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.