Once to Every Man

He placed the smoking lamp upon the bare board table and turned. As if they could still hear him–the circle about the Tavern stove in the valley below–he lifted both hard fists and tightened them until the heavy muscles beneath his shirt bunched and quivered like live things.

“Size never made any difference to him?” he repeated the Judge’s word aloud, with a drawling interrogation. “Size never made any difference to him?”

He laughed again, softly, as if there were a newly discovered humor about it all which must be jealously guarded.

“It never had to make any difference,” the drawling voice went on, “it didn’t have to–because Jed Conway was always the biggest boy in the school!”

His nostrils were dilating, twitching with the thin, sharp odor of the overturned demijohn which was rising and thickening in the room. His eyes fell and for the first time became conscious of it lying there at his feet. And he stooped and picked it up, lifting it between both hands until it was level with his face–until it was held at arm’s length high above his head. Then his whole body snapped forward and the glass from the broken window pane jingled musically on the floor as the jug crashed out into the night.

Young Denny stood and smiled, one side of his chin a gash of crimson against the dead white of his face. Again he lifted his fists.

“He never whipped me,” he challenged the lights in the hollow, “he never whipped me–and he never tried but once! I–I–ain’t never been–whipped–yet!”

There had been no sound to herald her coming as she darted up to the door. Reeling giddily there in the middle of the room, he had not even heard the one low cry that she choked back as she stopped at the threshold, but he half turned that moment and met the benumbed horror of Dryad Anderson’s eyes. Minute after minute he merely stood and stared back at her stupidly, while bit by bit every detail of her transformation began to penetrate his brain, still foggy with the force of the blow that had laid his chin wide open. Her tumbled hair was piled high upon her head; she was almost tall with the added height of the high-heeled satin slippers; more slender than ever in the bespangled clinging black skirt and sleeveless scarlet waist which the old cloak, slipping unheeded from her shoulders, had disclosed.

As his brain began to clear Young Denny forgot the dripping blood that made his white face ghastly, he forgot the stinging odor of the broken demijohn, thick in the room–forgot everything but Judge Maynard’s face when the latter had looked up and found him standing at the Tavern door. He knew now what the light was that had lurked in their shifty depths; it was fear–fear that he–Young Denny–might speak up in that moment and disclose all the hypocrisy of his suave lies. He even failed to see the horror in the eyes of the girl before him. Sudden, reckless laughter rang from his lips.

“Dryad,” he cried out. “Dryad, it’s all right–it’s always been all right–with us! They lied–they lied and they knew they were lying!”

She shrank back, as if all the strength had been drained from her knees, as he lurched unsteadily across toward her and reached out his arms. But at the touch of his hands upon her shoulders the power of action came rushing back into her limbs. She shuddered and whirled–and shook off his groping fingers. Her own hands flashed out and held his face away from her.

“Don’t you touch me!” she panted huskily. “Oh, you–you–don’t you even dare to come near me!”

He tried to explain–tried to follow her swift flight as she leaped back, but his feet became entangled in the cloak on the floor and brought him heavily to his knees. He even tried to follow her after she had been swallowed up in the shadows outside, until he realized dully that his shuffling feet would not go where his whirling head directed them. Once he called out to her, before he staggered back to the kitchen door, and received no answer.

With his hands gripping the door frame he eased himself down to the top step and sat rocking gently to and fro.

“S’all right,” he muttered once, his tongue thick with pain. “S’always been all right!”

And he laughed aloud, a laugh of utter confidence in spite of all its unsteadiness.

“Twelve thousand dollars,” he said, “and–and he never whipped me! He never could–not the best day he ever lived!”

CHAPTER VII

Denny Bolton never quite knew at what hour of that long black night he reached the final decision; there was no actual beginning or ending or logical sequence to the argument in the back of his brain which led up to it, to crystallize into final resolve.

He merely sat there in the open door of his half-lighted kitchen, swaying a little from side to side at first, giddy with the pain of that crashing blow that had laid open his chin; then balancing, motionless as the thick shadows themselves, in a silence that was unbroken save for the creaking night noises about him and the rhythmic splash of the warm drops that fell more and more slowly from the gaping, unheeded wound, he groped back over the succession of events of that afternoon and night, reconstructing with a sort of dogged patience detail after detail which was waveringly uncertain of outline, until with the clearing of his numbed brain they stood out once again in sane, well-ordered clarity. And as they gradually took shape again each detail grew only more fantastically unbelievable.

It seemed ages since he had stood against the closed door of the Tavern office and seen Judge Maynard turn and falter before his unsuspected presence–days and days since he had stood there and watched that round moon-like face flush heavily with the first shock of surprise, and realized that the startled light in the shifty eyes of Boltonwood’s most prominent citizen was part fear, part appeal, that he, Denny Bolton, whose name in the estimation of that same village stood for all that was at the other extreme, would confirm and support his barefaced lying statement. It was more than merely fantastic; and yet, at that, sitting there in the dark, Young Denny still found something in the recollection that was amusing–far more amusing than he had imagined anything so simple ever could be.

And already, although it was scarcely hours old, the rest of it, too, was tinged with an uncanny unreality that was not far removed from the bodiless fabric of nightmare itself: Those great, catapulting hoofs which had thundered against him from the darkness and beaten him back, a half-senseless heap, against the barn wall; the blind, mad rage, as much a wildly hysterical abandonment of utter joy as anything else, which had surged through him when, with the stinging odor of the overturned jug in his nostrils, he had stooped and straightened and sent the old stone demijohn, that had stood sentinel for years in the corner near the door, splintering its way through the window into the night; and, last of all, the sick horror of the girl’s face as she recoiled before him came vividly before his eyes, and his own strange impotence of limb and lip when he had tried to follow and found that his feet would not obey the impulse of his brain, tried to explain only to find that his tongue somehow refused at that moment to voice the words he would have spoken.

That was hardest of all to believe–most difficult to visualize–and he would not give it full credence until he had reached out behind him in the dark and found the bit of a cloak which, slipping from her shoulders, become entangled in his stumbling feet and brought him crashing to his knees. The feel of that rough cloth beneath his hand was more than enough to convince him, and swiftly, unreasonably, the old bitter tide of resentment began to creep back upon him–bitter resentment of her quick judgment of him, which like that of the village, had condemned in the years that were past, even without a hearing.

“She thought,” he muttered slowly aloud to himself, “she thought I had–” He left the sentence unfinished to drift off into a long brooding silence; and then, many minutes later: “She didn’t even wait to ask–to see–to let me tell her–”

One hand went tentatively to the point of his chin–his old, vaguely preoccupied trick of a gesture–and the wet touch of that open wound helped to bring him back to himself. A moment longer he sat, trying to make out the stained figures that were invisible even though he held them a scant few inches from his eyes, before he rose, stretching his legs in experimental doubt at first, and passed inside. And once more he stood before the square patch of mirror on the wall, with the small black-chimneyed lamp lifted high in one hand, just as he had stood earlier that same night, and scanned his own face.

All trace of resentment left his eyes as he realized the ghastly pallor of those features–all the ragged horror of that oozing welt which he had only half seen in that first moment when he was clinging to consciousness with clenched teeth. It was not nice to look at, and the light that replaced that sudden flare of bitterness was so new that he did not even recognize it himself at first.

It was a clearer, steadier, surer thing than he had ever known them to reflect before; all hint of lost-dog sophistication was gone; even the smile that touched his thin, pain-straightened lips was different somehow. It was just as whimsical as before, and just as half-mirthless–gentle as it always had been whenever he thought at all of her–but there was no wistful hunger left in it, and little of boyishness, and nothing of lurking self-doubt.

“Why, she couldn’t have known,” he went on then, still murmuring aloud. “She couldn’t have been expected to believe anything else. I–I’m not much to look at–just now.”

He even forgot that he had tried to follow her–forgot that her cloak had thrown him sprawling in the doorway.

“I ought to have told her,” he condemned himself. “I shouldn’t have let her go–not like that.”

In the fullness of this new certainty of self that was setting his pulses hammering, he even turned toward the sleeping town, thickly blanketed by the shadows in the valley, in a sudden boyish burst of generosity.

“Maybe they didn’t mean to lie, either,” he mused thoughtfully. “Maybe they haven’t really meant to lie–all this time. They could have been mistaken, just as she was tonight–they certainly could have been that.”

He found and filled a basin with cold water and washed out the cut until the bleeding had stopped entirely. And then, with the paper which that afternoon’s mail had brought–the sheet with the astounding news of Jed The Red, which Old Jerry prophesied would put Boltonwood in black letters on the map of publicity–spread out on the table before him, he sat until daybreak poring over it with eyes that were filmed with preoccupation one moment and keenly strained the next to make out the close-set type.

Not long before dawn he reached inside his coat and brought out a bit of burnished white card and set it up in front of him against the lamp. There was much in the plump, black capitals and knobby script of Judge Maynard’s invitation which was very suggestive of the man himself, but Young Denny failed to catch the suggestion at that moment.

He never quite knew when that decision became final, nor what the mental process was which brought it about. Nor did he even dream of the connection there might have been between it and that square of cardboard lying in front of him. Just once, as the first light came streaking in through the uncurtained window beside him, he nodded his head in deliberate, definite finality.

“Why, it’s the thing I’ve been waiting for,” he stated, something close akin to wonder in his voice. “It’s just a man’s size chance. I’d have to take it–I’d have to do that, even if I didn’t want to–for myself.”

And later, while he was kindling a fire in the stove and methodically preparing his own breakfast, he paused to add with what seemed to be absolute irrelevance:

“Silk–silk, next to her skin!”

There were only two trains a day over the single-track spur road that connected Boltonwood with the outer world beyond the hills; one which left at a most unreasonably inconvenient hour in the early morning and one which left just as inconveniently late at night. Denny Bolton, who had viewed from a distinctly unfavorable angle any possible enchantment which the town might chance to offer, settled upon the first as the entirely probable choice of the short, fat, brown-clad newspaper man, even without a moment’s hesitation to weigh the merits of either. And the sight of the round bulk of the latter, huddled alone upon a baggage truck before the deserted Boltonwood station-shed, fully vindicated his judgment.

It was still only a scant hour since daybreak. Heavy, low-hanging clouds in the east, gray with threatening rain, cut off any warmth there might have been in the rising sun and sharpened the raw wind to a knifelike edge. The man on the truck was too engrossed with the thoughts that shook his plump shoulders in regularly recurring, silent chuckles, and a ludicrously doleful effort to shut off with upturned collar the draft from the back of his neck, to hear the boy’s approaching footsteps. He started guiltily to his feet in the very middle of a spasmodic upheaval, to stand and stare questioningly at the big figure whose fingers had plucked tentatively at his elbow, until a sudden, delighted recognition flooded his face. Then he reached out one pudgy hand with eager cordiality.

“Why, greetings–greetings!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t quite recognize you with your–er–decoration.” His eyes dwelt in frank inquisitiveness upon the ragged red bruise across Young Denny’s chin. “You’re the member who stood near the door last night, aren’t you–the one who didn’t join to any marked degree in the general jubilee?”

Young Denny’s big, hard hand closed over the outstretched pudgy white one. He grinned a little and slowly nodded his head.

“Thought so,” the man in brown rambled blithely on, “and glad to see you again. Glad of a chance to speak to you! I wanted most mightily to ask you a few pertinent questions last night, but it hardly seemed a fitting occasion.”

He tapped Young Denny’s arm with a stubby forefinger, one eyelid drooping quizzically.

“Entre nous– just ’twixt thee and me,” he went on, “and not for publication, was this Jeddy Conway, as you knew him, all that your eminent citizenry would lead a poor gullible stranger to believe, or was he just a small-sized edition of the full-blown crook he happens to be at the present stage of developments? Not that it makes any difference here,” he tapped the big notebook under his arm, “but I’m just curious, a little, because the Jed The Red whom I happen to know is so crooked nowadays that his own manager is afraid to place a bet on him half the time. See?”

Denny smiled comprehendingly. He shifted his big body to a more comfortable and far less awkward position.

“I see,” he agreed.

Somehow, where it would have been an utter impossibility to have spoken lightly to him the night before, he found it very easy now to understand and meet half way the frivolity of the fat, grinning man before him.

“Well, when he left town about eight years ago, his going was just a trifle hasty. He–he took about everything there was in the cash-drawer of Benson’s store with him–except maybe a lead slug or two–and there are some who think he only overlooked those.”

The gurgle of sheer delight that broke from the lips of the man in brown was spontaneously contagious.