“He had just finished telling how Conway had cleaned up the village kids, irrespective of size, whenever he felt the need of exercise, and was looking around at the circle behind him to give them a chance to back him up, when it happened. I told you a minute ago that I wished you could have seen that boy, as I saw him that night, standing there in that tavern doorway. You see, he’d come in so quietly that nobody had heard him––come in just in time to hear the Judge’s last words. And when the Judge turned around he looked full into that boy’s eyes.
“Oh, he got his, good and plenty! I didn’t watch him very closely because it was hard for me to take my eyes off the white face of that boy at the door. But I did see that he went pretty nearly purple for a minute, and I heard him gurgle, too, he was that surprised, before he caught his breath. Then he stuck out one hand and tried to bluff it out.
“‘There’s one of ’em, right now,’ he sang out; 209 but he should have known that a man who’s sure of his ground doesn’t have to shout to make his point. ‘There’s Young Denny Bolton,’ he said, ‘who went to school with him, right here in this town. Ask him if Jeddy Conway was pretty handy as a boy!’ And he laughed, Flash––commenced to chuckle! Oh, there was no misunderstanding what he meant to insinuate. ‘Ask him––but maybe he’s still a little mite too sensitive to talk about it yet––eh, Denny?’
“He thought he could bluff it––bluff me, with that boy standing there in the doorway calling him a liar as if I didn’t know it all, yet at that minute I couldn’t help but ask that boy a question. I think it was mostly because I wanted to hear what the voice of a man with a face like his would sound like, for he hadn’t opened his lips to answer that fat hypocrite’s insinuation.
“So I asked him if he had known Conway well––asked him if he had had a few set-to’s with him himself. I’m not going to forget how he looked when he turned toward me, either. I’m not going to forget the look on his face as he swung around. And I’m remembering his voice pretty fairly well, too, right now!
“‘Maybe,’ he answered me, and he almost drawled the words. ‘Maybe I did,’ he said.
“Why, Flash, he couldn’t have said more if he had talked for a week. He’d said all there was to 210 say, now, hadn’t he? But it let the Judge out, just the same, for he just gave the circle behind him the the high sign and set the crowd to laughing for a minute or two, until the tension was relieved. I didn’t laugh myself. There didn’t seem to be much of a joke about it after seeing that boy’s eyes. It was Bolton––Young Denny, they called him––and I got his story, their side of it at least, after he shut the door behind him.
“It’s another thing I’d be more likely to understand than you would, Flash, because you’ve never lived in a village like that, and I have. Back a hundred years or so the first settlement had been named for his family––Boltonwood, they’d called it––but I guess the strain must have petered out. From all I could gather the Boltons had been drinking themselves to death with unfailing regularity and dispatch for several generations back, and I heard a choice detailed description, too, of the way the boy’s own father had made his final exit––heard it from that moon-faced leading citizen who did all the talking––that made me want to kick him in the face. I don’t know yet why I didn’t. I was sitting on the tavern desk with my feet on a level with his face. I should have bashed him a good one. It’s one of the lost opportunities which I’ll always regret, unless maybe I take a Saturday off some day and run up and beat him up proper!
“He gave me a nice little account of how the boy’s dad had gone over, screaming mad, with the town’s elite standing around saying, ‘I told you so,’ and that big scared kid kneeling beside his bed, trying to pray––trying to make it easier for him.