Larry Evans

“ Judge Maynard’s round moon-face went purple. Twice he tried to speak before he sat silent, annihilation in his eyes, until Jerry’s outbreak had subsided. Then he lifted one forefinger and pointed, with all the majesty such a gesture could ever convey, to the empty chair––the chair which Old Jerry should have been occupying in becoming silence at that moment.
“Have you gone crazy?” he thundered. “Have you––or are you just naturally witless? Or was there something you wanted to say? If there isn’t––if you’ve no questions to ask––you get over to that chair and sit down where you belong!” ”

“ For too constant insistence upon an evil thing is sure to breed doubt in the mind of one who is in the habit of thinking at all. It did in Cecille's. If it be so true, so inevitable, so frightful, surely it should be self-evident now and then, instead of a mere matter of report. And beautiful generalization, never anything but vague, becomes noticeable after a time, questionable. The things of glory in this world are not so tediously many that they will not bear once or twice the telling. Why not refuse, for once, to blink the facts, even though they may not be suitably sordid? ”

“ And Young Denny, waiting there in the thickening dusk before his own dark place, smiled gravely back at that single blinking light in the window of the cottage squatting under the hill––he smiled with whimsical gentleness, a man’s smile that softened somehow the hard lines of jaw and lip. It was more than three years now since the first night when he had stood and watched for it to flash out across the valley before he had turned and gone to set a lamp in the dark front windows behind him in answer to it. ”

“ Barbara breathed her contrition. "I never dreamed——"
"No one ever does," faltered Miss Sarah. "I—I am an old, faded, hopelessly unmarried woman to you, my dear—oh, child, you need not protest a kinder opinion! I am just 'Caleb Hunter's spinster sister' to the people of this village. But to—to myself, Barbara, I am at times the same girl who waited, roses in her hair and roses in her cheeks, for him to come, so that I might tell him that I was his, body and soul. And he never came! Oh, my dear, I do not mean to break down like this, for you have your own heart-ache. ”

“ It was a white night––a night so brilliant that the village lights far below in the hollow all but lost their own identity in the radiance of that huge, pale moon; so white that the yellow flare of the single lamp in its bracket, in the back kitchen of the old Bolton place on the hill seemed shabbily dull by contrast.
Standing at the window in the dark front room of the house, peering out from under cupped palms that hid her eyes, Dryad could almost pick out each separate picket of the straggling old fence that bounded the garden of the little drab cottage across from her. ”

“ For I've never had to struggle very hard for anything I've wanted. I want to be friends, but I'm not silly enough to think you won't tell me again that you—care. I want to be friends, but not at the price of your heart-ache and disappointment, and—why, I wonder, do I get all tangled up when I try to explain myself to you? It's just this: I'm not going to be unkind to little Steve any more, Mr. O'Mara, or—or big Steve, either. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And he had never liked the boy; never learned to like the man he had grown to be. Underneath Dexter Allison's jovial exterior there was a cynicism which for hardness would have made Garry Devereau's worst moments seem mere childish fits of spleen. Men do not watch other men whimper and beg for mercy—little rascals who have been nipped in a greater schemer's trap—without beginning to wonder, soon or late, how much of man is warped and twisted; and he had been watching Archie Wickersham now for months. He believed that men's men were not women's men, the oft-repeated epigram to the contrary. ”

“ A rare, amused smile tugged at the corners of Young Denny’s lips as he crossed the open yard to the crest of the hill. But when the groaning buggy came to a standstill and Old Jerry flung the reins across the mare’s wide back, to dive and burrow in frantic haste under the seat for the customary roll of advertisements, without so much as a glance for the boy who strode slowly up to the wheel, that shadow of a smile which had touched his face faded into concerned gravity. He hesitated a moment, as if not quite certain of what he should do.
“Is there––there isn’t any one sick, is there?” ”

“ It was August temperature, the third Sunday in April, when Stephen O'Mara stood and watched, beneath the glare of kerosene torches, his bridge at Thirty-Mile go into position between dark and dawn.
There was no man among them that day who did not show upon his face the strain they had been under. They were few, they were unshaven and dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent combat. Fat Joe was no longer plump. Steve was worn down to actual thinness. ”

“ It was Old Jerry’s hour––the one hour of the day in which his starved appetite for notoriety ever supped of nourishment––that moment when the small knot of loiterers upon the sidewalk, always, face for face, composed of the same personnel as the unvarying nightly circle about the Tavern stove, gave way before him and the authority of the “Gov’mint” which he personified.
Since that first morning, years back, which had hailed his initial appearance with the mail bags slung over one thin shoulder, he had made the most of that daily entrance upon the stage of publicity. ”

“ He complained, querulously, like a half-aged boy, over the treacherous footing which the flooded alder brakes afforded. And once when he had felled a tree and narrowly missed being pinned beneath it, in spite of Steve's quick leap that dragged him aside, he plunged into an incisive diatribe concerning the perversity of inanimate things—a short discussion in many-syllabled words which would have awakened Steve's admiration by its very brilliance, had he not already been fully concerned with the light of triumph which had flared and then died out in Garry's eyes when the hemlock only grazed him. ”

“ Denny Bolton’s long, tanned face was entirely grave––even graver than usual. Just a hint of wistfulness that would never quite leave them showed in his eyes and lurked in the line of his lips––an intangible, fleeting suggestion of expectation that had waited patiently for something that had been very long in the coming. And the black felt hat and smooth black suit which he wore finished the picture and made the illusion complete. His face and figure, even there in the doorway of Hogarty’s Fourteenth Street place, could have suggested but one thing to an observant man. ”

“ For even while she was speaking the corners of Steve's eyelids began to crinkle; before she had finished mocking at him in a voice that still caught unsteadily in her throat, it was her up-turned face which had grown pink under his gravely amused scrutiny.
"Was it as bad as that?" he asked. "I don't know that I mind the 'benign' part so very much, but as for my 'surety'—well, now I must set you right. I have seen men holding four aces sit with faces so sad and hopeless that they might have earned their fortunes as professional mourners, could their expressions have been rendered permanent. ”

“ Leaning against the table there in the half light of the room, a slow smile curled back the corners of her lips, still childishly quizzical in contrast with that slim roundness of body which was losing its boyish litheness in a new slender fullness that throbbed on the threshold of womanhood. She smiled deprecatingly as she lifted one hand to search in the breast of the blouse that was always just enough outgrown to fail of closing across her throat, and drew out the thing which the Judge had delivered with every possible flourish, barely a few hours back. ”

“ There is a poise which comes only with hard-bought knowledge of one's self. It was Miss Sarah's; Miriam had acquired it, too. Without a hint of resentment in her manner she rose and withdrew. But Barbara did not go to bed. She took that vacated seat at the window. And long after her breathing had ceased to be quick and sharp she was still wondering why the odor of stale alcohol should recall to her, with elusive vagueness, the threatening face of a red-haired riverman who found it hard to keep his feet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the same trail which once had led him to the "city" of Morrison he carried her now to that cabin which stood on the balsam knoll in the crook of the west branch; nor was it far for she had traveled straight, though in the wrong direction. But it was long after dark when the river gleamed ahead of him through the trees, jet and glassy in the deep pools, streaked with blurred star-reflections in the riffles. A grown woman is a grown man's burden, even though she seem very small to him; and Steve had to travel slowly. ”

“ They had all forgotten Old Jerry’s interruption; they had forgotten everything else but the Judge’s recital, that was climbing to its climax. That room was very quiet when the speaker paused and waited for his words to sink in––very quiet until a half-smothered giggle broke the stillness.
There was an unholy glee in that mirth––a mocking, lilting note of actual joy which rang almost profane at such a moment. Man for man it brought that circle erect in the chairs; man for man they sat and stared at the grotesque figure which was rocking now in a paroxysm of laughter too real for simulation. ”

“ Again she felt the swift tensing of the flesh beneath; she fell back a step before the startling abruptness with which Steve whirled. She even threw up one small hand, as if to shield her face. And then, the cloak falling open at her throat, a slender, swaying figure in blue and shimmering white, she stood and flung a little laugh at him—a laugh a little unsteady, a bit tinged with mockery, and as untroubled as the spirit of youth itself.
"Is that the way you always prepare to greet your friends?" she asked. ”

“ It brought a little homesick ache into the girl’s throat; it set her lips to curving––made her eyes go damp with pity and tenderness for the little white-haired figure bending over his bench. He had clung so bravely, so stubbornly, to that battered bit of a house; to his garden which he had never realized had long since ceased to be anything but a plot of waist-high bushes and weeds. Once when she recollected those countless rows of poignantly wistful faces on the shelves of that back-room workshop she wondered if she had not been disloyal, after all. ”

“ He stopped to stare at his handful of men, rearing their heads to listen, too. Steve had been all winter alone with the puzzle of his own inferiority which he could never understand. And a minute later, when he had reached out to help to the ground a little blue clad figure with fur at throat and wrists, she drew the be-furred edge of her skirt about her ankles and laughingly refused his assistance, and jumped to the ground unaided. She was far too excited to know what she was doing; she hardly saw him at all in that first moment, but the act spelled much to him. ”

“ That brain which could cope with but one idea at a time was fertile ground for seed which such a one as Harrigan might sow. Big Louie failed to reply. He sat quiet, deep in thought when Stephen O'Mara closed the door noiselessly behind him.
It was minutes after Steve had gone back up the hill before Garry Devereau reached out a hand in the darkness and touched, experimentally, what had seemed to be only a shapeless black blotch at the edge of light, a rod or two from the door. And instantly at his touch the shadow was galvanized into life. ”

“ Hogarty had one other reason that morning which accounted for his absolute serenity. From Third Avenue to the waterfront any one who was well-informed at all––and there was no one who had not at least heard whispers of his fame––knew that the thin-faced, hard-eyed, steel-sinewed ex-lightweight who dressed in almost funeral black and white and talked in the hushed, measured syllables of a professor of English, loved one thing even more than he loved to see his own man put over the winning punch in––say the tenth. It was common gossip that a set of ivory dominoes came first before all else. ”

“ And now when she stood and waved her hand at him from the brass-railed observation platform of Allison's private car which a switch engine, out of patience with the grade, was shunting across the lower end of the clearing, he could only stand and stare dully, no faith in his eyes.
The loud plaid of her father's garb flashed behind her in the doorway. Hardwick Elliott's fine face peered over his shoulder. And Wickersham, who had not seen his fiance in a month, had started toward them, stiffly erect in his immaculate whipcord habit. Wickersham was smiling; Wickersham was safe again. ”

“ Slender and boy-like in her little blouse and tight, short skirt the girl was half-hidden in the hollow of his shoulder. Once, watching with his head cocked pertly, sparrowlike, on one side, the old man’s eyes went to the white-bandaged knuckles of Denny’s right hand; once while he waited Old Jerry saw her lift her face––saw the big, shoulder-heavy figure fold her in his arms and bend and touch the glory of her hair with his lips while she clung to him, before she turned and went slowly toward the open kitchen door. ”

“ And then, wanly grateful: "You are not the sort of man who lies convincingly, Steve."
And then Stephen O'Mara let him have it—all the story which had lain so many days in his heart. There were times when Garry went even paler during the short recital; times when everything else was submerged by the incredulity that flooded his face. But before Steve had finished the last trace of doubt was gone. Before the end came Garry had bowed his head, this time in flushed, self-conscious wonder which transfigured him.
"Miriam Burrell!" he breathed. ”

“ But no one, not even Morehouse, knew when Old Jerry disappeared that night after Jed Conway had come hurtling from his corner, only to lift and whirl and go crashing back before the impact of The Pilgrim’s leaping gloves. At first the plump newspaper man believed that the surging, shouting wave of humanity which had broken comber-like over the ropes to hail a newer favorite had separated the little, bird-faced man from him. ”