Part 8 (1/2)
”Not bad--not bad at all,” he frankly admired his own handiwork at the finish. ”You see, it was like this. I've been short on anything like this for a long time--good Rube stuff--and so when Conway came through in his match the other night it looked like a providential opportunity--and it certainly has panned up to expectations.”
Once more he turned to scan the lean face turned toward him, far more openly, far more inquisitively, this time. It perplexed him, bewildered him--this easy certainty and consciousness of power which had replaced the lost-dog light that had driven the smile from his own lips the night before when he had followed Judge Maynard's beckoning finger.
Hours after the enthusiastic circle about the Tavern stove had dissolved he had labored to reproduce that white, bitter, quivering face at the door, only to find that the very vividness of his memory somehow baffled the cunning of his pencil. There had been more than mere bitterness in those curveless, colorless lips; something more than doubt of self behind the white hot flare in the gray eyes. Now, in the light of day, his eyes searched for it openly and failed to find even a ghost of what it might have been.
”No,” he ruminated gently, and he spoke more to himself than the other, ”you don't stand deuce high with this community. You're way down on the list.” He hesitated, weighing his words, suddenly a little doubtful as to how far he might safely venture. ”I--I guess you've--er--disappointed them too long, haven't you?”
The blood surged up under Young Denny's dark skin until it touched his crisp black hair, and the fat man hastened to throw a touch of jocularity into the statement.
”Yep, you've disappointed 'em sorely. But I've been monopolizing all the conversation. I can't convince myself that you've come down here merely to say me a touching farewell. Was there--was there something you wanted to see me about in particular?”
It was the very opening for which Denny had been waiting--the opening which he had not known how to make himself, for his plan for procedure by which he was to accomplish it was just as indistinct as his resolution had been final. He nodded silently, uncertain just how to begin, and then he plunged desperately into the very middle of it.
”I thought maybe you could tell me if this was true or not,” he said, and he drew from his pocket the paper which bore the account of Jed The Red's victory over The Texan. A hint of a frown appeared upon the forehead of the man in brown as he took the folded sheet and read where Denny's finger indicated--the last paragraph of all.
”The winner's share of the receipts amounted to twelve thousand dollars,” was its succinct burden.
He read it through twice, as if searching for any puzzling phrase it might contain.
”I certainly can,” he admitted at last. ”I wrote it myself, but it's no doubt true, for all that. Not a very big purse, of course, but then, you know, he isn't really champions.h.i.+p calibre. He's just a second-rate hopeful, that's all. It seems hard to find a real one these days. But why the riddle?” he finished, as he handed back the paper.
”Why, I thought if it was true maybe I'd ask you to tell me if I--how I could get a chance at him.”
The boy's explanation was even more flounderingly abrupt than his former question had been, but his eyes never wavered from the newspaper man's face. The latter laid his notebook upon the truck with exaggerated care and rose and faced him.
”Another!” he lamented in simulated despair. But the next moment all the bantering light went from his face, while his eyes flashed in lightning-like apprais.e.m.e.nt over Denny's lean shoulder-heavy body, from his feet, small and narrow in spite of the clumsy high boots, to his clean-cut head, and back again. There was a hint of businesslike eagerness in that swift calculation of possibilities. The boy s.h.i.+fted consciously under the scrutiny.
”It isn't that he never was able to whip me--even when he was a kid,”
he tried to explain. ”It--it's because I don't believe, somehow, that he ever could.”
All the strained eagerness disappeared from the face of the pudgy man in brown. He laughed softly, a short little laugh of amus.e.m.e.nt at his own momentary folly.
”Whew!” he murmured. ”I'm getting to be just as bad as all the rest!”
He felt in a pocket for a card and scribbled an address across its back. A trace of good-natured familiarity--the first hint of superiority that had marked his manner--accompanied his gesture when he extended it in one hand. It savored of the harmless humoring of a childish vagary.
”If you ever did chance to get as far from home as that, there's a man at that address who'd fall on your neck and weep real tears if you happened to have the stuff,” he said. ”But just one additional word.
Maybe I've led you astray a bit. Just because I said that Jed The Red is a second-rater, don't think for a moment that he fights like a schoolboy now. He doesn't--nothing like that!”
He gazed for another second at the boy's thin, grave face, so like, in its very thinness and gravity, all that a composite of its Puritan forbears might have been. And as he became suddenly conscious of that resemblance he reversed the card, a whimsical twist touching his lips, and wrote above his own name, ”Introducing the Pilgrim,” and put it in the outstretched hand.
”Any idea when you expect to make a start?” he inquired with an elaborate negligence that brought the hot color to the boy's cheeks.
But again, at the words, he caught, too, a glimpse of the unshaken certainty that backed their gray gravity.
”Tomorrow, I reckon. It'll take me all of today to get things fixed up so I can leave. I'll take this train in the morning. And they--they ought to have told you at the hotel that it's always a half-hour late.”
Young Denny rose.