world!"
+
+The next instant she straightened to scan soberly the old shiny black
+skirt she was wearing, and the darned stockings and cracked shoes.
+
+"And--and you would help, I think," she went on musing. "I know you
+would, but then--then it wouldn't be _me_. It would be easy for any
+one to care for you--almost too easy. I--I think I'll wear them for
+him--some other time, maybe--if he wants me to."
+
+But she turned the very next moment and crossed to the mirror on the
+wall--that square bit of glass before which Young Denny had stood and
+stared back into his own eyes and laughed. Oblivious to everything
+else she was critically scanning her own small reflection--great,
+tip-tilted eyes, violet in the shadow, and then cheeks and pointed
+chin--until, even in spite of her preoccupation, she became aware of
+the hungry tremulousness of the mouth of that reflected image--until
+the hoarse shriek of an engine's whistle leaped across the valley and
+brought her up sharp, her breath going in one long, quavering gasp
+between wide lips.
+
+It was that moment toward which she had been straining every hour of
+those two days; the one from which she had been shrinking every minute
+of those last two hours since dark. She hesitated a second, head
+thrown to one side, listening; she darted into that dark front room
+and pressed her face to the cold pane, and again that warning note
+came shrilling across the quiet from the far side of town.
+
+There in the darkness, a hand on either side of the frame holding her
+leaning weight, she stood and waited. Below her the house roofs lay
+like patches of jet against the moon-brightness. She stood and watched
+its whole length, and no darker figure crept into relief against its
+lighter streak of background. Minutes after she knew that he had had
+time to come, and more, she still clung there, staring wide-eyed,
+villageward.
+
+It wasn't a recollection of that half dismantled wreck of a house
+under the opposite ridge that finally drew her dry-lipped gaze from
+the road; she did not even think of it that moment. It was simply
+because she couldn't watch any longer--not even for a minute or
+two--that her eyes finally fluttered that way. But when she did turn
+there was a bigger, darker blot there against the leaning picket
+fence--a big-shouldered figure that had moved slowly forward until it
+stood full in front of the sagging gate.
+
+And even as she watched Denny Bolton swung around from a long
+contemplation of that half-torn-down building to peer up at his own
+dark place on the hill--to peer straight back into the eyes of the
+girl whom he could not even see.
+
+She saw the bewilderment in that big body's poise; even at that
+distance she sensed his dumb, numbed uncomprehension. From bare white
+throat to the mass of tumbled hair that clustered across her forehead
+the blood came storming up into her face; and with the coming of that
+which set the pulses pounding in her temples and brought an
+unaccountable ache to her throat, all the doubt which had squired her
+that day slipped away.
+
+Before he had had time to turn back again she had flown on mad feet
+into the kitchen, swept the lamp from its bracket on the wall with
+heedless haste and raced back to that front window. And she placed it
+there behind a half-drawn shade--that old signal which they had agreed
+upon without one spoken word, years back.
+
+Crouching in the semi-gloom behind the lamp she watched.
+
+He stepped forward a pace and stopped; lifted one hand slowly, as
+though he did not believe what he saw. Bareheaded he waited an instant
+after that arm went back to his side. When he swung around and
+disappeared into the head of the path that led from the gate into the
+black shadow of the thicket in the valley's pit she lifted both arms,
+too, and stood poised there a moment, slender and straight and vividly
+unwavering as the lamp-flame itself, before she wheeled and ran.
+
+It was dark in the thick of the underbrush; dark and velvety quiet,
+save for the little moon-lit patch of a clearing where he waited. He
+stood there in the middle of that spot of light and heard her coming
+long before she reached him--long before he could see her he heard her
+scurrying feet and the whip of bushes against her skirt.
+
+But when she burst through the fringe of brush he had no time to move
+or speak, or more than lift his arms before her swift rush carried her
+to him. When her hands flashed up about his neck and her damp mouth
+went searching softly across his face and he strained her nearer and
+even nearer to him, he felt her slim body quivering just as it had
+trembled that other night when she had raced across the valley to
+him--the night when Judge Maynard's invitation had failed to come.
+After a time he made out the words that were tumbling from her lips,
+all incoherent with half hysterical bits of sobs, and he realized,
+too, that her words were like that of that other night.
+
+"Denny--Denny," she murmured, her small, gold-crowned head buried in
+his shoulder. "I'm here--I've come--just as soon as I could; Oh, I've
+been afraid! I knew you'd come, too--I knew you would tonight! I was
+sure of it--even when I was sure that you wouldn't."
+
+For a long time he was silent, because dry lips refused to frame the
+words he would have spoken. Minutes he stood and held her against him
+until the rise and fall of her narrow shoulders grew quieter, before
+he lifted one hand and held her damp face away, that he might look
+into it. And gazing back at him, in spite of all the wordless wonder
+of her which she saw glowing in his eyes, she read, too, the grave
+perplexity of him.
+
+"Why--you--you must have known I'd come," he said, his voice
+ponderously grave. "I--I told you so. I left word for you that I would
+be back--as soon as I could come."
+
+He felt her slim body slacken--saw the lightning change flash over her
+face which always heralded that bewildering swift change of mood. It
+wiped out all the tenseness of lip and line.
+
+There in the white light in spite of the shadows of her lashes which
+turned violet eyes to great pools of satin shadow, he caught the flare
+of mischief behind half-closed lids, before she tilted her head back
+and laughed softly, with utter joyous abandon straight up into his
+face.
+
+"He--he didn't deliver it," she stated naively. "It wasn't his fault
+entirely, though, Denny--although I did give him lots of chances, at
+first anyway. I almost made him tell--but he--he's stubborn."
+
+She stopped and laughed again--giggled shamelessly as she remembered.
+But her eyes grew grave once more.
+
+"I think he didn't quite approve of my attitude," she explained to him
+as he bent over her. "He thought I wasn't--sorry enough--to deserve it
+at first. And then--and then I never gave him any opportunity to
+speak. I would have stopped him if he had tried. You--you see, I just
+wanted to--wait."
+
+Head bowed she paused a moment before she continued.
+
+"But--but I sent him to you--two days ago, Denny. I sent something
+that I asked him to give you--when--when it was over. Didn't you--get
+it?"
+
+He fumbled in the pocket of his smooth black suit after she had
+disengaged herself and dropped to the ground at his feet. With her
+ankles curled up under her she sat in a boyish heap watching him,
+until he drew out the bit of a spangled crimson bow and held it out
+before him in the palm of one big hand. Then he swung down to the
+ground beside her.
+
+"I thought it must have been Old Jerry who brought it. I didn't see
+him, and no one could remember his name or knew where he had gone when
+they thought to look for him. They--they just described him to me."
+
+He turned the bow of silk over, touching it almost reverently.
+
+"Some one gave it to me," he continued slowly. "I don't know exactly
+how or when. It--it was just put into my hand--when I needed it most.
+I wasn't sure Old Jerry had brought it, but I knew it came from you,
+knew it when I didn't--know--much--else!"
+
+She was very, very quiet, content merely in his nearness. Even then
+she didn't understand it--the reason for his going that night, weeks
+before--for the papers which had told her a little had told her
+nothing of his brain's own reason. The question was on her lips when
+her narrow fingers, searching the shadow for his, found that bandaged
+wrist and knuckles. Almost fiercely she drew that hand up into the
+light. From the white cloth her gaze went to the discolored, bruised
+patches on face and chin--the same place where that long, ugly cut had
+been which dripped blood on the floor the night she had run from him
+in the dark--went to his face, and back again, limpid with pity. And
+she lifted it impulsively and tucked it under her chin, and held it
+there with small hands that trembled a little.
+
+"Then--then if you haven't seen Old Jerry--why--why you--he couldn't
+have told you anything at all yet, about me."
+
+The words trailed off softly and left the statement hanging
+interrogatively in midair.
+
+Denny nodded his head in the direction of John Anderson's house that
+had been.
+
+"About that?" he asked.
+
+She nodded her head. And then she told him; she began at the very
+beginning and told him everything from that night when she had watched
+him there under cover of the thicket. Once she tried to laugh when she
+related Old Jerry's panic, a week or two later, when he had come to
+find her packing in preparation to leave. But her mirth was waveringly
+unsteady. And when she tried to explain, too, how she had chanced to
+buy up the mortgage on his own bleak house on the hill, her voice
+again became suddenly, diffidently small.
+
+There was a new, sweet confusion in her refusal to meet his eyes and
+Denny, reaching out with his bandaged hand, half lifted her and swung
+her around until she needs must face him.
+
+"You--you mean you--bought it, yourself?" he marvelled.
+
+Then, face uplifted, brave-eyed, she went on a little breathlessly.
+
+"I bought it, myself," she said, "the week you went away." And, in a
+muffled whisper: "Denny, I didn't have faith--not much, at first. But
+I meant to be here when you did come, just--just because I thought you
+might need me--mighty badly. And waiting is hard, too, when one hasn't
+faith. And I did wait! That was something, wasn't it, Denny?
+Only--only now, today, I--I think I realized that my own need of you
+is greater than yours could ever be for me!"
+
+She sat, lips apart, quiet for his answer.
+
+An odd smile edged the boy's lips at her wistful earnestness. It was a
+twisted little smile which might have been born of the pain of
+stinging lids and dryer, aching throat. He could not have spoken at
+that moment had he tried. Instead he lifted her bodily and drew her
+huddled little figure into his arms. It was his first face to face
+glimpse of the wonder of woman.
+
+But he knew now something which she had only sensed; he knew that the
+big, lonesome, bewildered boy whom she had tried to comfort in his
+bitterness that other night when she had hidden her own hurt
+disappointment with the white square card within her breast, had come
+back all man.
+
+He looked down at her--marvelled at her very littleness as though it
+were a thing he had never known before.
+
+"And--and you still--would stay?" he managed to ask, at last. "You'd
+stay--even if it did mean being like them," he inclined his head
+toward the distant village, "like them, old and wrinkled and worn-out,
+before they have half lived their lives?"
+
+She nodded her head vehemently against his coat. He felt her thin arms
+tighten and tighten about him.
+
+"I'll stay," she repeated after him in a childishly small voice.
+"You--you see, I _know_ what it is now to be alone, even just for a
+week or two. I think I'll stay, please!"
+
+There had been a bit of a teasing lilt in her half smothered words. It
+disappeared now.
+
+"I--I'd be pretty lonesome, all the rest of my life--man--if I
+didn't!"
+
+And long afterward she lifted her head from his arm and blinked at him
+from sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes.
+
+"Why, Denny?" she asked in drowsy curiosity. "Why did you go--why,
+really? Don't you realize that you haven't told me even yet?"
+
+He rose and lifted her to her feet, but that did not cover the slow
+flush that stained his face--the old, vaguely embarrassed flush that
+she knew so well. He groped awkwardly for words while he stared again
+at the bit of silk in his hand, before his searching fingers found the
+thick, crisp packet that had lain with it in his pocket.
+
+"The Pilgrim's share of the receipts amounted to $12,000," had been
+the tale of Morehouse's succinct last paragraph.
+
+Then, "It--took me almost two months to save fifteen dollars," Young
+Denny explained in painful self-consciousness.
+
+She understood. She remembered the scarlet blouse and shimmering skirt
+with its dots of tinsel, and the stockings and slim-heeled slippers.
+Her fingers touched his chin--the barest ghost of a caressing
+contact.
+
+"Denny--Denny," she murmured, "I told you that night that you didn't
+understand. And yet--and yet I'm glad that you couldn't. 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?"
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+The circle in the Boltonwood tavern convened early that night, and
+long after hope had all but died a death of stagnation the regulars
+stuck stubbornly to their places about the cheerlessly cold,
+fat-bellied stove.
+
+It was a session extraordinary, for even Dave Shepard, the patriarch
+of the circle itself, could not recall an occasion when they had
+foregathered there in such fashion so long after the last spring snow
+had surrendered to summer. Yet it was largely mild-voiced Dave's
+doing--this silent, sober gathering.
+
+For he alone of all of them had heeded Old Jerry's parting admonition
+that night, weeks before, when the servant of the Gov'mint had turned
+from his shrill defiance of the Judge to whip their whole ranks with
+scorn. Since then Dave had been following the papers with faithful and
+painstaking care--not merely the political news of the day which
+invariably furnished the key for each night's debate--but searching
+every inch of type, down to the last inconsequential advertisement.
+And he had been rewarded; he had penetrated, with the aid of that
+small picture inset at the column-head, the disguise of the colorful
+sobriquet which Morehouse had fastened upon Young Denny Bolton. More
+than that, he had been reading for weeks each step in that campaign of
+publicity which had so harrowed Old Jerry's peace of mind--and somehow
+he had kept it religiously to himself.
+
+Not until two days before, when Old Jerry's desertion from duty had
+become a town-wide sensation had he opened his mouth. The route back
+in the hills went mailless that day, and for that reason there were
+more than enough papers to go around when he finally gave the old
+guard which was waiting in vain for Old Jerry's appearance upon the
+top step of the post-office, the benefits of his wider reading.
+
+There had been a fierce factional debate raging when he came up
+late to take his unobtrusive place upon the sidewalk, but even before
+he added his voice to the din those who argued that the old
+mail-carrier's disappearance could be in no way connected with that
+of Young Denny Bolton, who had gone the way of all the others of
+his line, were in a hopeless minority.
+
+Their timidest member's announcement stunned them all to silence--left
+them hushed and speechless--not for an hour or two, but for the days
+that followed as well. Even the red-headlined account which had come
+with that morning's batch of news of Young Denny's victory and the
+fall of Jed The Red, whom they had championed under the Judge's able
+leadership, failed to stir up any really bitter wrangle.
+
+They sat in an apathetic circle, waiting for Old Jerry to come.
+
+But no one, not even Morehouse, knew when Old Jerry disappeared that
+night after Jed Conway had come hurtling from his corner, only to lift
+and whirl and go crashing back before the impact of The Pilgrim's
+leaping gloves. At first the plump newspaper man believed that the
+surging, shouting wave of humanity which had broken comber-like over
+the ropes to hail a newer favorite had separated the little,
+bird-faced man from him. Only a recollection of those vice-like
+fingers clinging to his arm a moment before made that probability seem
+unbelievable.
+
+It was a long time before The Pilgrim's brain had again become clear
+enough to grasp the meaning of the questions which Morehouse put to
+him, but Denny did not know even as much as did the round-faced
+reporter himself. He only recognized the description of the shrill
+voiced, beady-eyed mail carrier.
+
+To Old Jerry belonged the only comprehensive explanation for his
+sudden withdrawal from the scene, just at that moment when his own
+share in it might have been not inconsequential. And more than that,
+his resolution to keep it strictly and privately his own grew firmer
+and firmer, the more thought he gave to it.
+
+In those hours which intervened between the impulse which had resulted
+in his modest retreat from Morehouse's side, under cover of the
+crowd's wild demonstration, and the next morning when he boarded the
+train which was to carry him back to the hills, after a cautious
+reconnaissance that finally located Denny in the coach ahead of him,
+he once or twice sought to analyze his actions for an explanation less
+derogatory to his own self-respect.
+
+"They wan't no real sense ner reason in my hangin' around, jest
+gittin' under foot," he stated thoughtfully. "I done about all I was
+called on to do, didn't I? Why, I reckon when all's said and done, I
+jest about won that fight myself! For if I hadn't a-come he wouldn't
+never a-got that ribbon. And Godfrey, but didn't that wake him!"
+
+There was more than a little satisfaction to be gained in viewing
+himself in that light. With less to occupy his mind and unlimited
+leisure for elaboration it could have served as the entire day's theme
+for thought. But so far as explaining his almost panic haste to get
+away the reasoning was palpably unsatisfactory--so unsatisfactory that
+he cringed guiltily behind the back of the seat in front of him
+whenever anyone entered the front door of the car.
+
+He gave quite the entire day to the problem and long before night hid
+the flying fences outside his window he decided that eventually there
+could be only one way out of it. Sooner or later he had to face the
+issue: he had to tell Young Denny that he had betrayed his trust. Even
+that damp wad of bills which the boy had pressed into his hand, that
+night before he left, still burned within his coat.
+
+Once or twice he rose, during the return journey and advanced with
+forced jauntiness as far as the door of the car ahead. But he always
+stopped there, after a moment's uneasy contemplation of Denny's back,
+turned a little sadly to the water-cooler, and returned slowly and
+unenthusiastically to his seat. Twice when it was necessary to change
+trains he made the transfer with a lightning precision that would have
+done honor to any prestidigitator. And when, hours after nightfall,
+the train came to a groaning standstill before Boltonwood's deserted
+station shed he waited his opportunity and dropped off in the dark--on
+the wrong side of the track!
+
+Denny had already become a dark blur ahead of him when he, too, turned
+in and took the long road toward town.
+
+Old Jerry followed the big-shouldered figure that night with heavily
+lagging feet--he followed heavy in spirit and bereft of hope. He was
+still behind him when Denny finally paused before the sagging gate of
+John Anderson's half-stripped house. Then, watching the boy's dumb
+lack of understanding, the enormity of the whole horrible complication
+dawned upon him for the first time. He had forgotten Dryad Anderson's
+going--forgotten that the house upon the ridge was no longer the
+property of the man who had entrusted it to him.
+
+When the light behind that half-drawn shade flared up, far across on
+the crest of the opposite hill, and Young Denny wheeled to plunge into
+the black mouth of the path that led deeper into the valley, he too
+started swiftly forward. He swept off in desperate haste up the long
+hill road that led to the Bolton homestead.
+
+The light was still there in that front room when he poked a
+tentatively inquiring head in at the open door; he paused in a
+dull-eyed examination of the silken garments draped over the table top
+in the kitchen after he had roamed vaguely through the silent house.
+But he was too tired in mind to give them much attention just then.
+
+Outside, buried in the shadow of Young Denny's squat, unpainted barn,
+he still waited doggedly--he waited ages and ages, a lifetime of
+apprehension. And then he saw them coming toward him, up out of the
+shadow of the valley into the moonlight that bathed the hill in
+silver.
+
+They paused and stood there--stood and stared out across the valley at
+Judge Maynard's great box of a house on the hill and that bit of a
+wedge-shaped acre of ruin that clung like an unsightly burr to the hem
+of his immaculate pastures.
+
+Slender and boy-like in her little blouse and tight, short skirt the
+girl was half-hidden in the hollow of his shoulder. Once, watching
+with his head cocked pertly, sparrowlike, on one side, the old man's
+eyes went to the white-bandaged knuckles of Denny's right hand; once
+while he waited Old Jerry saw her lift her face--saw the big,
+shoulder-heavy figure fold her in his arms and bend and touch the
+glory of her hair with his lips while she clung to him, before she
+turned and went slowly toward the open kitchen door.
+
+Then he started. He shrank farther back into the shadow and edged a
+noiseless way around the building. But with the tavern lights
+beckoning to him he waited an introspective moment or two.
+
+"Godfrey 'Lisha," he sighed thunderously, "but that takes a load offen
+my mind!"
+
+And he ruminated.
+
+"But what's the use of my tryin' to explain now? What's the use--when
+they ain't nothing to explain! It's all come out all right, ain't it?
+Well, then, hedn't I jest as well save my breath?"
+
+He straightened his thin shoulders and stretched his arms.
+
+"It couldn't a-been handled much neater, either," that one-sided
+conversation went on, "not anyway you look at it. I always did think
+that the best thing to do in them matters was to kinda let 'em take
+their own course. And now--now I guess I'll be gittin' along down!"
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before he opened the door of the Tavern office a scant half hour
+later, Denny Bolton stopped there on the steps a moment and, his hand
+on the latch, listened to the thin, falsetto voice that came from
+within. A slow smile crept up and wrinkled the corners of the boy's
+eyes after a while when he had caught the drift of those strident
+words.
+
+They had been waiting for him--the regulars. They had been waiting for
+him longer than Old Jerry knew. In the chair that had been the
+throne-seat of the town's great man the servant of the Gov'mint sat
+and faced his loyal circle.
+
+He had reached his climax--had hammered it home. Now he was rounding
+out his conclusion for those who hung, hungry-eyed, upon his
+eloquence.
+
+"I ain't begun to do it jestice yet," he apologized. "I ain't more'n
+jest teched on a good many things that needs to be gone into a
+trifle. Jest a trifle! It'll take weeks and weeks to do that. But
+as I was a-sayin'--I got there! I got there just when I was needed
+almighty bad. I ain't done that part of it jestice--but you'll see it
+all in the papers in a day or two--Sunday supplement, maybe--and
+pictures--and colors, too, I reckon!"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP'S
+
+DRAMATIZED NOVELS
+
+THE KIND THAT ARE MAKING THEATRICAL HISTORY
+
+May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list.
+
+WITHIN THE LAW. By Bayard Veiller & Marvin Dana.
+
+Illustrated by Wm. Charles Cooke.
+
+This is a novelization of the immensely successful play which ran for two
+years in New York and Chicago.
+
+The plot of this powerful novel is of a young woman's revenge directed
+against her employer who allowed her to be sent to prison for three years
+on a charge of theft, of which she was innocent.
+
+WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY. By Robert Carlton Brown.
+
+Illustrated with scenes from the play.
+
+This is a narrative of a young and innocent country girl who is suddenly
+thrown into the very heart of New York, "the land of her dreams," where
+she is exposed to all sorts of temptations and dangers.
+
+The story of Mary is being told in moving pictures and played in theatres
+all over the world.
+
+THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM. By David Belasco.
+
+Illustrated by John Rae.
+
+This is a novelization of the popular play in which David Warfield, as Old
+Peter Grimm, scored such a remarkable success.
+
+The story is spectacular and extremely pathetic but withal, powerful, both
+as a book and as a play.
+
+THE GARDEN OF ALLAH. By Robert Hichens.
+
+This novel is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit
+barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness and loneliness.
+
+It is a book of rapturous beauty, vivid in word painting. The play has
+been staged with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties.
+
+BEN HUR. A Tale of the Christ. By General Lew Wallace.
+
+The whole world has placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance on a
+height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached. The
+clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect
+reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere of
+the arena have kept their deep fascination. A tremendous dramatic success.
+
+BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. By George Broadhurst and Arthur Hornblow.
+
+Illustrated with scenes from the play.
+
+A stupendous arraignment of modern marriage which has created an interest
+on the stage that is almost unparalleled. The scenes are laid in New York,
+and deal with conditions among both the rich and poor.
+
+The interest of the story turns on the day-by-day developments which show
+the young wife the price she has paid.
+
+Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+JOHN FOX, JR'S.
+
+STORIES OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS
+
+May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list.
+
+THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE.
+
+Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+The "lonesome pine" from which the story takes its name was a tall tree
+that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of the pine
+lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail, and when he
+finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the pine but the
+foot-prints of a girl. And the girl proved to be lovely, piquant, and the
+trail of these girlish foot-prints led the young engineer a madder chase
+than "the trail of the lonesome pine."
+
+THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME
+
+Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "Kingdom Come." It
+is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural and honest, from which often
+springs the flower of civilization.
+
+"Chad," the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he
+came--he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood,
+seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and mothered
+this waif about whom there was such a mystery--a charming waif, by the
+way, who could play the banjo better than anyone else in the mountains.
+
+A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND.
+
+Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of
+moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine
+a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young
+Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns
+what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of the
+mountaineers.
+
+Included in this volume is "Hell fer-Sartain" and other stories, some of
+Mr. Fox's most entertaining Cumberland valley narratives.
+
+Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY
+
+GENE STRATTON-PORTER
+
+May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list.
+
+THE HARVESTER.
+
+Illustrated by W. L. Jacobs
+
+"The Harvester," David Langston, is a man of the woods and fields, who
+draws his living from the prodigal hand of Mother Nature herself. If the
+book had nothing in it but the splendid figure of this man, with his sure
+grip on life, his superb optimism, and his almost miraculous knowledge of
+nature secrets, it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his
+"Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole sound, healthy, large outdoor
+being realizes that this is the highest point of life which has come to
+him--there begins a romance, troubled and interrupted, yet of the rarest
+idyllic quality.
+
+FRECKLES.
+
+Decorations by E. Stetson Crawford
+
+Freckles is a nameless waif when the tale opens, but the way in which he
+takes hold of life; the nature friendships he forms in the great
+Limberlost Swamp; the manner in which everyone who meets him succumbs to
+the charm of his engaging personality; and his love-story with "The Angel"
+are full of real sentiment.
+
+A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST.
+
+Illustrated by Wladyslaw T. Brenda.
+
+The story of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, lovable type of the
+self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards
+all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul,
+and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising
+surroundings those rewards of high courage.
+
+It is an inspiring story of a life worth while and the rich beauties of
+the out-of-doors are strewn through all its pages.
+
+AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW.
+
+Illustrations in colors by Oliver Kemp. Design and decorations by Ralph
+Fletcher Seymour.
+
+The scene of this charming, idyllic love story is laid in Central Indiana.
+The story is one of devoted friendship, and tender self-sacrificing love;
+the friendship that gives freely without return, and the love that seeks
+first the happiness of the object. The novel is brimful of the most
+beautiful word painting of nature, and its pathos and tender sentiment
+will endear it to all.
+
+Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+STORIES OF WESTERN LIFE
+
+May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list.
+
+RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, By Zane Grey.
+
+Illustrated by Douglas Duer.
+
+In this picturesque romance of Utah, of some forty years ago, we are
+permitted to see the unscrupulous methods employed by the invisible hand
+of the Mormon Church to break the will of those refusing to conform to its
+rule.
+
+FRIAR TUCK, By Robert Alexander Wason.
+
+Illustrated by Stanley L. Wood.
+
+Happy Hawkins tells us, in his humorous way, how Friar Tuck lived among
+the Cowboys, how he adjusted their quarrels and love affairs and how he
+fought with them, and for them when occasion required.
+
+THE SKY PILOT, By Ralph Connor.
+
+Illustrated by Louis Rhead.
+
+There is no novel, dealing with the rough existence of cowboys, so
+charming in the telling, abounding as it does with the freshest and the
+truest pathos.
+
+THE EMIGRANT TRAIL, By Geraldine Bonner.
+
+Colored frontispiece by John Rae.
+
+The book relates the adventures of a party on its overland pilgrimage, and
+the birth and growth of the absorbing love of two strong men for a
+charming heroine.
+
+THE BOSS OF WIND RIVER, By A. M. Chisholm.
+
+Illustrated by Frank Tenney Johnson.
+
+This is a strong, virile novel with the lumber industry for its central
+theme and a love story full of interest as a sort of subplot.
+
+A PRAIRIE COURTSHIP, By Harold Bindloss.
+
+A story of Canadian prairies in which the hero is stirred, through the
+influence of his love for a woman, to settle down to the heroic business
+of pioneer farming.
+
+JOYCE OF THE NORTH WOODS, By Harriet T. Comstock.
+
+Illustrated by John Cassel.
+
+A story of the deep woods that shows the power of love at work among its
+primitive dwellers. It is a tensely moving study of the human heart and
+its aspirations that unfolds itself through thrilling situations and
+dramatic developments.
+
+Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Once to Every Man, by Larry Evans
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