To reach the really great heights of which the evening’s triumph was capable the old mail carrier’s collaboration had been almost indispensable. They had been waiting with hungry impatience for him. And then Old Jerry had appeared––he made his entrance and his exit––and departing had left them gasping for breath.
Old Jerry had not waited to view the effect of his mad defiance of the town’s great man. It is doubtful if he had given that side of the issue one passing thought, but his triumphant withdrawal from the field had robbed the situation of not one bit of 232 its decisiveness. Quiet followed his going, a stillness so profound that they heard him cackling to himself in insane glee as he went down the steps. And that hush had endured while they waited in a delicious state of tingling suspense for the first furious sentences which should preface his lifelong banishment from the circle itself.
For years they had whispered, “Just wait, he’ll come to it––he’ll go just like the rest.” And so Young Denny’s final weakening had not been so unexpected as it might have been. And more than once, too, when the Judge’s harsh censure of him who had always been his stanchest supporter had left Old Jerry cringing in his place beside the stove, they had all felt the justice if not a premonition of final retribution to come. It was the debonaire dare-deviltry of Old Jerry’s defiance rather than its unexpectedness which had proved its greatest sensation. That day’s one supreme moment––the only one which had not suffered from too acute anticipation––came while they waited for the Judge’s denial, that denial which was never spoken.
The town’s great man had slumped back in his chair in a kind of stunned trance while the apoplectic purple of his earlier wrath faded from his face. He did open his mouth, but not in any effort to speak. It was only to lick his thick lips and gurgle 233 noisily in his fat throat. He tried to rise, too, and failed in his first attempt––and tried again.
They had all realized what it was that made his knees wabble as he crossed to the door; they understood what had drained his face of all its color. Every man of them knew why the latch rattled under his shaking figure. The Judge had been afraid, not merely morally frightened, but abjectly, utterly terrified in the flesh––afraid of the threat in the insolent bearing of the little, shriveled man who had passed out into the night a moment before.
It could have been funny. It might have been sublimest farce-comedy, had they not lacked the perspective necessary for its appreciation. But it was enough that they realized that the demagogue had come crashing down––enough that, watching his furtive disappearance that night, they learned how pitiful a coward a blusterer really can be.
Old Jerry’s own actions in those days which followed had furnished rich food for conjecture. The fact that it had been the little mail-carrier himself who had ridden in the carriage beside the slim girl with the tumbled hair, at the head of the dreary procession that toiled slowly up to the bleak cemetery behind the church, had, indeed, been worthy of some discussion. The spendthrift prodigality of the white roses which rumor whispered he had gone to place the next day over the new mound of raw 234 earth had not gone unspoken. Even the resemblance of the girl who John Anderson had named Dryad in his hunger for the beautiful––even the likeness of her face with its straight little nose and wistfully curved lips, to the features of that small, rain-stained statue of the white and gold slip of a woman who had been his wife, came in for its share of the discussion, too.
But all those topics which were touched upon in the nights that followed were, at best, of only secondary importance. Inevitably the circle about the stove swung back to a consideration of that first day’s major climax, until the very discord of opinion which hitherto had been the chief joy of those nightly sessions bade fair to prove their total disruption.
For the circle of regulars were leaderless now; there was no longer a master mind to hold in check the flood of argument and rebuttal, or preserve a unity of disagreement. Where before they had been accustomed to take up each new development and pursue it until it reached a state either too lucid for further consideration or an insolvable problem that dead-locked conversation, a half dozen different arguments sprang up each night, splitting the circle into wrangling factions which trebled the din of voices and multiplied ten-fold the new note of bitter personalities which had taken the place of former incontrovertible logic.