“Because I––I wouldn’t like to hev you go––without seein’ you again,” he went on slowly––“without a chance to tell you something––er––to tell you good-by.”
He didn’t wait for her answer. At the far bend 251 in the road, when he looked back, she was still there in the doorway watching him.
He was not quite certain, but he thought she threw up one thin white arm to him as he passed out of sight.
CHAPTER XVII
It rained that next day––a dull, steady downpour that slanted in upon a warm, south wind. 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. At any other time the contents of that red-headlined sheet would have set his pulses throbbing in a veritable ecstasy of excitement.
For two whole weeks he had been watching for it, scanning every inch of type for the news it brought, but now that account of Young Denny’s first match, with a little, square picture of him inset at the column head, fell woefully flat so far as he was concerned.
Not that the plump newspaperman who had 253 written the account of that first victorious bout had achieved anything but a masterpiece of sensationalism. Every line was alive with action, every phrase seemed to thud with the actual shock of contest. And there was that last paragraph, too, which hailed Denny––“The Pilgrim,” they called him in the paper, but that couldn’t deceive Old Jerry––as the newcomer for whom the public had been waiting so long, and, toward the end, so hopelessly.