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