ever happened to this town. It–it’s terrific! We’ll be famous–that’s what we’ll be! In a week or two Boltonwood’ll be as famous as–as–why, we’ll be as famous as the Chicago Fair!”
He broke off with a gasp for breath and started fluttering madly through the paper which he had wrenched from Young Denny’s bundle of closely wrapped mail, until he found the page he sought.
“There ’tis,” he cried, and pointed out a lurid headline that ran half across the head of the sporting section. “There ’tis–or leastwise that’s a part on it. But they’s more a-comin’–more that that won’t be a patch to! But you just take a look at that!”
Young Denny took the paper from his hand with a sort of sober patience, and there across the first three column heads, following the direction of Old Jerry’s quivering forefinger, he found his first inkling of the astounding news.
“Jed The Red wins by knockout over The Texan in fourteenth round,” ran the red-inked caption.
Word by word he read it through, and a second time his grave eyes went through it, even more painstakingly, as though he had not caught at a single reading all its sensational significance. Then he looked up into the seamed old face above him, a-gleam and a-quiver with excitement.
“Jed The Red,” the boy said in his steady voice. “Jed The Red!” And then, levelly: “Who’s he?”
Old Jerry stared at him a moment before he shook his head hopelessly and collapsed with a thud upon the torn seat behind him, in an excess of disgust for the boy’s stupidity which he made no effort to conceal.
“Jed who?” he mimicked, his voice shrill with sarcasm. “Now what in time Jed would it be, if ’twa’n’t Jeddy Conway–our own Jeddy Conway from this very village? What other Jed is there? Ain’t you got no memory at all, when you ought to be proud to be able to say that you went to school with him yourself, right in this town?”
Again Young Denny nodded a silent agreement, but Old Jerry’s feverish enthusiasm had carried him far beyond mere anger at his audience’s apparent lack of appreciation.
“And that ain’t all,” he rushed on breathlessly, “not by a lot, it ain’t! That ain’t nothin’ to compare with what’s to come. Why, right this minute there’s a newspaper writer down to the village–he’s from New York and he’s been stayin’ to the Tavern ever since he come in this morning and asked for a room with a bath–and he’s goin’ to write up the town. Yes sir-e-e–the whole dad-blamed town! Pictures of the main street and the old place where Jeddy went to school, like as not, and–and”–he hesitated for an instant to recall the exact phrasing–“and interviews with the older citizens who recognized his ability and gave him a few pointers in the game when he was only a little tad. That’s what’s to follow, and it’s comin’ out in the New York papers, too–Sunday supplement, colors, maybe, and–and–”
Sudden recollection checked him in the middle of the tumbled flow of information. Leaning far out over the dash, he put all his slight weight against the reins and turned the fat white mare back into the road with astonishing celerity.
“Godfrey, but that makes me think,” he gasped. “I ain’t got no time to fritter away here! I got to git down to the Tavern in a hurry. He’ll be waitin’ to hear what I kin tell him.”
The thin, wrinkled old face twisted into a hopeful, wheedling smile.
“You know that, don’t you, Denny? You could tell him that there wa’n’t nobody in the hills knew little Jeddy Conway better’n I did, couldn’t you? It–it’s the last chance I’ll ever git, too, more’n likely.
“Twice I missed out–once when they found Mary Hubbard’s husband a-hangin’ to his hay mow–a-hangin by the very new clothes-line Mary’d just bought the day before and ain’t ever been able to use since on account of her feelin’ somehow queer about it–and me laid up to home sick all the time! Everybody else got their names mentioned in the article, and Judge Maynard had his picture printed because it was the Judge cut him down. ’Twa’n’t fair, didn’t seem to me, and me older’n any of ’em.
“And ’twas just the same when they found Mrs. Higgins’s Johnny, who had to go and git through the ice into the crick just the one week in all the winter when I was laid up with a bad foot from splittin’ kindling. I begun to think I wasn’t ever goin’ to git my chance–but it’s come. It’s come at last–and I got to cut along and be there!”
Once more he leaned over the dash and slapped the old mare’s back with the slack of the lines.
“Git there, you,” he urged, and the complaining buggy went lurching down the rough road at the same unheard of pace at which it had ascended. Halfway down the hill, after he had lifted the mare from her shuffling fox-trot to a lumbering gallop, Old Jerry turned back for a last shouted word.
“He’ll be anxious to git all I can tell him, don’t you think?” the shrill falsetto drifted back to the boy who had not stirred in his tracks. “No article would be complete without that, would it? And they’s to be pictures–Sunday paper–and–maybe–in colors!”
There was an odd light burning in Denny Bolton’s eyes as he stood and watched the crazy conveyance disappear from view. The half hungry, half sullen bewilderment seemed to have given place to a new confusion, as though all the questions which had always been baffling him had become, all in one breath, an astounding enigma which clamored for instant solution. Not until the shrill scream of the ungreased axles had died out altogether and his eyes fell once more to the vivid streak of red that ran across the top of the sheet still clutched in his hand did Young Denny realize that Jerry had even failed to leave him the rest of his mail–the bulky package of circulars.
He was smiling again as he turned and went slowly toward the back door of the house, but somehow, as he went, the stoop of his big shoulders seemed to have even more than the usual vague hint of weariness in their heavy droop. He even forgot that the hungry team which he had stabled just a few minutes before was still unfed, as he dropped upon the top step and spread the paper out across his knees.
“Jed The Red wins by knockout over The Texan in fourteenth round,” he read again and again.
And then, with a slow forefinger blazing the way, he went on through the detailed account of the latest big heavyweight match, from the first paragraph, which stated that “Jed Conway, having disposed of The Texan at the Arena last night, by the knockout route in the fourteenth round, seems to loom up as the logical claimant of the white heavyweight title,” to the last one of all, which pithily advised the public that “the winner’s share of the receipts amounted to twelve thousand dollars.”
It was all couched in the choicest vocabulary of the ringside, and more than once Young Denny, whose literature had been confined chiefly to harvesters and sulky plows, had to stop and decipher phrases which he only half understood at first reading. But that last paragraph he did not fail to grasp.
It grew too dark for him to make out the small type any longer and the boy folded the paper and laid it back across his knees. With his chin resting upon one big palm he sat motionless, staring out beyond his sprawling, unpainted sheds toward the dim bulk of his hilly acres, with their jagged outcroppings of rock.
“Twelve thousand dollars!” He muttered the words aloud, under his breath. Eight hundred in three years had seemed to him an almost miraculous amount for him to have torn from that thin soil with nothing but the strength of his two hands. Now, with a bitterness that had been months in accumulating, it beat in upon his brain with sledgelike blows that he had paid too great a price–too
