Once to Every Man

“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.