Once to Every Man Part 19

"Will he have to be in on it?" Hogarty countered instantly. "Will he?

Not to any great extent, he won't. According to my plan he fights straight. Don't you suppose I know a straight man when I see one, just as well as you do?

"Here's the whole thing--just as I'll put it up to Dennison before it's dark tonight. It's Dennison's own plan, too, in the first place, so he hasn't any kick coming. We'll match Bolton against one of the fairly good ones--Lancing, say--in about two weeks. Lancing gets his orders to open up in the sixth round and go down with the punch--and stay down! That's plain enough, isn't it? Well, Bolton is fighting under the name of 'The Pilgrim,' and you step up the next morning and give him two columns--you hail him as a real one, at last.

"We'll match him with The Texan then. Conway whipped him back a week or two, but he had his hands full doing it. The Texan--and I ought to know--is open to reason if the figure is big enough to be persuasive.

We'll see to that.

"He gets his orders, too--just as if they were really necessary! About the twelfth he lies down to sleep. Why, it's so simple it's real art!

I'll just hold Bolton back until those rounds. I'll make him take it slow--and then send him in to clean up! Dennison is shy a match right this minute for The Red; they're all a little doubtful about him. The Pilgrim will be the only logical man in the world to send against him--that is, according to your sporting columns. And Dennison, of course, being on the inside, knows he is really nothing but a dub--knows it is simply a plain open and shut proposition. That is to say--he _thinks_ he knows!"

Jesse Hogarty paused and the corners of his lips twitched back to show his teeth, but not in laughter.

"It's the same little frame-up that he sent against Boots and me," he finished. "He ought to be satisfied, hadn't he? And I'll have him on the street the next morning--I'll put him where he'll be glad to borrow a dollar to buy his breakfast with!"

For a long time they stared back into each other's face: Hogarty taut at the table side, Morehouse slouched deep in his chair. The latter was the first to break that pregnant silence. He was nodding his head in thoughtful finality when he lifted himself to his feet.

"You've got me," he stated. "You've got me snared! Not that I give two hoots about what happens to Dennison, mind! I don't--although I must admit that the prospect of his starving to death is a lovely one to contemplate. And I'd die happy, I think, if I could see The Red trimmed, and trimmed with conscientious thoroughness. But those aren't my reasons for going hands with you in this a.s.sa.s.sination.

"I know a hunch when I see one. I ought to, for I've spent the contents of my little yellow envelope often enough trying to make one come true. And I'm in with you, Flash, till the returns are all in from the last district, but it's because I know that there is something more than either of us dream of behind that boy's wanting to meet Conway. He has something on his mind; he wants something, and wants it real bad. And I like him--I liked him right from the beginning--so I'll stick around and help. Maybe I'll find out what it is that's been bothering him, too, before I get through. But I wish I wasn't of such an inquiring turn of mind. It keeps one too stirred up."

He stopped to grin comically.

"Any objection, now that I've sworn allegiance, Flash, if I go out and present myself?"

Hogarty's whole tense body began to relax, his lean face softened and his eyes lost much of their hardness and glitter as he shook his head in negation.

"That's a little detail of the campaign which I had already a.s.signed to you," he replied, and the inflection of his voice was perfect. "Not that I have any fears of his going the way of his forefathers, however, because I haven't. And if my a.s.surance on that point perplexes you, you might ask him to have one drink and watch his eyes when he refuses you.

"But I would like to have you look out for him for a while. If you don't Ogden will--Ogden likes him, too--and he is too frivolous to be trusted."

Hogarty reached out one long arm and dropped a hand heavily upon Morehouse's shoulder. He was smiling openly now--smiling with a barefaced enjoyment which the plump newspaper man had never before known him to exhibit. And he continued to smile, while he stood there in the open door and watched Morehouse mince on tiptoe across the polished floor to the corner where Ogden was officiously presenting each member of the Monday morning squad of regulars, as they returned from the dressing-rooms, to the big-shouldered boy in black, whose face was so very grave.

Hogarty smiled as he closed his office door, after he had seen Morehouse slip his hand through the crook of Young Denny's arm, in spite of Bobby Ogden's yelp of protest, and clear a way to the outer entrance with one haughty flip of his free hand.

Hours later that same day, when the tumult in the long main room of the gymnasium had hushed and the apathetic Legs and his helper had turned again to their endless task of grooming the waxed floor, Dennison, the manager of Jed The Red, sitting in that same chair which Morehouse had occupied, cuddling one knee in his hands, fairly basked in that same smile. The purring perfection of Hogarty's discourse was enticing. The absurd simplicity of his plan, which he admitted must, after all, be credited to the astuteness of Dennison himself, was more than alluring. But that smile was the quintessence of hypnotic flattery.

It savored of a delightful intimacy which Jesse Hogarty accorded to few men.

CHAPTER XVI

In all that hill town's history no period had ever before been so filled with sensation as was that one which opened with the flight of Judge Maynard's yellow-wheeled buckboard along the main street of Boltonwood to herald the pa.s.sing of the last of the line of men who had given the village its name.

One by one, in bewildering succession, climax after climax had piled itself upon those which already had left the white-haired circle of regulars about the Tavern stove breathless with fruitless argument and footless conjecture.

Old Jerry's desertion from the ranks of the old guard over which the Judge had ruled with a more than despotic tongue, bursting with bomblike suddenness in their midst that very same night which had seen Young Denny's dramatic departure, had complicated matters to an inconceivable degree. For, after all, he was the one member of the circle to whom they had all been unconsciously looking for a comprehensive answer to the question which the Judge's crafty exhibition of the boy's bruised face had created.

He enjoyed what none of the others could claim an absolutely incontestable excuse for visiting the old, weatherbeaten farmhouse on the hill above town--and in his official capacity they felt, too, that he might venture a few tentative inquiries at least, which, coming from any one else, might have savored of indelicacy.

Not but what the circle had enjoyed Judge Maynard's masterly recital, for it had held them as one man. But they were hungry also for facts--facts which could convince as well as entertain. Even the Judge himself had planned upon Old Jerry's co-operation; he had had it in mind to be patronizingly lenient that night; that is, after that first rebuke which was to leave him the undisputed master of the situation.

To reach the really great heights of which the evening's triumph was capable the old mail carrier's collaboration had been almost indispensable. They had been waiting with hungry impatience for him.

And then Old Jerry had appeared--he made his entrance and his exit--and departing had left them gasping for breath.

Old Jerry had not waited to view the effect of his mad defiance of the town's great man. It is doubtful if he had given that side of the issue one pa.s.sing thought, but his triumphant withdrawal from the field had robbed the situation of not one bit of its decisiveness.

Quiet followed his going, a stillness so profound that they heard him cackling to himself in insane glee as he went down the steps. And that hush had endured while they waited in a delicious state of tingling suspense for the first furious sentences which should preface his lifelong banishment from the circle itself.

For years they had whispered, "Just wait, he'll come to it--he'll go just like the rest." And so Young Denny's final weakening had not been so unexpected as it might have been. And more than once, too, when the Judge's harsh censure of him who had always been his stanchest supporter had left Old Jerry cringing in his place beside the stove, they had all felt the justice if not a premonition of final retribution to come. It was the debonaire dare-deviltry of Old Jerry's defiance rather than its unexpectedness which had proved its greatest sensation. That day's one supreme moment--the only one which had not suffered from too acute antic.i.p.ation--came while they waited for the Judge's denial, that denial which was never spoken.

The town's great man had slumped back in his chair in a kind of stunned trance while the apoplectic purple of his earlier wrath faded from his face. He did open his mouth, but not in any effort to speak.

It was only to lick his thick lips and gurgle noisily in his fat throat. He tried to rise, too, and failed in his first attempt--and tried again.

They had all realized what it was that made his knees wabble as he crossed to the door; they understood what had drained his face of all its color. Every man of them knew why the latch rattled under his shaking figure. The Judge had been afraid, not merely morally frightened, but abjectly, utterly terrified in the flesh--afraid of the threat in the insolent bearing of the little, shriveled man who had pa.s.sed out into the night a moment before.

It could have been funny. It might have been sublimest farce-comedy, had they not lacked the perspective necessary for its appreciation.

But it was enough that they realized that the demagogue had come crashing down--enough that, watching his furtive disappearance that night, they learned how pitiful a coward a bl.u.s.terer really can be.

Old Jerry's own actions in those days which followed had furnished rich food for conjecture. The fact that it had been the little mail-carrier himself who had ridden in the carriage beside the slim girl with the tumbled hair, at the head of the dreary procession that toiled slowly up to the bleak cemetery behind the church, had, indeed, been worthy of some discussion. The spendthrift prodigality of the white roses which rumor whispered he had gone to place the next day over the new mound of raw earth had not gone unspoken. Even the resemblance of the girl who John Anderson had named Dryad in his hunger for the beautiful--even the likeness of her face with its straight little nose and wistfully curved lips, to the features of that small, rain-stained statue of the white and gold slip of a woman who had been his wife, came in for its share of the discussion, too.

But all those topics which were touched upon in the nights that followed were, at best, of only secondary importance. Inevitably the circle about the stove swung back to a consideration of that first day's major climax, until the very discord of opinion which hitherto had been the chief joy of those nightly sessions bade fair to prove their total disruption.

For the circle of regulars were leaderless now; there was no longer a master mind to hold in check the flood of argument and reb.u.t.tal, or preserve a unity of disagreement. Where before they had been accustomed to take up each new development and pursue it until it reached a state either too lucid for further consideration or an insolvable problem that dead-locked conversation, a half dozen different arguments sprang up each night, splitting the circle into wrangling factions which trebled the din of voices and multiplied ten-fold the new note of bitter personalities which had taken the place of former incontrovertible logic.

Judge Maynard's iron discipline was gone, and the old guard faced a quite probable dissolution in the first week or two which followed his going. More from habit than anything else they had waited that next night for him to come and clear his throat pompously and open the evening's activities. And the Judge failed to appear, failed just as signally as had Old Jerry.

And yet it was not the absence of the former which had left them leaderless. Not one of them had realized it the night before--but that second night they knew!

By his very rebellion Old Jerry had won the thing which years of faithful service had failed to bring. He had dethroned the despot, and the honors were his by right of conquest.

The circle knew that the Judge would never return; after one hour of fruitless waiting that was a certainty. But night after night they continued to gather, stubbornly, persistently hopeful that Old Jerry would come back. And in the meantime they almost forgot, at times, Young Denny who had gone the way of his fathers as they had so truly prophesied; they only touched a little uncomfortably upon the problem of the slim, yellow-haired girl alone in the battered cottage at the edge of the town, while they reviewed with startlingly fertile detail and a lingering relish that came very close to being hero-worship, his last brief remarks which had left the Judge a wreck of his former magnificence.

If Old Jerry realized all this that had come to pa.s.s he gave no outward sign of such knowledge. He even forgot to pause impressively upon the top step of the post-office those days, as he always had formerly, before he made his straight-backed descent with the pouches slung over one shoulder. There were mornings when he came perilously near to ignoring altogether the double line which, with a new deference, greeted his daily pa.s.sage to the waiting buggy, and yet there was not one who dared so much as to whisper that there was anything in his air of preoccupation that savored of studiously planned forethought. But it is doubtful if he did realize the change that had taken place, at least in that first week or two, for Old Jerry had much of a strictly private nature to occupy his mind.

He was never quite able to remember the things he had said that morning to the girl with the too-white face and tumbled hair, huddled in the half-light at the table before the window, or to recall in any sort of a connected, coherent sequence his own actions in those first few days which followed it.

It aggravated him for a day or two, this inability to piece out the details; it brought a peevish frown to his thin face and a higher, even more querulous note to his shrill falsetto voice, which, while they hardly understood it, nevertheless resulted in an even profounder hush in those respectful ranks. He couldn't even revisualize it clearly enough for his own private edification--for the joy of seeing himself as others had seen him.

Nothing remained but a picture of Dryad Anderson's face--the face that had tried so hard to smile--which she had lifted to him that first morning when he entered the front room of the little drab cottage at the edge of town. That was limned upon his brain in startlingly perfect detail still--that and one other thing. The memory of John Anderson's pitifully wasted form huddled slack upon the high stool, arms outstretched and silvered head bowed in a posture of utter weariness, remained with him, too, clinging in spite of every effort to dislodge it.

That whole week had not served to wipe it out. Day after day, as Old Jerry drove his route with the reins taut in his nervous hands, it floated up before him. And even when he wound the lines about the whipstock, letting the old mare take her own pace, and leaned back, eyes closed, against the worn cushions, the interior of that back-room shop with its simple, terribly inert occupant and countless rows of tiny white statues, all so white and strangely alike, crept in under the lids.

Old Jerry's mail route suffered that week; his original "system" of mail distribution, of which he had always been so jealously proud, went from bad to very, very bad, and from that to an impossible worse; and yet, while it became a veritable lottery for the hillsfolk who were dependent upon him whether they would receive the packet of mail which really belonged to a two-mile distant neighbor or none at all, in one respect the rural service improved immensely, and the improvement--and strangely enough, too--was as directly a result of that stubborn image of John Anderson's bowed head which persisted in haunting the mind of the servant of the Gov'mint as was the alarming growth of his lack of dependability.

Day by day Old Jerry grew less and less p.r.o.ne to let the leisurely white mare take her own pace. Instead, he sat stiffly erect a great portion of the time, driving with one eye c.o.c.ked calculatingly upon the course of the sun, and his mind running far ahead of him, to the end of the day's route, when he would have to turn in at the cross-road that toiled up the grade to the wind-racked old Bolton place on the hill north of town.