CHAPTER I_Once to Every Man

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[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

LARRY EVANS

ILLUSTRATED BY

ANTON OTTO FISCHER

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS :: NEW YORK

The Metropolitan Magazine Company.

The H. K. Fly Company.

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.