Once to Every Man Part 25

He rested there for a precious instant, swaying on one knee. But his eyes were still glazed when he rose, and again Conway, rushing, beat down that guarding right, and, swinging with all his shoulder weight behind it, found that same spot and dropped him again.

Pandemonium broke loose in the upper reaches of the seats, but the silence of the body of the house was deathlike as he lay without stirring. Old Jerry gulped and waited--choked back a sobbing breath as he saw him start to lift himself once more. Upon his hands and knees first, then upon his knees alone. And then, with eyes shut, he struggled up, at the count of ten, and shaped up again.

And Conway beat him down.

Even the gallery was quiet now. The thud of that stiff-armed jolt went to every corner of that vast room. And the referee was droning out the count again.

"--Five--six--seven----"

Head sagging between his arms, eyes staring and sightless, The Pilgrim groped out and found the ropes. Once more at the end of the toll he lifted himself--lifted himself by the strength of his shoulders to his legs that tottered beneath him, and then stepped free of the ropes.

That time, before Conway could swing, the gong saved him.

Again it was Hogarty who was first through the ropes. Effortlessly he stooped and lifted that limp body and carried it across to the stool.

They tried to stretch him back against the ropes behind him, and each time his head slumped forward over his knees.

Old Jerry turned toward Morehouse and choked--licked his lips and choked again. And Morehouse nodded his head dumbly.

"He--he's gone!" he said.

Old Jerry sat and stared back at him as though he couldn't understand.

He remembered the bit of a red bow in his pocket then; he fumbled inside and found it. He remembered the eyes of the girl who had given it to him, too, that night when she had knelt at his knees. His old fingers closed, viselike, upon the fat man's arm.

"But she told me to give him this," he mumbled dully. "Why, she--she said for me to give him this, when he had _Won_."

Morehouse stared at the bit of tinseled silk--stared up at Old Jerry's face and back again. And then he leaned over suddenly and picked it up. The next moment he was crowding out from behind the desk--was climbing into the ring.

Old Jerry saw him fling fiercely tense words into Hogarty's face, and Hogarty stood back. He knelt before the slack body on the stool and tried to raise the head; he held the bit of bright web before him, but there was no recognition in Denny's eyes. And the old man heard the plump reporter's words, sob-like with excitement:

"She sent it," he hammered at those deaf ears. "She sent it--she sent it--silk--a little bow of red silk!"

Then the whole vast house saw the change that came over that limp form. They saw the slack shoulders begin to go back; saw the dead-white face come up; they saw those sick eyes beginning to clear.

And The Pilgrim smiled a little--smiled into Morehouse's face.

"Silk," he repeated softly. "Silk!" and then, as if it had all come back at once: "Silk--next to her skin!"

And they called it a miracle--that recovery. They called it a miracle of the mind over a body already beaten beyond endurance. For in the scant thirty seconds which were left, while the boy lay back with them working desperately above him, it was almost possible to see the strength ebbing back into his veins. They dashed water upon his head, inverted bottles of it into his face, and emptied it from his eyes, but during that long half minute the vague smile never left his lips--nor his eyes the face of Conway across from him.

And he went to meet The Red when the gong called to them again. He went to meet him--smiling!

The bell seemed to pick him up and drop him in the middle of the ring.

Set for the shock he stopped Conway's hurtling attack. And when The Red swung he tightened, took the blow flush on the side of the face, and only rocked a little.

Conway's chin seemed to lift to receive the blow which he started then from the waist. That right hand, flashing up, found it and straightened The Red back--lifted him to his toes. And while he was still in the air The Pilgrim measured and swung. The left glove caught him flush below the ear; it picked him up and drove him crashing back into the corner from which he had just come.

Old Jerry saw them bend over him--saw them pick him up at last and slip him through the ropes. Then he realized that the referee was holding Young Denny's right hand aloft; that Hogarty, with arms about him, was holding the boy erect.

The little mail-carrier heard the ex-lightweight's words, as he edged in beside Morehouse, against the ropes.

"A world-beater," he was screaming above the tumult. "I'll make a world-beater of you in a year!"

And The Pilgrim, still smiling vaguely, shook his head a little.

"Maybe," he answered faintly. "Maybe I'll come back. I don't know--yet. But now--now I reckon I'd better be going along home!"

CHAPTER XIX

It was a white night--a night so brilliant that the village lights far below in the hollow all but lost their own ident.i.ty in the radiance of that huge, pale moon; so white that the yellow flare of the single lamp in its bracket, in the back kitchen of the old Bolton place on the hill seemed shabbily dull by contrast.

Standing at the window in the dark front room of the house, peering out from under cupped palms that hid her eyes, Dryad could almost pick out each separate picket of the straggling old fence that bounded the garden of the little drab cottage across from her. In that searching light she could even make out great patches where the rotting sheathing of the house had been torn away, leaving the framework beneath naked and gaunt and bare.

It was scarcely two months since the day when she had gone herself to Judge Maynard with her offer to sell that unkempt acre or so which he had fought so long and bitterly to force into the market. And it had been a strange one, too--that interview. His acceptance had been quick--instantaneously eager--but the girl was still marvelling a little over his att.i.tude throughout that transaction, whenever her mind turned back to it.

When she mentioned the mortgage which Young Denny had secured only a few days before, he had seemed to understand almost immediately why she had spoken of it, without the explanation which she meant to give.

Once again she found him a different Judge Maynard from all the others she had known, and he had in the years since she could remember, been many different men to her imagination. It puzzled her almost as much as did his opinion upon the value of the old place, which, somehow, she could not bring herself to believe was worth all that he insisted upon paying. But then, too, she did not know either that the town's great man had been riding a-tilt at his own soul, for several days on end, and just as Old Jerry had done, was seizing upon the first opportunity to salve the wounds resultant.

And yet this was the first day that the girl had seen him so much as inspect his long-coveted property; the first time she had known him to set foot within the sagging gate since he had placed in her hands that sum of money which was greater than any she had ever seen before.

Under his directions men had commenced clearing away the rank shrubbery that afternoon--commenced to tear down the house itself.

Time after time since morning she had entered the front room to stand and peer out across the valley at this new activity which the Judge himself was directing with an oddly suppressed lack of his usual violent gestures. There was something akin to apology in his every move.

It brought a little homesick ache into the girl's throat; it set her lips to curving--made her eyes go damp with pity and tenderness for the little white-haired figure bending over his bench. He had clung so bravely, so stubbornly, to that battered bit of a house; to his garden which he had never realized had long since ceased to be anything but a plot of waist-high bushes and weeds. Once when she recollected those countless rows of poignantly wistful faces on the shelves of that back-room workshop she wondered if she had not been disloyal, after all. And she had argued it out with herself aloud as she went from task to task in that afternoon's gathering twilight.

"But it was because of her that he stayed," she rea.s.sured herself. "It was because of her that he kept it, all these years. And--and so he couldn't mind--not very much, I think, now that they don't need it any longer, if I sold it so that I could keep this place--for him!"

They had been long, those hours of waiting. Not a minute of those entire two days since Old Jerry's departure but had dragged by on laggard feet. And yet now, with nightfall of that third day she became jealous of every pa.s.sing minute. She hated to have them pa.s.s; dreaded to watch the creeping hands of the clock on the kitchen wall as they drew up, little by little, upon that hour which meant the arrival of the night train in the village.

One moment she wondered if he would come--wondered and touched dry lips with the tip of her tongue. And the very next, when somehow she was so very, very sure that there was no room for doubt, she even wondered whether or not he would be glad--glad to find her there. The gaunt skeleton of a framework showing through the torn sides of John Anderson's cottage almost unnerved her whenever that thought came, and sent her out again into the lighted back room.

"What if he isn't?" she whispered, over and over again. "Why, I--I never thought of that before, did I? I just thought I had to be here when he came. But what if he--isn't glad?"

An hour earlier, when the thought had first come to her, she had carried a big, square package out to the table before the kitchen window and untied with fluttering fingers the string that bound it.

The little scarlet blouse and shimmering skirt, alive with tinsel that glinted under the light, still lay there beside the thin-heeled slippers and filmy silk stockings. She bent over them, patting them lovingly with a slim hand, her eyes velvety dark while she considered.

"Oh, you're pretty--pretty--pretty!" she said in a childishly hushed voice, "the prettiest things in the world!"

The next instant she straightened to scan soberly the old shiny black skirt she was wearing, and the darned stockings and cracked shoes.

"And--and you would help, I think," she went on musing. "I know you would, but then--then it wouldn't be _me_. It would be easy for any one to care for you--almost too easy. I--I think I'll wear them for him--some other time, maybe--if he wants me to."

But she turned the very next moment and crossed to the mirror on the wall--that square bit of gla.s.s before which Young Denny had stood and stared back into his own eyes and laughed. Oblivious to everything else she was critically scanning her own small reflection--great, tip-tilted eyes, violet in the shadow, and then cheeks and pointed chin--until, even in spite of her preoccupation, she became aware of the hungry tremulousness of the mouth of that reflected image--until the hoa.r.s.e shriek of an engine's whistle leaped across the valley and brought her up sharp, her breath going in one long, quavering gasp between wide lips.

It was that moment toward which she had been straining every hour of those two days; the one from which she had been shrinking every minute of those last two hours since dark. She hesitated a second, head thrown to one side, listening; she darted into that dark front room and pressed her face to the cold pane, and again that warning note came shrilling across the quiet from the far side of town.