Old Jerry’s sparrowlike, thinly, wistful face flamed red, and then faded a ghastly white, but no one seemed conscious at that moment of the ignominy of it all. It was hours later that they recalled it and realized that they had looked upon history in the making. No one noticed the old man’s faltering descent of the steps, or saw that he paused in his slow way to the buggy to turn back and stand looking about him in a kind of bewildered desperation. For the gaze of all had swung from the Judge’s broad, disappearing back to the face of the boy who was sitting in the buckboard, totally unconscious of that battery of eyes, smiling to himself.
He even chuckled aloud once––Young Denny 114 did––a muffled, reasonless sort of a chuckle, as if he did not even know they were there. It was almost as though he were playing straight into the Judge’s own plan, for the effect of the mirth upon the group on the walk was electrical. It sent a shiver of anticipation through it from end to end. And then, like the eyes of one man, their eyes swung back again from the ragged bruise across the boy’s chin to meet the Judge as he reappeared.
Yet not one of them so much as dared to whisper the question that was quivering upon the lips of all and burning hungrily in their faded eyes. Once more the wide lane opened magically for him––but again Judge Maynard’s measured progress was momentarily barred. Curiosity may have prompted it, and then again it may have been that he was betrayed by the very fury of his desperate, eleventh hour effort to assert his right to the center of that stage––the right of long-established precedent––yet even those two long files of old men gasped aloud their dismay at his temerity when Old Jerry thrust his way forward and planted himself for a second time squarely in the great man’s path.
Half way from the office doors to the yellow-wheeled buckboard, in the very middle of the walk, he stood and stretched out a tentatively restraining hand, just as mild-voiced, white-haired Dave had done years before. And in his high, cracked falsetto, that 115 was tremulously bitter for all that he struggled to lift it to a plane of easy jocularity, he exclaimed:
“Now see here, Jedge; what’s the meanin’ of all this? You ain’t turned kidnapper, hev you?”
There came a heavy hush, while the Judge stood and stared down at the thin face trying to smile confidently up at him––a hush that endured while Judge Maynard swept him from head to foot with one shriveling glare and then walked around him without a word––walked around him just as he might have walked around the hitching post at the roadside, or any other object that chanced to bar his way! And this time Old Jerry’s face twitched and went whiter even than before.
Nobody laughed, not even after the yellow-wheeled buckboard with its strangely assorted pair of passengers had sped from sight toward the county seat and a legal adjustment of still another mortgage on the Bolton acres. Not a word was spoken until Old Jerry, too, had clambered silently into his own creaking buggy and crawled slowly off up the hill, with a squealing accompaniment of ungreased axles.
And even then, in the argument which began with a swirl of conjecture and ended, hours later, in a torrent of bitter personalities farthest of all from the first question under consideration, they avoided a mention of that regrettable incident just as for some 116 time after its occurrence they avoided each other’s eyes, as if they felt somehow that theirs was, after all, the real guilt.
Upon one point alone did they agree; they were unanimous that if Young Denny Bolton’s bearing that morning––the angle at which he held his chin, and the huge cut that adorned it, and his causeless mirth––was not entirely damning, it was at least suspicious enough to require more than a little explanation. But that verdict, too, was none other than the very one which the Judge had already planned for them.