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.