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And then, with the paper which that afternoon's mail had brought the sheet with the astounding news of Jed The Red, which Old Jerry prophesied would put Boltonwood in black letters on the map of publicity spread out on the table before him, he sat until daybreak poring over it with eyes that were filmed with preoccupation one moment and keenly strained the next to make out the close-set type.
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.
And with the minister, too, it happened, although not so often, for the minister of Boltonwood called at almost every door on his rounds and stayed longer at each, so sometimes for months at a time he never got around to the shabby place on the hill at all. But the boy believed that he did understand this and often he smiled to himself over it, without any bitterness just smiled half wistfully.
But I managed to slip by 'em at last!" He paused and waited for some word of commendation. Morehouse merely nodded. He was thinking thinking hard! The voice was almost as familiar to him as was his own, and yet it persisted in tantalizing his memory. He couldn't quite place it. Old Jerry sensed something of his difficulty. "I'm from Boltonwood," he introduced himself, not quite so uncertainly.
They were not given to the reading of heathen mythology, the people of Boltonwood, and so they could not know.
In all that hill town's history no period had ever before been so filled with sensation as was that one which opened with the flight of Judge Maynard's yellow-wheeled buckboard along the main street of Boltonwood to herald the passing of the last of the line of men who had given the village its name.
"Denny Bolton, from Boltonwood or or I reckon you've never heard of that place. I'm down from the hill country, back in the north," he supplemented. Hogarty turned away turned back to the green-topped table and played the double-blank with delicate precision. "Of course," he agreed softly. "Quite right quite right!
There were only two trains a day over the single-track spur road that connected Boltonwood with the outer world beyond the hills; one which left at a most unreasonably inconvenient hour in the early morning and one which left just as inconveniently late at night.
That knowledge had been very vividly present when, a few days before, on the platform of the Boltonwood station, he had requested Denny Bolton to give him back his card for a moment, after listening to the boy's grave explanation of the raw wound across his cheek, and on a quite momentary impulse written across its back that short sentence which was so meaty with meaning.
And still the circle around the stove in the Boltonwood Tavern tilted its head tilted it ominously as if to say: "Just wait a bit, he'll come to it wait now and see!" But the prophecy's fulfilment, long deferred, was making them still more bitter strangely bitter toward the boy, who stood alone at sundown watching the road that wound up from the village.
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