Once or twice he rose, during the return journey and advanced with forced jauntiness as far as the door of the car ahead. But he always stopped there, after a moment’s uneasy contemplation of Denny’s back, turned a little sadly to the water-cooler, and returned slowly and unenthusiastically to his seat. Twice when it was necessary to change trains he made the transfer with a lightning precision that would have done honor to any prestidigitator. And when, hours after nightfall, the train came to a groaning standstill before Boltonwood’s deserted station shed he waited his opportunity and dropped off in the dark––on the wrong side of the track!
Denny had already become a dark blur ahead of him when he, too, turned in and took the long road toward town.
Old Jerry followed the big-shouldered figure that night with heavily lagging feet––he followed heavy in spirit and bereft of hope. He was still behind him 314 when Denny finally paused before the sagging gate of John Anderson’s half-stripped house. Then, watching the boy’s dumb lack of understanding, the enormity of the whole horrible complication dawned upon him for the first time. He had forgotten Dryad Anderson’s going––forgotten that the house upon the ridge was no longer the property of the man who had entrusted it to him.
When the light behind that half-drawn shade flared up, far across on the crest of the opposite hill, and Young Denny wheeled to plunge into the black mouth of the path that led deeper into the valley, he too started swiftly forward. He swept off in desperate haste up the long hill road that led to the Bolton homestead.
The light was still there in that front room when he poked a tentatively inquiring head in at the open door; he paused in a dull-eyed examination of the silken garments draped over the table top in the kitchen after he had roamed vaguely through the silent house. But he was too tired in mind to give them much attention just then.
Outside, buried in the shadow of Young Denny’s squat, unpainted barn, he still waited doggedly––he waited ages and ages, a lifetime of apprehension. And then he saw them coming toward him, up out of the shadow of the valley into the moonlight that bathed the hill in silver.
They paused and stood there––stood and stared out across the valley at Judge Maynard’s great box of a house on the hill and that bit of a wedge-shaped acre of ruin that clung like an unsightly burr to the hem of his immaculate pastures.
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.
Then he started. He shrank farther back into the shadow and edged a noiseless way around the building. But with the tavern lights beckoning to him he waited an introspective moment or two.