Once to Every Man Part 5

"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.

"G.o.dfrey, 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 n.o.body 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 t.i.tle," 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 acc.u.mulating, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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.

CHAPTER VI

The Tavern "office" was crowded and hazy with acrid blue smoke. Behind the chairs of the favored members of the old circle, who always sat in nightly conclave about the stove, a long row of men lounged against the wall, but the bitter controversies of other nights were still.

Instead, the entire room was leaning forward, hanging breathlessly upon the words of the short fat man who was perched alone upon the worn desk, too engrossed even to notice Young Denny's entrance that night.

The boy stood for a moment, his hand still clasping the k.n.o.b behind him, while his eyes flickered curiously over the heads of the crowd.

Even before he drew the door shut behind him he saw that Judge Maynard's chair was a good foot in advance of all the others, directly in front of the stranger on the desk, and that the rest of the room was furtively taking its cue from him--pounding its knee and laughing immoderately whenever he laughed, or settling back luxuriously whenever the Judge relaxed in his chair.

Subconsciously Young Denny realized that such had always been the recognized order of arrangement, ever since he could remember. The Judge always rode in front in the parades and invariably delivered the Fourth of July oration. Undisputed he held the one vantage point in the room, but over his amply broad back, as near as he dared lean, bent Old Jerry, his thin face working with alternate hope and half fearful uncertainty.

Denny Bolton would have recognized the man on the desk as the "newspaper writer" from New York from his clothes alone, even without the huge notebook that was propped up on his knees for corroborative evidence. From the soft felt hat, pushed carelessly back from his round, good-natured face, to the tips of his gleaming low shoes, the newcomer was a symphony in many-toned browns. And as Young Denny closed the door behind him he went on talking--addressing the entire throng before him with an easy good-fellowship that bordered on intimate _camaraderie_.

"Just the good old-fashioned stuff," he was saying; "the sort of thing that has always been the backbone of the country. That is what I want it to be. For, you see, it's like this: We haven't had a champion who came from our own real old Puritan stock in years and years like Conway has, and it'll stir up a whole lot of enthusiasm--a whole lot!

I want to play that part of it up big. Now, you're the only ones who can give me that--you're the only men who knew him when he was a boy--and right there let's make that a starter! What sort of a youngster was he? Quite a handful, I should imagine--now wasn't he?"

The man on the desk crossed one fat knee over the other, tapping a flat-heeled shoe with his pencil. He tilted the brown felt hat a little farther back from his forehead and winked one eye at the Judge in jovial understanding. And Judge Maynard also crossed his knees, tucked his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets, and winked back with equal joviality.

"Well, ye-e-s," he agreed, and the agreement was weightily deliberate.

"Ye-e-s, quite a handful was Jeddy."

One pudgy hand was uplifted in sudden, deprecatory haste, as though he would not be misunderstood.

"Nothing really wrong, of course," he hurried to add with oratorical emphasis. "Nothing like that! There never was anything mean or sneaking about Jeddy, s'far as I can recollect. Just mischievous--mischievous and up and coming all the time. But there were folks," Judge Maynard's voice became heavy with righteous accusation--"it's always that way, you understand--and there were folks, even right here in Jeddy's own village, who used to call him a bad egg. But I--I knew better!

Nothing but mischievousness and high spirits--that's what I always thought. And I said it, too--many's the time I said----"

The big shouldered boy near the door shifted his position a little.

He leaned forward until he could see Judge Maynard's round, red face a little more distinctly. There was an odd expression upon Denny Bolton's features when the fat man in brown lifted his eyes from his notebook, eyes that twinkled with sympathetic comprehension.

"----That it was better a bad egg than an omelette, eh?" he interrupted knowingly.

The Judge pounded his knee and rocked with mirth.