Once to Every Man

by Larry Evans

Perhaps with his mind set upon other things that morning Young Denny forgot it, perhaps there was an even deeper reason for his remissness, but the Judge, while he stood and listened to the boy’s tersely short explanation of his errand, was himself too taken up with other thoughts to note the omission. He was already formulating the rounded sentences with which he would introduce the subject that night to the circle in the Tavern office.

There was much of the dramatic in the whole situation––much that needed only proper staging and elaboration to make of it a tremendous triumph, a personal triumph, the extent of which he began to foresee with Denny’s opening words. And the greater became his consciousness of Denny Bolton’s strange new bearing, the clearer he saw all the possibilities of the situation.

To cap it all, the one big, irrefutable fact about 110 which he could build his climax was there all ready before him, ripe for exploitation. It was with an actual effort of the will that the Judge held his brain sufficiently attentive to the boy’s words to grasp the reason for his early morning visit, in the face of the fascination which that great, ragged bruise across Denny’s chin had for him. Properly displayed, properly played up, the possibilities of that raw, unbandaged wound were incalculable, and the Judge started almost guiltily from his greedy scrutiny of it to a sudden realization that the boy before him had paused in his recital and was waiting in almost insulting self-possession for a reply.

Many men and some few women had rung boldly at the Judge’s front door or, more often, tapped timidly at the entrance in the rear of the house, all bent upon the same errand. For it was a country-wide secret that no one had ever been turned away from those doors with a refusal. If any of those same visitors ever awakened to a realization that the terms of their bargain were far harder to bear than a refusal might have been, they nursed that knowledge in secret.

The Judge was a first mortgage financier, and he scanned each new addition to his already extensive collection with all the elaborate care which a matcher of precious stones might have exercised in the assembling of a fabulous priced string of pearls. It was his practice to scrutinize each transaction from every 111 possible angle, in every degree of light and shade, but in his eagerness that morning he forgot to don for Denny the air of gracious understanding that was half paternal, half deprecating, which he always wore to set the others more at their ease. He even forgot to clear his throat judicially when he asked the boy before him if he had considered sufficiently the gravity of such a step as the placing in pawn of the roof that sheltered him and the ground that gave him food. It may have been because Young Denny, as he stood quietly waiting for his answer, came under neither classification––he was neither pitifully timid nor more pitifully bold––that the Judge omitted the usual pompous formula, or merely that in his eager contemplation of the boy’s hurt face he forgot for once his perfectly rehearsed part.

No preoccupation, however, marred the businesslike statement of his terms, but even while he named the amount which he was willing to risk upon Young Denny’s arid, rocky acres, and the rate of interest which he felt compelled to demand, his brain was racing far ahead of the matter in hand. It was the Judge himself who engineered the half hour’s delay which resulted in the fullest possible audience for their appearance that morning. While he had never attended it himself, except now and then by chance, he knew too well the infallibility of that little knot of regulars who watched Old Jerry’s daily departure to have any 112 fears that the first of that day’s many thrills would go unseen or unsung. And he timed their arrival to a second.

Old Jerry was in the doorway, ready for his straight-backed descent of the worn steps, when Judge Maynard pulled his smooth gaited pair to a restive standstill before the office and gave the reins into Young Denny’s keeping. The throng of old men upon the sidewalk was at the point of opening ranks to allow him to pass through to his tattered buggy, which stood at the roadside, a bare half-length ahead of the Judge’s polished equipage. And now those same ranks broke in wild disorder and then closed tighter even than before, while they shifted and struggled for a better view.

They forgot the ceremonious solemnity of the moment and the little, birdlike figure upon the top step trying not to show too plainly upon his face a sense of his own importance––they forgot everything but the portend of the scene which the Judge was handling in so masterful a fashion.

The latter’s descent from his seat to the ground was deliberate, even for him; his silent nod to those wide-eyed, loose-jawed old men upon the sidewalk was the very quintessence of secretive dignity, and yet had he taken up his position there on the corner of the uneven boardwalk and cried aloud his sensation, like a bally-hoo advertising the excellence of his own 113 particular side-show, he could not have equaled the results which the very profundity of his silence achieved.

There was a momentous promise in his gravity, a hint of catastrophe in the tilt of his head. Like two receding waves the tight ranks opened before him, clearing a path for his heavy-footed advance to the post-office doors––a lane of bulging eyes and clicking tongues such as Old Jerry in all his days had never provoked. And the latter stood there stock still in the middle of the entrance, too dazed at first to grasp the whole meaning of the situation, until he, too, was swept aside, without so much as a glance or a word, by one majestic sweep of the Judge’s hand.