n that we are to meet again. And don't lose
that card!"

Young Denny's fingers closed over the outstretched hand with a grip
that brought the short, fat man in brown up to his toes. Long after
the train had crawled out of sight the boy stood there motionless
beside the empty truck, reading over and over again the few scrawled
words that underran the line of address.

"Some of them may have science," it read, "and some of them may have
speed, but, after all, it's the man that can take punishment who gets
the final decision. Call me up if this ever comes to hand."

Which, after all, was not so cryptic as it might have been.

CHAPTER VIII

That drearily bleak day which was to witness the temporary passing of
the last of the line of Boltons from the town which had borne their
name longer even than the oldest veteran in the circle of regulars
which nightly flanked the cracked wood-stove in the Tavern office
could recall, brought with it a succession of thrills not second even
to those that had been occasioned by the advent of the plump newspaper
man from the metropolis, and all his promised works.

And yet, so far as he himself was concerned, Young Denny Bolton was
totally oblivious, or at least apparently so, to the very audible hum
of astonishment which ripped along behind them when they--he and Judge
Maynard of all men--whirled down the main street of the village that
morning through the gray mist already heavy as fine rain, to stop with
a great flourish of glittering harness buckles and stamping of hoofs
before the post-office doors.

It was the busiest hour which the straggling one-story shops along
the unpaved thoroughfare knew, this one directly following the
unshuttering of the specked, unwashed show-windows, known distinctly
as "mail time"--a very certain instant when Old Jerry's measured
passage from the office doors to his dilapidated rig at the edge of
the boardwalk heralded the opening of the general delivery window
within.

It was Old Jerry's hour--the one hour of the day in which his starved
appetite for notoriety ever supped of nourishment--that moment when
the small knot of loiterers upon the sidewalk, always, face for face,
composed of the same personnel as the unvarying nightly circle about
the Tavern stove, gave way before him and the authority of the
"Gov'mint" which he personified.

Since that first morning, years back, which had hailed his initial
appearance with the mail bags slung