“–––That it was better a bad egg than an omelette, eh?” he interrupted knowingly.
The Judge pounded his knee and rocked with mirth.
“Well, that’s just about it––that’s just about as near as words could come to it,” he managed to gasp, and the circle behind him rocked, too, and pounded its knee as one man.
The man on the desk went on working industriously with his pencil, even while he was speaking.
“And then I suppose he was pretty good with his hands, too, even when he was a little shaver?” he suggested tentatively. “But then I don’t suppose that any one of you ever dreamed that you had a world’s champion, right here at home, in the making, did you?”
The whole room leaned nearer. Even the late comer near the door forgot himself entirely and took one step forward, his narrowing gray eyes straining upon the Judge’s face.
Judge Maynard again weighed his reply, word for word.
“We-e-ll, no,” he admitted. “I don’t believe I can say that I downright believed that he’d make a world’s champion. Don’t believe’s I could truthfully state that I thought that. But I guess there isn’t anybody in this town that would ever deny but what I did say more than once that he’d make the best of ’em hustle––ye-e-s, sir, the very best of ’em, some day!”
The speaker turned to face the hushed room behind him, as if to challenge contradiction, and Young Denny, waiting for some one to speak, touched his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. But no contradiction came. Instead Old Jerry, leaning across the Judge’s broad back, quavered breathlessly.