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.