"'Introducing The Pilgrim,'" he murmured to himself, after a moment of silence, and the professor of English accent could not have been more perfect, "The Pilgrim! Hum-m-m, surely! And a really excellent name for publicity purposes, too. It—it fits the man."

Then he threw back his head—he came suddenly to his feet, to pace twice the length of the room and back, before he remembered. When he reseated himself he was gnawing his lip as if vexed that he had showed even that much lack of self-control. And once more he buried the point of his chin in his hands.

"Do, Chub?" he picked up the other's question silkily. "What am I going to do? Well, I believe I am going to pay my debts at last. I think I am going to settle a little score that has stood so long against me that it had nearly cost me my self-respect."

That lightning-like change swept his face again, twisting his lips nastily, stamping all his features with something totally bad. The man who had never been whipped by any man, from the day he won his first brawl in the gutter, showed through the veneer that was no thicker than the funereal black and white garb he wore, no deeper than his superficially polished utterance which he had acquired from long contact with those who had been born to it.

"I'm going to pay my debts," he slurred the words dangerously, "pay them with the same coin that Dennison slipped to me two years ago!"

Little by little Morehouse's head came forward at the mention of that name. It was of Dennison that the plump newspaper man had been subconsciously thinking ever since he had entered Hogarty's immaculate little office; it was of Dennison that he always thought whenever he saw that bad light kindling in the ex-lightweight's eyes. Dennison was the promoter who had backed Jed The Red from the day when the latter had fought his first fight.

And, "You don't mean," he faltered, "Flash, you don't mean that you think that boy can stop——"

Hogarty's thin voice bit in and cut him short.

"Think?" he demanded. "Think? I don't have to think any more! I know!"

For a second he seemed to be pondering something; then he threw up his head again. And his startlingly sudden burst of laughter made Morehouse wince a little.

"Don't make a fool of him, Chub?" he croaked. "Be merciful with the boy! Man, you're half an hour late! I did my best. Oh, I'm bad—I know just how bad I can be, when I try. But he called me! Yes, that's what he did—he as much as told me that I wasn't giving him a chance to get his cards on the table. So I ran him up against Sutton. And I did more than that. I told Boots to get him—told him to beat him to death—and I meant it, too! And do you know what happened? Could you guess? Well, I'll tell you and save you time.

"He went in and took enough punishment from Boots in that first round to make any man stop and think. He put up the worst exhibition I ever saw, just because he was trying to fight the way Ogden had coached him, instead of his own style. That was the first round; but it didn't take him very long to see where he had been wrong. There wasn't any second round—that is, not so that you could really notice it.

"He was waiting for the bell, and the gong just seemed to pick him up and drop him in the middle of the ring. And Sutton went to him—and he caught Boots coming in! Why, he just snapped his right over and straightened him up, and then stepped in and whipped across his left, and Boots went back into the ropes. He went back—and he stayed back!"

Swiftly, almost gutturally, Hogarty sketched it all out: Young Denny's calm statement of his errand, his own groundless burst of spleen, and the outcome of the try-out which had sent him hurrying back to Denny's dressing-room with many questions on his tongue's tip and a living hope in his brain which he hardly dared to nurse.

Hogarty even recalled and related the late delivery of the card of introduction which Morehouse was now nervously twisting into misshapen shreds and, word for word, repeated the boy's grave explanation of his reason for that tardiness.

"He bothered you, did he?" he asked. "Well, he had me guessing, too, right from the first word he spoke. There was something about him that left me wondering—thinking a little. But I'm understanding a whole lot better since you finished talking. You're right, too, Chub—you're all of that! Five years is a long time to wait for a chance to swing. I ought to know—I've waited half that long myself. That was the way he started for Boots, that second round. Oh, it was deadly—it was mighty, mighty wicked. And now, to top it all, it's The Red for whom he was looking, too. I wish it wasn't so easy; I sure do! It's so simple I almost don't enjoy it. Almost—but not quite!"

Once more he shot to his feet and began pacing up and down the room. Morehouse sat following him to and fro with his eyes, trying to comprehend each step of this bewildering development which was furthest of all from what he had expected. He had listened with his face fairly glowing with appreciation to the ex-lightweight's account of Denny's coming. It was all so entirely in keeping with what he had already known of him. But the glint died out of his eyes after a time; even his nervously active fingers stopped worrying the bit of cardboard on the table.

"Granted that he could turn the trick, Flash," he suggested at last, "even admitting that he might be able to stop Conway after a few months of training to help him out, do you suppose he'd be willing to hang around and fight his way up through the ranks, until he forced 'em to let him have his match? It's usually a two year's job, you know, at the very least.

"I don't know why, Flash, but somehow the more I think of it, the surer I grow that there is something more behind his wanting that fight than we know anything about. It isn't just a grudge; it isn't just because of the dirty deal which that village has been giving him, either. I've been wondering—I'm wondering right now why he asked me if that account of the purse was true or not. Because men don't fight the way you say he fought, Flash, just for money. They fight hard, I'll admit, but not that way!"

There was a living menace in Hogarty's steady tread up and down the room. He wheeled and crossed, turned and retraced his steps noiselessly, cat-footed in his low rubbed-shod shoes. And he turned a gaze that was almost pitying upon the plump man's objection.

"Two years—to get ready?" he asked softly. "Chub, do you think I'd wait two years—now? Why, two months is too long, and that is the outside limit which I'm allowing myself in this affair. You're a little slow, Chub—just a bit slow in grasping the possibilities, aren't you? Think a minute! Put your mind upon it, man! I've told you I am going to pay Dennison off—and pay him with the same coin that he handed me. Doesn't that mean anything at all?"

He stopped short, crossed to the table and stood with his fingertips bracketed upon its surface. Morehouse knew Hogarty—knew him as did few other men, unless, perhaps, it was those who, years before, had faced him in the ring. And at that moment Hogarty's eyes were mere slits in his face as he stood and peered down into the newspaper man's upturned features, his mouth like nothing so much as a livid scar above his chin. There was nothing of mirth in those eyes, nothing of merriment in that tight mouth, and yet as he sat and gazed back up at them, Morehouse's own lips began to twitch. They began to relax. That wide grin spread to the very corners of his eyelids and half hid his delighted comprehension behind a thousand tiny wrinkles.

"I wonder," he breathed, "I wonder now, Flash, if you are thinking about the same thing I am? For if you are—well, you're too sober faced. You are that! It's time to indulge in a little hysterics."

And he began to chuckle; he sat and shook with muffled spasms of absolute joy as the thing became more and more vivid with each new thought. Even Hogarty's answering smile, coming from reluctant lips, had in it something of sympathetic mirth.

"That's just what I am thinking," he said. "Just that! It's what I meant when I said I was going to pay him—with his own coin. When a man plays another man crooked, he expects that other man to come back at him some day; he is looking for him to do that. But there is one thing he doesn't expect—not usually. He isn't looking for him to work the same old game. It is something new he's looking to guard against.

"And that is where Dennison is weak—in that spot and one other. He doesn't know even yet that when I fell for his game I fell hard enough to wake me up. He thinks I haven't a suspicion but what it was just an accident that laid Sutton out, two years back—just a lucky punch of The Red's that went across and spoiled our perfect frame-up. And he hasn't a suspicion that I know he was sure The Red was going to clean up Sutton, just as surely as they went to the ring together.

"That is where he is weak. When a man is a crook he wants to be a real crook—and a real one is suspicious of everybody, even of himself."

He lifted one hand and pounded gently upon the polished surface of the table.

"The old days are done—dead—when a man got his reputation, and a chance at the big ones simply by fighting his way up from the bottom. I can give a man a bigger reputation in a week, with five thousand dollars' worth of real advertising, than he'd be able to get in a lifetime the old way. And training?——"

He jerked his head over one shoulder toward the dressing-rooms beyond the closed door.

"Right now he is just where I want him. Why, he looks like a pitiful dub if you hold him back. Order him to wait—and it's heart-breaking to watch him suffer. In one month I can teach him all he'll ever need to know about blocking and getting away. And the rest? Well, you'll get a chance to see just what happens when he really goes into action. I tell you it makes you stop and think.

"And I don't care what he is fighting for; I don't care what he wants. Pleasure or profit, it's all one to me. It's you I need most right now, Chub. I know you have always been a little particular about soiling your hands. A shady deal never appealed to me so much, either, but I'm not exactly bashful about this one. That part of it will be my own private affair. You handle the publicity end—merely hail Bolton as a comer, when the time is ripe. Are you—are you in on it?"

Morehouse thoughtfully scratched his head.

"I have been a trifle fastidious, haven't I?" he murmured, and unconsciously he mimicked Hogarty's measured accents. "But I hardly believe that any sensitive scruples of mine would annoy me much in this matter. I don't know but what I'd just as soon squash a snake with a brick, even if I knew it was somebody's beloved performing pet.

"That, as you say, is your side of the question. As for me—well, every time I remember that popeyed unctuous fat party they called the 'Judge' chanting Conway's innocent childhood, with that big, lonesome kid standing there in the doorway listening and trying to understand, I begin to sizzle. It is time that Conway was licked—and licked right!

"Oh, I'm in on it—I want to be there! But," he stopped and made a painstaking effort to fit the torn card together again, "but I have an idea that Bolton may be the one to hold out. There are some honest people, you know, who are honest all the time. He might not understand the necessity of—er—a little professional fixing, so to speak."

"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 assassination.

"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 assigned 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 assurance 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 passing 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 passing 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 anticipation—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 passed 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 blusterer 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 rebuttal, 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 pass 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 passage 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 prone 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 cocked 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.

They had always had a forbidding aspect—Young Denny's black, unpainted farmhouse and dilapidated outbuildings—even when he had been certain that just as surely as he reached the crest he would find the boy's big body silhouetted against the skyline, waiting for him, they had not been any too prepossessing. Now they never served to awake in him anything but actual dread and distrust.

Old Jerry laid it to the lonesomeness of the place—to the bleak blindness of the shaded windows and the untenanted silence—but he took good care that no loitering on his part would be to blame for his arrival at the house after dusk.

No one, not even he himself, knew how strong the temptation was that week to make tentative advances of peace to the members of the circle of Tavern regulars, for the more he dwelt upon it the finer the dramatic possibilities of the thing seemed. But he had misread in the hushed respect of his former intimates a chill and uncompromising disapproval, and he had to fall back upon a one-sided conversation with himself as the next best thing.

"I wa'n't brought up to believe in ghosts," he averred to himself more than once. "Ghosts naturally is superstition—and that ain't accordin' to religion, not any way you look at it. But allowing that there could be ghosts—just for the sake of argument allowing that there is—now what would there be to hinder him from just kinda settlin' down up there, as you might say? It's nice and quiet, ain't it? Sort of out of the way—and more or less comfortable, too?"

At that point in the mumbled monologue the white-haired driver of the buggy usually paused for a moment, tilting his head, birdlike, to one side, wrapped in thought. There were those shelves lined with countless white figures which also had to be considered.

"He must've worked mighty steady," he told himself time and again in a voice that was small with awe. "He must hev almost enjoyed workin' at 'em, to hev finished so many! And he kept at it nearly all the time, I reckon. And now, that's what I'm a-gettin' at! Now I want to ask how do we know he's a-goin' to quit now—how do we know that? We don't know it! And Godfrey 'Lisha, what better place would he want than that back kitchen up there? Ain't there a table right there by the window, all a-waitin' for him—an'—an'——"

Invariably he broke off there, to peer furtively at the sun, before he whipped up his horse.

"Git along!" he admonished her earnestly, then, "Git along—you! Nobody believes in ghosts—leastwise, I don't. But they ain't no sense nor reason in just a-killin' time on the road, neither. And I ain't one to tempt Providence—not to any great nor damagin' extent, I ain't!"

And yet in spite of all the uneasiness which the combination of the dark house and the persistent image of the little, worn-out stone-cutter kept alive in him, in so far as Young Denny's team of horses was concerned, and the scanty rest of the stock which the boy had left in his care, Old Jerry kept strictly to the letter of his agreement. At the most it meant no more than a little readjustment of his daily schedule, which he high-handedly rearranged to suit his better convenience.

But all the rest which he had promised so fervidly to carry out—the message which he had meant to deliver the very next morning after the boy's departure and the explanation of Young Denny's bruised face, even a diplomatic tender of the damp wad of bills which Denny had pushed in his hand—had somehow been allowed to wait. For it had proved to be anything but the admirably simple thing it had seemed to the old man when he had volubly acquiesced to the plan.

He had forgotten it that first morning. With the well-planned opening sentence fairly trembling upon his tongue-tip when he opened the door, the whole thing had been swept utterly from his mind. And in the press of events that followed he never so much as thought of it again for days. When the memory of it did return, a week later, somehow he found it almost impossible to introduce the subject—at least impossible to introduce it gracefully.

That was one of the reasons for his failure to execute the mission entrusted to him. The other reason, which was far weightier, so far as Old Jerry was concerned, was even harder to define. He blamed it directly to the attitude of the girl with the tumbled yellow hair and blue eyes, which were never quite the same shade of purple. More than a small proportion of the remarks which he had prepared beforehand to deliver to her had consisted of reproof—not too harsh, but for all that a trifle severe, maybe—of her hasty and utterly unfair judgment of Young Denny. That, he had assured himself, was only just and merited, and could only prove, eventually, to have been for the best. But she never gave him a chance to deliver it. One moment of sadness on her part would have been sufficient excuse. If he could have surprised her just once gazing at him from moist, questioning eyes, he felt that that would have been enough proof of contrition and humble meekness of spirit on her part. But he never did.

Instead Old Jerry had never seen so astounding a change take place in any human being as that which came over her day by day. By the end of that first week the pallor had gone entirely from her cheeks. The deep dark circles which had rimmed the wet eyes which she had lifted to him that first morning disappeared so entirely that it was hard to remember that they had ever been there at all. Even the lithely slender body seemed fuller, rounder. To every outward appearance at least Old Jerry had to confess to himself that he had never seen a more supremely contented, thoroughly happy creature than Dryad Anderson was at that week's end.

And it irritated him; it almost angered him at times. Remembering his own travail of spirit, the self-inflicted agony of mind which he had undergone that day when he had first looked square into the eyes of his own soul and acknowledge his years of guilty unfairness to the lonely boy on the hill, he shut his lips tight upon the message he might have delivered and waited, stubbornly, for her to show some sign of repentance.

For a day or two a mental contemplation of this necessarily severe course brought him moments of comparative peace of mind. It justified in a measure, at least, his own remissness, and yet even that mind-state at times was rudely shaken. At each day's end, after he had made his reluctant ascent of the hill which led up to Young Denny's unlighted house, and a far speedier, none too dignified return, the little driver of the squealing buggy made it a point to turn off and stop for a moment or two before the gate of John Anderson's cottage. At first the girl's real need of him prompted this daily detour; then, when the actual need no longer existed, he excused the visit on the plea of her lonesomeness and his promise to Denny to look after her.

His own loneliness—for he had never been so lonely before in all his lonely life—and the other and real reason for this habit, he never allowed himself to scrutinize too closely. But each day he sat a little forward on the buggy seat as soon as he had turned the last sharp curve in the road and stared eagerly ahead through the afternoon dusk until he made out her slim figure leaning against the fence waiting for him. And every afternoon, after he had pulled the shuffling horse to a standstill, he bent down from his vantage point on the high seat to scan her upturned face minutely, almost craftily at times, for some tell-tale trace of tears on her long lashes, or a possible quiver of her lips, or a suspicious droop in her boyish shoulders. And he never discovered either the one or the other.

It was at such moments that his peace of mind suffered, for no sane man could ever have read, by any stretching of the imagination, anything akin to sorrow or sadness in the low laugh with which she invariably met his scrutiny. It fairly bubbled joy. Each day Old Jerry found her only happy—offensively happy—and where he had been secretly watching her for one betraying sign he became uneasily conscious after a time that very often she, too, seemed to be scanning his own face as if she were trying to penetrate into the inner tumult of perplexities behind his seamed forehead. Some days he was almost certain that there was a calculating light in her steady eyes—a hint of half-hidden delight in something he couldn't understand—and it worried him. It bothered him almost as much as did the unvaried formula with which she greeted him every afternoon.

"Have you any news for me today?" she always asked him. "Surely you've something new to tell me this afternoon—now, haven't you?"

The tone in which she made the query was never anything but disarming; it was quite childishly wheedling and innocently eager, he thought. But reiterated from day to day it wore on his nerves after a while. Added to the something he sometimes thought he caught glimmering in her tip-tilted eyes, it made him more than a little uncomfortable. He fell back upon a quibble to dodge the issue.

"Was you expectin' a letter?" he always countered.

This daily veiled tilt of wits might have gone on indefinitely had not a new development presented itself which threw an entirely different aspect upon the whole affair.

A fortnight had elapsed since Denny Bolton's mysterious departure from the village when it happened. As usual, after the day's duties were completed with his hurried return from the Bolton homestead, Old Jerry turned off at the crossroads to stop for a moment before the cottage squatting in its acre of desolate garden. He didn't even straighten up in his seat that afternoon to gaze ahead of him, so certain he had grown that she would be waiting for him, a hint of laughter in her eyes and the same disturbing question on her lips, and not until the fat animal between the shafts had stopped of her own accord before the straggling fence did he realize that the girl was not there. Then her absence smote him full.

It frightened him. Right from the first he was conscious of impending disaster born quite entirely of the knowledge of his own guilt. The front door of the house was open and after fruitless minutes of panicky pondering he clambered down and advanced uncertainly toward it. His shadow across the threshold heralded his reluctant coming, and Dryad turned from the half-filled box upon the table over which she had been bending and nodded to him almost before he caught sight of her.

That little, intimately brief inclination of the head was her only greeting. With hands grasping each side of the door-frame Old Jerry stood there and gazed about the room. It had never been anything but bare and empty looking—now with the few larger pieces of furniture which it had contained all stacked in one corner and the smaller articles already stored away in a half-dozen boxes, the last of which was holding the girl's absorbed attention, it would have been barnlike had it not been so small. From where he stood Old Jerry could see through into the smaller back-room workshop. Even its shelves were empty,—entirely stripped of their rows of tiny white woman-figures.

He paled as he grasped the ominous import of it; he tried to speak unconcernedly, but his voice was none too steady.

"So you're a-house-cleanin', be you?" he asked jauntily. "Ain't you commencin' a little early?"

He was uncomfortably conscious of that interrogative gleam in Dryad's glance—that amused glimmer which he couldn't quite fathom—when she turned her head. She was smiling, too, a little—smiling with her lips as well as with her eyes.

"No-o-o," she stated with preoccupied lack of emphasis, as she bent again over the box. "No—I'm packing up."

Old Jerry had known that that would be her answer. He had been certain of it. The other interpretation—the only other possible one which could be put upon the dismantled room—had been nothing more or less than a momentary and desperate grasping at a straw.

For a while he was very, very quiet, wondering just what it was in her mind which made her so cheerfully indifferent to his presence. She filled that last box while he stood there in the doorway, stood off to survey her work critically, and then picked up a hammer that lay on the table and prepared to nail down the lid.

"I've hit my finger four times today," she apprised him between strokes as she drove the first nail home. "Four times this afternoon—and always the same finger, too!"

The very irrelevancy of the statement, coupled with her calm serenity, was appalling to the old man. She didn't so much as lift her eyes when she told him, but when the lid was fastened she whirled suddenly with that impetuosity which always startled him more than a little, her hands tightly clasped in front of her, and fairly beamed at him.

"There, that finishes everything—everything but the pots and pans," she cried. "And I'll need them a little longer, anyway, won't I? But maybe I won't take them with me, either—they're pretty old and worn out. What do you think?"

Old Jerry cleared his throat. He ignored her question.

"Ain't—ain't this a trifle sudden," he faltered—"jest a trifle?"

She shook her head again and laughed softly, as if from sheer joyous excitement.

"No," she said. "No, I've been planning it for days and days—oh, for more than a week!"

Then she seemed to catch for the first time the dreariness of his whole attitude—the dejection of his spare angular body and sparrowlike, anxious face.

"You're sorry I'm going," she accused him then, and she leaned toward him a little, eyes quizzically half closed. "I knew you'd be sorry!" And then, swiftly, "Aren't you?"

Old Jerry scraped first one foot and then the other.

"I reckon I be," he admitted faintly. "Kinda surprised, too. I—I wa'n't exactly calculating on anything like this. It—it's kinda thrown me off my reckonin'! Are you—are you figurin' on goin' right away?"

Dryad spun about and threw her head far on one side to scan the whole bare room.

"Tomorrow, maybe," she decided, when she turned back to him. "Or the next day at the very latest. You see, everything is about ready now, and there isn't any reason for me to stay, on and on, here—is there?"

A little tired note crept into the last words, edging the question with a suggestion of wistfulness. It was something not so very different from that for which Old Jerry had been stubbornly waiting throughout those entire two weeks, but he failed to catch it at that moment. He had heard nothing but her statement that she meant to remain at least another day. It made it possible for him to breathe deeply once again.

Much could happen in twenty-four hours. She might even change her mind, he desperately assured himself—women were always doing something like that, wern't they? But even if she did go it was a reprieve; it gave him one last opportunity. Now, for the present, all he wanted was to get away—to get away by himself and think! On heavily dragging feet he turned to go back down the rotting boardwalk.

"I—I'll drop in on you tomorrow," he suggested, pausing at the steps. "I'll stop in on my way 'round—to—to say good-by."

The girl stood in the doorway smiling down at him. He couldn't meet her eyes. As it was he felt that their gaze went through and through him. And so he did not see her half lift her arms to him in a sudden quite wonderful gesture of contrite and remorseful reassurance. He did not hear the first of the impulsive torrent of words which she barely smothered behind lips that trembled a little. His head was bowed so that he did not see her eyes, and if he could but have seen them and nothing else, he would have understood, without the words or the gesture.

Instead he stood there, plucking undecidedly at his sleeve.

"Because I—I wouldn't like to hev you go—without seein' you again," he went on slowly—"without a chance to tell you something—er—to tell you good-by."

He didn't wait for her answer. At the far bend in the road, when he looked back, she was still there in the doorway watching him.

He was not quite certain, but he thought she threw up one thin white arm to him as he passed out of sight.



CHAPTER XVII

It rained that next day—a dull, steady downpour that slanted in upon a warm, south wind. Old Jerry was glad of the storm. The leaden grayness of the low-hanging clouds matched perfectly his own frame of mind, and the cold touch of the rain soothed his hot head, too, as it swept in under the buggy hood, and helped him to think a little better. There was much that needed readjusting.

Throughout the early hours of that morning he drove with a newspaper spread flat upon his knees—the afternoon edition of the previous day, which, in the face of other matters, he had had neither the necessary time nor enthusiasm to examine until it was an entire twelve hours old. At any other time the contents of that red-headlined sheet would have set his pulses throbbing in a veritable ecstasy of excitement.

For two whole weeks he had been watching for it, scanning every inch of type for the news it brought, but now that account of Young Denny's first match, with a little, square picture of him inset at the column head, fell woefully flat so far as he was concerned.

Not that the plump newspaperman who had written the account of that first victorious bout had achieved anything but a masterpiece of sensationalism. Every line was alive with action, every phrase seemed to thud with the actual shock of contest. And there was that last paragraph, too, which hailed Denny—"The Pilgrim," they called him in the paper, but that couldn't deceive Old Jerry—as the newcomer for whom the public had been waiting so long, and, toward the end, so hopelessly.

It was really a perfect thing of its kind—but Old Jerry could not enjoy it that morning, even though it was Denny Bolton's first triumph, to be shared by him alone in equal proportion. Instead of sending creepy thrills chasing up and down his spine it merely intensified his doleful bitterness of spirit. Long before noon he breathed a leaden heavy sigh, refolded the sodden sheet and put it away in the box beneath the seat.

The old mare took her own pace that day. In a brain that was already burdened until it fairly ached there was no room for the image of the silver-haired stone-cutter which had made for speed on other occasions. He had plenty to occupy his mind which was of a strictly immediate nature.

A dozen times that morning Old Jerry asked himself what he would tell Dryad Anderson that night, when he stopped at the little drab cottage at the route's end, ostensibly to bid her good-by. He asked himself, in desperate reiteration, how he would tell, for he knew that the long delay in the delivery of Denny's message was going to need more than a little explanation. And when he had wrestled with the question until his eyes stung and his temples throbbed, and still could find no solution for it, he turned helplessly to the consideration of another phase of the problem.

He fell to tormenting himself with the possibility of her having gone already. Everything in those bare rooms had been packed—there was no real reason for the girl to remain another hour. Perhaps she had reconsidered, changed her mind, and departed even earlier than she had planned, and if she had—if she had——

Whenever he reached that point, dumbly he bowed his head.

It was dark when he turned off the main road and started up the long hill toward the Bolton place—not just dark, but a blackness so profound that the mare between the shafts was only a half formless splotch of gray as she plodded along ahead. Even his dread of the place, which formerly had been so acute, did not penetrate the mental misery that wrapped him; he did not vouchsafe so much as one uneasy glance ahead until a glimmer of light which seemed to flash out from the rear of the house fairly shocked him into conscious recollection of it all.

He sprang erect then, spilling a cataract of water from his hat brim in a chill trickle down the back of his neck, and barked a shrilly staccato command at the placid horse. The creaking buggy came to a standstill.

He tried to persuade himself it was a reflection of the village lights upon the window panes which had startled him, but it was only a half-hearted effort. No one could mistake the glow that filtered out of the black bulk of the rear of the house for anything save the thing it was. Half way up the hill he sat there, hunched forward in a hopeless huddle, his eyes protected by cupped palms, and stared and stared.

Once before, the evening of that day when the Judge's exhibition of Young Denny's bruised face had been more than his curiosity could endure, he had approached that bleak farmhouse in fear and trembling, but the trepidation of that night, half real, half a child of his own erratic imagination, bulked small beside the throat-tightening terror of this moment.

And yet he did not turn back. The thought that he had only to wheel his buggy and beat as silent a retreat as his ungreased axles would permit never occurred to him. It was much as if his harrowed spirit, driven hither and yon without mercy throughout the whole day long, had at last backed into a corner, in a mood of last-ditch, crazy desperation, and bared its teeth.

"If he is up there," he stated doggedly, "if he is up there, a-putterin' with his everlasting lump o' clay, he ain't got no more right up there than I hev! He's just a-trespassin', that's what he's a-doin'. I'm the legal custodian of the place—it was put into my hands—and I'll tell him so. I'll give him a chance to git out—or—or I'll hev the law on him!"

The plump mare went forward again. There was something terribly uncanny, even in her relentless advance, but the old man clung to the reins and let her go without a word. When she reached the top she slumped lazily to a standstill and fell contentedly to nibbling grass.

The light in the window was much brighter, viewed from that lessened distance—thin, yellow streaks of brightness that quivered a little from the edges of a drawn shade. An uneven wick might easily have accounted for the unsteadiness, but in that flickering pallor Old Jerry found something ominously unhealthy—almost uncanny.

But he went on. He clambered down from his high seat and went doggedly across—steadily—until his hand found the door-latch. And he gave himself no time for reconsideration or retreat. The metal catch yielded all too readily under the pressure of his fingers, and when the door swung in he followed it over the threshold.

The light blinded him for a moment—dazzled him—yet not so completely but that he saw, too clearly for any mistake, the figure that had turned from the stove to greet him. Dryad Anderson's face was pink-tinted from forehead to chin by the heat of the glowing lids—her lips parted a little until the small teeth showed white beyond their red fullness.

In her too-tight, boyish blouse, gaping at the throat, she stood there in the middle of the room, hands bracketed on delicate hips, and smiled at him. And behind her the lamp in its socket on the wall smoked a trifle from a too-high wick.

Old Jerry stood and gazed at her, one hand still clutching the door latch. In one great illuminating flash he saw it all—understood just what it meant—and with that understanding a hot wave of rage began to well up within him—a fierce and righteous wrath, borne of all that day's unnecessary agony and those last few minutes of fear.

It was a hoax on her part. She had been trifling with him the day before, just as she had been playing fast and loose with his peace of mind for days. An ejaculation bordering close upon actual profanity trembled upon his lips, but a draft of cold air sweeping in at the open doorway set the lamp flickering wildly and brought him back a little to himself. His eyes went again to the girl in the middle of the floor. She was rocking to and fro upon the balls of her feet, every inch of her fairly pulsing with mocking, malicious delight.

She waited for him to speak, and he, stiff of back and grim of face, stood stonily silent. She seemed all innocently unaware of his unconcealed disgust. The quizzical smile only widened before the chilly threat of his beady eyes and ruffled forehead. And then, all in one breath, her little pouted chin went up and she burst into a low gurgle of utter enjoyment of the tableau.

"Well," she demanded, "aren't you ever going to say anything? Here I am! I—I decided to move today—there really wasn't any use of waiting. Aren't you surprised—just a little?"

The meekness of her voice, so wholly belied by her eyes and lips and swaying boy-like body, only tightened the old man's mouth. He was still reviewing all that long day's mental torment, counting the wasted hours which might have been applied to a soul-satisfying feast upon Morehouse's red-headlined account in the paper. No veteran had ever marched more hopelessly into a cannon's mouth than he had approached the door of that kitchen.

And yet a flood of thankfulness, the direct reflex of his first impotent rage, threatened to sweep up and drown the fires of his wrath. Already he wanted to slump down into a chair and rest weary body and wearier, relieved brain; he wanted a minute or two in which to realize that she was there—that his unfulfilled promise was still far from being actual catastrophe—and he would not let himself. Not yet!

She had been playing with him—playing with him cat-and-mouse fashion. The birdlike features which had begun to relax hardened once more.

"Maybe I be," he answered her question with noncommittal grimness. "Maybe I be—and maybe I ain't!" And then, almost belligerently: "Your lamp's a-smokin'!"

She turned and strained on tiptoe and lowered it.

"I thought you would be," she agreed, too gravely for his complete comfort, when she had accomplished the readjustment of the wick to her entire satisfaction. "For, you know, you seemed a little worried and—well, not just happy, yesterday, when I told you I was going to move I—I felt sure you would be glad to find that I hadn't gone far!"

Old Jerry remembered at that moment and he removed his soaked hat. He turned, too, and drew up a chair. It gave him an opportunity to avoid those moistly mirthful eyes for a moment. Seated and comfortably tilted back against the wall he felt less ill at ease—felt better able to deal with the situation as it should be dealt with.

For a moment her presence there had only confounded him—that was when the wave of righteous wrath had swept him—but at the worst he had counted it nothing more than a too far-fetched bit of fantastic mischief conceived to tantalize him.

Her last statement awakened in him a preposterously impossible suspicion which, now that he had a chance to glance about the room, was confirmed instantly—absolutely. It was astounding—utterly unbelievable—and yet on all the walls, in every corner, there were the indisputable evidences of her intention to remain indefinitely—permanently.

At least it gave him an opening.

"You don't mean to say," he began challengingly, "you don't mean to tell me that you're a-figurin' on stayin' here—for good?"

She pursed her lips and nodded vigorously at him until the loosened wisps of hair half hid her eyes. It was quite as though she were pleased beyond belief that he had got at the gist of it all so speedily.

"Yes, for good," she explained ecstatically, "or," more slowly, "or at least for quite a while. You see I like it here! It's just like home already—just like I always imagined home would be when I really had one, anyway. There's so much room—and it's warm, too. And then, the floors don't squeak, either. I don't think I care for squeaky floors—do you?"

A quick widening of those almost purple eyes accompanied the last question.

The little white-haired figure in the back-tilted chair snorted. He tried to disguise it behind a belated cough, but it was quite palpably a snort of outraged patience and dignity. She couldn't fool him any longer—not even with that wide-eyed appealingly infantile stare. He knew, without looking closer, that there was a flare of mirth hidden within its velvet duskiness. And there was only one way to deal with such shallowness—that was with firm and unmistakable severity. He leaned forward and pounded one meager knee for emphasis as Judge Maynard had often done.

"You can't do it!" he emphasized flatly, his thin voice almost gloatingly triumphant. "Whatever put it into your head I don't know—but don't you realize what you're a-doin', comin' up here like this and movin' in, high-handed, without speaking to nobody? Well, you've made yourself liable to trespass—that's what you've done! Trespass and house-breaking, too, I guess, without interviewin' me first!"

The violet eyes flew wider. Old Jerry was certain that he caught a gleam of apprehension in them. She took one faltering step toward him and then stopped, irresolute, apparently. Somehow the mute appeal in that whole poise was too much, even for his outraged dignity. Maybe he had gone a little too far. He attempted to temper the harshness of it.

"Not a-course," he added deprecatingly, "meanin' that anything like that would be likely to happen to you. Seein' as you didn't exactly understand, I wouldn't take no steps against you." And, even more encouragingly, "I doubt if I'd hev any legal right to proceed against anybody without seeing Den—without seeing the rightful owner first."

He bit his tongue painfully in covering that slip, but Dryad had not seemed to notice it. She crossed back to the stove and in an absolute silence fell to prodding with a fork beneath steaming lids.

"I really should have thought of that myself," she murmured pensively. "After seeing you return from here every afternoon, I should have known he—the place had been left in your care."

It rather startled him—that half absent-minded statement of hers—it disturbed his confidence in his command of the situation. Sitting there he told himself that he should have realized long ago that she could easily watch the hill road from the door of the little drab cottage huddled at the end of Judge Maynard's acres.

He began to feel guilty again—began to wonder just how much his daily visits to Denny's place had led her to suspect. But Dryad did not wait for any reply. She had turned once more until she was facing him, her lips beginning to curl again, petal-like, at the corners.

"But you would have to interview the real owner first?" she inquired insistently. "You do think that would be necessary before you could make me leave, don't you?"

He nodded—nodded warily. Something in her bearing put him on his guard. And then, before he knew how it had happened, a little rush had carried her across the room and she was kneeling at his feet, her face upflung to him.

"Then you'll have to interview me,"—the words trembled madly, breathlessly, from her lips. "You'll have to interview me—because—because I own it all—all—every bit of it!"

And she laughed up at him—laughed with a queer, choking, strained note catching in her throat up into his blankly incredulous face. He felt her thin young arms tighten about him; he even half caught her next hysterical words in spite of his amazement, and for all that they were quite meaningless to him.

"You dear," she rushed on. "O, you dear, dear stubborn old fraud! I punished you, didn't I? You were frightened—afraid I'd go! You know you were! As if I'd ever leave until—until—" She failed to finish that sentence. "But I'll never, never tease you so again!"

Then there came that lightning-like change of mood which always left him breathless in his inability to follow it. The mirth went out of her eyes—her lips drooped and began to work strangely as she knelt and gazed up at him.

"I bought his mortgage," she told him slowly. "I bought it from Judge Maynard a week ago with part of the money he gave me for our place there below his. He was very generous. Somehow I feel that he paid me—much more than it was worth. He's always wanted it and—and I—there wasn't any need for me to stay there any more, was there?"

Old Jerry had never seen a face so terribly earnest before—so hungrily wistful—but it was the light that glowed in that kneeling girl's eyes that held him dumb. It left him completely incapable of coherent thought, yet mechanically his mind leaped back to that night, two weeks before, when Young Denny had stumbled and gone floundering to his knees before her, there on that very threshold. The boy's own words had painted that picture for him too vividly for him to forget. And he knew, without reasoning it out, just from the world of pain there in her eyes, that she, too, at that moment was thinking of that limp figure—of the great red gash across its chin.

"I didn't help him," she went on, and now her voice was little more than a whisper. "I went and left him here alone—and hurt—when I should have stayed, that night when he went away. And so I bought it—I bought it because I thought some day he might come back—and need me even more. I thought if he did come—he'd feel as though he had just—come back home! And—and just to be here waiting, I thought, too, might somehow help me to have faith that he would come, some day—safe!"

The old man felt the fiercely tense little arms go slack then. Her head went forward and lay heavy, pillowed in her hands upon his knees. But he sat there for a full minute, staring down at the thick, shimmering mass of her hair, swallowing an unaccountable lump that bothered his breathing preparatory to telling her all that he had kept waiting for just that opportunity, before he realized that she was crying. And for an equally long period he cast desperately about for the right thing to say. It came to him finally—a veritable inspiration.

"Why, you don't want to cry," he told her slowly. "They—they ain't nothing to worry about now! For if that's the case—if you've gone to work and bought it, why, I ain't got no more jurisdiction over it—none whatever!"

Immediately she lifted her head and gazed long and questioningly at him, but Old Jerry's face was only guilelessly grave. It was more than that—benevolent reassurance lit up every feature, and little by little her brimming eyes began to clear; they began to glisten with that baffling delight that had irritated him so before. She slipped slowly to her feet and stood and gazed down at him. Old Jerry knew then that he would never again see so radiant a face as hers was at that moment.

"I wasn't crying because I was worried," she said, and she managed not to laugh. "I've been doing that every night, all night long, for two weeks. That was before I understood—things! But today—this afternoon I found something—read something—that made me understand better. I—I'm just crying a little tonight because I am so glad."

Old Jerry couldn't quite fathom the whole meaning of those last words of hers. They surprised him so that all the things he had meant to tell her right then of Young Denny's departure once more went totally out of mind. He wondered if it was the red-headlined account of his first battle that she had seen. No matter how doubtful it was he felt it was very, very possible, for at each day's end he had been leaving Denny's roll of papers there just as he had when the boy was at home.

But the rest of it he understood in spite of the wonder of it all. Whenever he remembered Young Denny asprawl upon the floor it seemed to him a thing too marvelous for belief, and yet, recalling the light that had glowed radiant in that girl's eyes, he knew it was the only thing left to believe.

He talked it over with himself that night on the way home.

"She bought it so's if he ever did want to come back, he'd feel as if he had come back home," he repeated her words, and he pondered long upon them. There was only one possible deduction.

"She thought he wouldn't have nothing left to buy it back when he did come—that he'd be started on the road all the rest of 'em traveled and pretty well—shot—to—pieces! That's what she thought," he decided.

He shook his head over it.

"And she didn't know," he marveled. "She didn't know how that old jug really got broke—because I ain't told her yet! But she's waitin' for him just the same—just a-waitin' for him, no matter how he comes. Figurin' on takin' care of him, too—that's what she was doin'—her that ain't no bigger'n his little finger!"

The storm had blown over long before his buggy went rattling down that long hill, and he sat with the reins dangling neglected between his knees and squinted up at the stars.

"I always did consider I'd been pretty lucky," he confided after a time to the plump mare's lazily flopping ears, "never gettin' mixed up in any matrimonial tangle, so to speak. But now—now I ain't quite so sure." A lonesome note crept into the querulous voice. "Maybe I'd hev kept my eyes open a little mite wider'n I did if I'd ever a-dreamed anybody could care like that.... Don't happen very often though, I reckon. Just about once in a lifetime, maybe. Maybe, if he ain't too blind to see it when it does come ... maybe once to every man!"

* * * * *

That next week marked the beginning of an intimacy unlike anything which Old Jerry had ever before known in all his life, for in spite of the girl's absolute proprietorship he continued his daily trips up the long hill, not only for the purpose of leaving Young Denny's bundle of papers and seed catalogues, but to attend to the stock which the boy had left in his care as well. It never occurred to him that that duty was only optional with him now.

He never again attempted either, after that night, to explain his delinquency and deliver Young Denny's message to her. There seemed to him absolutely no need now to open a subject which was bound to be embarrassing to him. And then, too, a sort of tacit understanding appeared to have sprung up between them that needed no further explanation.

Only once was the temptation to confess to her the real reason for Denny's sudden going almost stronger than he could resist. That was quite a month later, when the news of the boy's second battle was flaunted broadcast by the same red-headlined sheet. Then for days he considered the advisability of such a move.

It was not some one to share his hot pride that he wanted; he had lived his whole life almost entirely within himself, and so his elation was no less keen because he had no second person with whom to discuss the victory. He wanted her opinion on a quite different question—a question which he felt utterly incapable of deciding for himself. It was no less a plan than that he should be present at the match which was already hinted at between "The Pilgrim" and Jed The Red—Jeddy Conway, from that very village.

There were days when he almost felt that she knew of this new perplexity of his, felt that she really had seen that account of Young Denny's first fight and had been watching for the second, and at such times only a mumbled excuse and a hasty retreat saved him from baring his secret desire.

"She'd think I'd gone stark crazy," he excused his lack of courage. "She'd say I was a-goin' into my second childhood!"

Yet in the end it was the girl with the tip-tilted eyes who decided it for him.

Spring had slipped into early summer when the day came which made the gossip of "The Pilgrim's" possible bid for the championship a certainty. It was harder than ever for Old Jerry after that. Each fresh day's issue brought forth a long and exhaustive comparison of the two men's chances—of their strength and weaknesses. The technical discussion the old man skipped; it was undecipherable to him and enough that Young Denny was hailed as a certain winner.

And then as the day set for the match crept nearer and nearer, he began to notice a new and alarming change in the tone of that daily column. At first it was only fleeting—too intangible for one to place one's finger upon it. But by the end of another week it was openly inquiring whether "The Pilgrim" had as much as an even chance of winning after all.

It bewildered Old Jerry; it was beyond his comprehension, and had he not been so depressed himself he would have noted the change that came over the girl, too, these days. He never entered the big back kitchen now to hear her humming softly to herself, and sometimes he had to speak several times before she even heard him.

That continued for almost a week, and then there came a day, a scant three days before the date which he had hungrily underlined in red upon a mental calendar, which brought the whole vexing indecision to a precipitate head.

Old Jerry read that day's column in the sporting extra with weazened face going red with anger—read it with fists knotted. Those others had been merely skeptical—doubtful of "The Pilgrim's" willingness to meet the champion—and now it openly scoffed at him; it laughed at his ability, lashed him with ridicule. And, to cap it all, it accused him openly of having already "sold out" to his opponent.

When the little white-haired driver of the buggy reached the house on the hill that night he was as pale as he had been red, hours before, and he pleaded fatigue to excuse his too hasty departure. He did not see that she was almost as openly eager to have him go or that she almost ran across to the table under the light with the packet of papers as he turned away.

Had he noticed he would have been better prepared the next night for the scene that met him when he opened her door at dusk. One step was all he took, and then he stopped, wide-eyed, aghast. Dryad was standing in the middle of the room, her hair loose about her shoulders, lips drawn dangerously back from tight little teeth, fists clenched at her throat, and her eyes flaming.

Old Jerry had never before seen her in a rage; he had never before seen anybody so terribly, pallidly violent. As he entered her eyes shot up to his. He heard her breath come and go, come and go, between dry lips. And suddenly she lifted her feet and stamped upon the newspaper strewn about her on the floor—infinitesimal shreds which she had torn and flung from her.

"It's a lie!" she gasped. "It's a lie—a lie! They said he couldn't win anyway; they said he had sold—sold his chance to win—and they lie! He's never been whipped. He's never—been—whipped—yet!"

It frightened him. The very straining of her throat and the mad rise and fall of her breast made him afraid for her. In his effort to quiet her he hardly reckoned what he was saying.

"Why, it—it don't mean nothin'," he stated mildly. "That newspaper trash ain't no account, anyway you look at it."

"Then why do they print it?" she stormed. "How do they dare to print it? They've been doing it for days—weeks!"

He felt more equal to that question. The answer fairly popped into his brain.

"They hev to, I reckon," he said with a fine semblance of cheerfulness. "If they didn't maybe everybody'd be so sure he'd win that they wouldn't even bother to go to see it." And then, very carelessly, as though it was of little importance: "Don't know's I would hev thought of goin' myself if it hadn't been for that. It's advertisin' I reckon—just advertisin'!"

Her fists came down from her chin; her whole body relaxed. It was that bewildering change of mood which he could never hope to follow. She even started toward him.

"Wouldn't have thought of it!" she repeated. "Why—why, you don't mean that you aren't going?"

It was quite as though she had never considered the possibility of such a contingency. Old Jerry's mouth dropped open while he stared at her.

"Go," he stammered, "me go! Why, it's goin' to happen tomorrow night!"

She nodded her head in apparent unconsciousness of his astonishment.

"You'll have to leave on the early train," she agreed, "and—and so I won't see you again."

She turned her back upon him for a moment. He realized that she was fumbling inside the throat of the little, too-tight blouse. When she faced him again there was something in the palm of her outstretched hand.

"I've been waiting for you to come tonight," she went on, "and it was hard waiting. That's why I tore the paper up, I think. And now, will you—will you give him this for me—give it to him when he has won? You won't have to say anything." She hesitated. "I—I think he'll understand!"

Old Jerry reached out and took it from her—a bit of a red silk bow, dotted with silver spangles. He gazed at it a moment before he tucked it away in an inside pocket, and in that moment of respite his brain raced madly.

"Of course I figured on goin'," he said, when his breath returned, "but I been a little undecided—jest a trifle! But I ought to be there; he might be a mite anxious if they wasn't somebody from home. And I'll give it to him then—I'll give it to him when he's won!"

He went a bit unsteadily back to his waiting buggy.

"She had that all ready to give me," he said to himself as he climbed up to the high seat. Tentatively his fingers touched the little lump that the spangly bow of red made inside his coat. "She's had it all ready for me—mebby for days! But how'd she know I was a-goin'?" he asked himself. "How'd she know, when I didn't know myself?"

He gave it up as a feminine whimsicality too deep for mere male wisdom. Once on the way back he thought of the route that would go mailless the next day.

"'Twon't hurt 'em none to wait a day or so," he stated, and his voice was just a little tinged with importance. "Maybe it'll do 'em good. And there ain't no way out of it, anyhow—for I surely got to be there!"



CHAPTER XVIII

Morehouse did not hear the door in the opaque glass partition that walled his desk off from the outer editorial offices open and close, for all that it was very quiet. Ever since the hour which followed the going to press of the afternoon edition of the paper the huge room, with its littered floor and flat-topped tables, had been deserted, so still that the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly against the window pane at Morehouse's side seemed irritatingly loud by contrast.

The plump newspaperman in brown was too deeply preoccupied to hear anything so timidly unobtrusive as was that interruption, and only after the intruder had plucked nervously at the elbow that supported his chin did he realize that he was not alone. His head came up then, slowly, until he was gazing back into the eyes of the little, attenuated old man who, head tilted birdlike to one side, was standing beside him in uncomfortable, apologetic silence.

It surprised Morehouse more than a little. For the life of him he couldn't have told just whom he had expected to see when he looked up, but nothing could have startled him more than the presence of that white-haired wisp of a man with the beady eyes who fitted almost uncannily into the perplexing puzzle which had held him there at his desk until dusk. He forgot to greet the newcomer. Instead he sat gazing at him, wide-mouthed, and after Old Jerry had borne the scrutiny as long as he could he took the initiative himself.

"Well, I got here," he quavered. "I been a-tryin' to get upstairs to see you ever since about three o'clock, and they wouldn't let me in. Said you was too busy to be bothered, even when I told 'em I belonged to the Gov'mint service. But I managed to slip by 'em at last!"

He paused and waited for some word of commendation. Morehouse merely nodded. He was thinking—thinking hard! The voice was almost as familiar to him as was his own, and yet it persisted in tantalizing his memory. He couldn't quite place it. Old Jerry sensed something of his difficulty.

"I'm from Boltonwood," he introduced himself, not quite so uncertainly. "I'm Old Jerry. Maybe you remember me—I sat just next the stove that night you was in town a-huntin' news."

Then Morehouse remembered. Old Jerry had not had much to say that night, but his face and his shrill eagerness to snatch a little of the spotlight was unforgettable. And it was of that very night Morehouse had been thinking—that and the face of the big boy silent there on the threshold—when the interruption came. But still he uttered no welcome; instead there was something close akin to distinct aversion in his manner as he drew up a chair for the old man.

Old Jerry felt the chill lack of cordiality, but he sat down. And after a long period of silence, in which Morehouse made no move to put him more at ease, he swallowed hard and went on with his explanation.

"I come down to—to see Denny fight," he stated. "It kinda seemed to us—to me—that he'd think it strange if somebody from his home town wa'n't there. So I come along. And I wouldn't a bothered you at all today—it's gettin' late and I ain't got my ticket to get in yet—only—only I was worried a mite—jest a trifle—and I thought I'd better see you if I could."

Morehouse tilted his head again.

Old Jerry gave up any attempt of further excusing his intrusion and went straight to the heart of the matter. He unfolded a paper that bulged from the side pocket of his coat and spread it out on the desk.

"It's this," he said, indicating the column that had scoffed so openly at Young Denny's chances. "You—you wrote it, I suppose, didn't you?"

Again that impersonal nod.

"Well, I just wanted to ask you if—if you really thought it was—if you think he ain't got no chance at all?"

The eagerness of that trembling old voice was not to be ignored any longer. But Morehouse couldn't help but recollect the eager circle of "Ayes" which had flanked the Judge that other night.

"What of it?" he inquired coolly. "What if he hasn't? I though Jed Conway was the particular pride of your locality!"

Old Jerry's beady eyes widened. There was no mistaking the positive dislike in that round face, any more than one could misunderstand the antagonism of that round-faced man's words.

For weeks Morehouse had been puzzling over a question which he could not answer—something which, for all the intimacy that had sprung up between himself and Denny Bolton, he had never felt able to ask of the boy with the grave eyes and graver lips. Even since the conference in Hogarty's little office, when he had agreed to the ex-lightweight's plan, it had been vexing him, no nearer solution than it had been that day when he assured Hogarty that there was more behind young Denny's eagerness to meet Jed Conway than the prize-money could account for.

Now, that afternoon, on the very eve of that battle, he sat there in the thickening dusk, unconscious of the passage of time, and listened to the explanation that came pouring from Old Jerry's lips, haltingly at first, and then in a steady falsetto stream, and learned the answer to it.

The old mail carrier didn't know what he was doing. His one desire was to vindicate himself in the cold eyes of the man before him. But he told it well and he did not spare himself.

Once he though he caught a glimpse of thawing mirth in that face when he had finished relating how Denny had led him, reluctant and fearful, from the kitchen of the farmhouse to the spot of blood on the stable wall, and from there to the jug in a heap of fragments against the tree-butt. And that fleeting mirth became a warm, all-enveloping grin when he had detailed the climax of the Judge's prearranged sensation that same night.

He knew then that he had set himself right, and he did not mean to go into it any more fully. It was the changed attitude of Morehouse that led him on and on. So he told, too, of Dryad Anderson's purchase of the bleak old place on the hill and her reason. But when it came to her wild fury against the paper that had dared to scoff at the boy he paused. For a second he calculated the wisdom of exhibiting the bit of a red bow that had been entrusted him. It, without a doubt, would be the only passport he could hope for to a share of the glory, when it was all over. For the time being he jealously decided to let it wait, and he turned back to the rumpled sheet upon the desk.

"She—she'd be mighty disappointed," he finished a little lamely. "She's so sure, somehow, it kinda worries me. You—you do think he's got a little chance, don't you—jest a trifle?"

It took a long time—Old Jerry's confession. It was dark before he finished, but Morehouse did not interrupt him by so much as the lifting of a finger. And he sat silent, gazing straight ahead of him, after the old man had finished. Old Jerry, watching him, wondered vaguely what made his eyes so bright now.

"So that's it, is it?" the plump man murmured at last. "So that's it. And I never dreamed of it once. I must be going stale."

He wheeled in his chair until he faced Old Jerry full.

"I don't know," he said. "A half-hour before you came in I didn't like even to think of it. But now—chance? Well, this deadly waiting is over anyhow, and we'll soon know. And I wonder—now—I wonder!"

With his watch flat in the palm of his hand Morehouse sat and whistled softly. And then he shot hastily to his feet. Old Jerry understood that whistle, but he hung back.

"I—I ain't got my ticket yet," he protested.

Morehouse merely reached in and hustled him over the threshold.

"Your unabridged edition, while it has no doubt saved my sanity, has robbed us both of food and drink," he stated. "There's no time left, even for friendly argument, if you want to be there when it happens. You won't need any ticket this time—you'll be with me."

Even at that they were late, for when they paused a moment in the entrance of the huge, bowl-shaped amphitheater, a sharp gust of hand-clapping, broken by shrill whistling and shriller cat-calls, met them. Far out across that room Old Jerry saw two figures, glistening damp under the lights, crawl through the ropes that penned in a high-raised platform in the very center of the building, and disappear up an aisle.

He turned a dismayed face to Morehouse who, with one hand clutching his arm, was deeply engrossed in a whispered conversation with a man at the entrance—too engrossed to see. But when the newspaperman turned at last to lead the way down into the body of the house he explained in one brief word:

"Preliminary," he said.

Old Jerry did not understand. But half dragged, half led, he followed blindly after his guide, until he found himself wedged into a seat at the very edge of that roped-off, canvas-padded area. It was a single long bench with a narrow board desk, set elbow high, running the entire length in front of it. Peering half fearfully from the corner of his eye Old Jerry realized that there were at least a full dozen men beside themselves wedged in before it, and that, like Morehouse, there was a block of paper before each man.

The awe with which the immensity of the place had stunned him began to lessen a little and allowed him to look around. Wherever he turned a sea of faces met him—faces strangely set and strained. Even under the joviality of those closest to him he saw the tightened sinews of their jaws. Those further away were blurred by the smoke that rose in a never-thinning cloud, blurred until there was nothing but indistinct blotches of white in the outer circles of seats.

And when he lifted his head and looked above him, he gasped. They were there, too, tiny, featureless dots of white, like nothing so much as holes in a black wall, in the smoke-drift that alternately hid and revealed them.

Faces of men—faces of men, wherever he turned his head! Faces strained and tense as they waited. That terrible tensity got under his skin after a while; it crept in upon him until his spine crawled a little, as if from cold. It was quiet, too; oddly quiet in spite of the dull mumble that rose from thousands of throats.

Twice that hush was broken—twice when men laden with pails of water, and bottles and sponges, and thick white towels crowded through the ropes in front of him. Then the whole house was swept by a premature storm of hand-clapping for the men who, stripped save for the flat shoes upon their feet and the trunks about their hips, followed them into the ring.

"Preliminary!" Morehouse had said, and there had been something of disinterested contempt in his voice. Old Jerry felt, too, the entire great crowd's disinterested, good-natured tolerance. They were waiting for something else.

Twice Morehouse left his place at the long board desk and wended his way off through the maze of aisles. The second time he returned, after the third match had been finished, Old Jerry caught sight of his face while he was a long way off—and Old Jerry's breath caught in his throat. His plump cheeks were pale when he crowded back into his place. The old man leaned nearer and tried to ask a question and his dry tongue refused. The plump reporter nodded his head.

Again the men came with their bottles of water—their pails—their towels and sponges. There was a third man who slipped agilely into the nearest corner. Old Jerry saw him turn once and nod reassuringly, he thought, at Morehouse. The little mail carrier did not know him; everybody else within a radius of yards had apparently recognized him, but he could not take his eyes off that lean, hard face. There was a kind of satanic, methodical deadliness in Hogarty's directions to the other two men inside the ropes.

Even while he was staring at him, fascinated, that hand-clapping stormed up again, and then swelled to a hoarse roar that went hammering to the roof. A figure passed Old Jerry, so close that the long robe which wrapped him brushed his knee. When Hogarty had stripped the robe away and the figure went on—on up through the ropes—he recognized him.

As Young Denny seated himself in the corner just above them Morehouse threw out his arm and forced Old Jerry back into his seat. Then the little man remembered and shrank back, but his eyes glowed. He forgot to watch for the coming of the other in dumb amaze at the wide expanse of the boy's shoulders that rose white as the narrow cloth that encircled his hips. Dazed, he listened to them shouting the name by which they knew him—"The Pilgrim"—and he did not turn away until Jed Conway was in the ring.

He heard first the cheers that greeted the newcomer—broken reiterations of "Oh, you Red!" But the same heartiness was not there, nor the volume. When Old Jerry's eyes crept furtively across the ring he understood the reason.

It was the same face that he had known before, older and heavier, but the same. And there was no appeal in that face. It was scant of brow, brutish, supercunning, and the swarthy body that rose above the black hip-cloth matched the face. Old Jerry's eyes clung to the thick neck that ran from his ears straight down into his shoulders until a nameless dread took him by the throat and made him turn away.

Back in Denny's corner Hogarty was lacing on the gloves, talking softly in the meantime to the big boy before him.

"From the tap of the gong," he was droning. "From the tap of the gong—from the tap of the gong."

Young Denny nodded, smiled faintly as he rose to his feet to meet the announcer, who crossed and placed one hand on his shoulder and introduced him. Again the applause went throbbing to the roof; and again the echo of it after Jed The Red had in turn stood up in his corner.

The referee called them to the middle of the ring. It was quiet in an instant—so quiet that Old Jerry's throat ached with it. The announcer lifted his hand.

"Jed The Red fights at one hundred and ninety-six," he said, "'The Pilgrim' at one hundred and seventy-two."

Immediately he turned and dropped through the ropes. His going was accompanied by a flurry in each corner as the seconds scuttled after him with stools and buckets.

They faced each other, alone in the ring save for the referee—The Pilgrim and Jed The Red. Then a gong struck. They reached out and each touched the glove of the other.

Old Jerry could not follow it—it came too terribly swift for that—but he heard the thudding impact of gloves as Denny hurtled forward in that first savage rush.

"From the gong," Hogarty had ordered, "from the gong!" The Red, covering and ducking, blocking and swaying beneath the whirlwind of that attack, broke and staggered and set himself, only to break again, and retreat, foot by foot, around the ring. The whole house had come to its feet with the first rush, screaming to a man. Old Jerry, too, was standing up, giddy, dizzy, as he watched Conway weather that first minute.

He had no chance to swing; with both hands covering he fought wildly to stay on his feet; to live through it; to block that right hand that lashed out again and again and found his face.

Each time that blow went across it shook him to the soles of his feet; it lifted the cheering of the crowd to a higher, madder key; but even Old Jerry, eyes a little quicker already, saw that none of those blows landed flush upon the side of the jaw.

Conway called to his aid all the ring-generalship of which he was capable in that opening round. Once that lightening-like fist reached out and found his mouth. A trickle of blood oozed red from the lips that puffed up, almost before the glove came away; once when he had seen an opening and led for The Pilgrim's own face, that wicked jolt caught him wide open. He ducked his head between his shoulders then. The shock sent him to his knees, but that upraised shoulder saved him. The force of that glancing smash had spent itself before it reached his unprotected neck.

There was no let-up—no lull in the relentless advance. He was on his feet again, grim, grasping, reeling, hanging on! And again that avalanche of destruction enveloped him.

He fought to drop into a clinch, for one breath's respite, his huge hairy arms slipping hungrily out about Denny's white body, but even as he snuggled his body close in, that fist lashed up between them and found his chin again. It straightened him, flung him back. And once more, before the certain annihilation of that blow, he ducked his head in between his shoulders.

Old Jerry heard the crash of the glove against the top of his head; he saw Conway hurled back into the ropes. But not until seconds later, when he realized that the roar of the crowd had hushed, did he see that a change had come over the fight.

Conway was no longer giving ground; he was himself driving in more and more viciously, for that deadly right hand no longer leaped out to check him. Twice just as Denny had rocked him he now jolted his own right over to The Pilgrim's face. At each blow the boy lashed out with his left hand. Both blows he missed, and the second time the force of his swing whirled him against the barrier. Right and left Conway sent his gloves crashing into his unprotected stomach—right and left!

And then the tap of the gong!

Hogarty was through the ropes with the bell. As Denny dropped upon the stool he stripped the glove from the boy's right hand and examined it with anxious fingers. The other two were sponging his chest with water—pumping fresh air into his lungs; but Old Jerry's eyes clung to the calamity written upon Hogarty's gray features.

Everybody else seemed to understand what had happened—everybody but himself. He turned again to the man next him on the bench. Morehouse, too, had been watching the ex-lightweight's deft fingers.

"Broken," he groaned. "His right hand is gone." And after what seemed hours Old Jerry realized that Morehouse was cursing hoarsely.

In Conway's corner the activity was doubly feverish. The Red lay sprawled back against the ropes while they kneaded knotty legs, and shoulders. There was blood on his chin, his lips were cut and misshapen, but he had weathered that round without serious damage. Watching him Old Jerry saw that he was smiling—snarling confidently.

Back in Denny's corner they were still working over him, but the whole house had sensed the dismay in that little knot of men. Hogarty, gnawing his lip, stopped and whispered once to the boy on the stool, but Young Denny shook his head and held out his hand. He laced the gloves back on them, over the purple, puffy knuckles.