going. More from habit than anything else they had waited that next
night for him to come and clear his throat pompously and open the
evening's activities. And the Judge failed to appear, failed just as
signally as had Old Jerry.

And yet it was not the absence of the former which had left them
leaderless. Not one of them had realized it the night before--but that
second night they knew!

By his very rebellion Old Jerry had won the thing which years of
faithful service had failed to bring. He had dethroned the despot, and
the honors were his by right of conquest.

The circle knew that the Judge would never return; after one hour of
fruitless waiting that was a certainty. But night after night they
continued to gather, stubbornly, persistently hopeful that Old Jerry
would come back. And in the meantime they almost forgot, at times,
Young Denny who had gone the way of his fathers as they had so truly
prophesied; they only touched a little uncomfortably upon the problem
of the slim, yellow-haired girl alone in the battered cottage at the
edge of the town, while they reviewed with startlingly fertile detail
and a lingering relish that came very close to being hero-worship,
his last brief remarks which had left the Judge a wreck of his former
magnificence.

If Old Jerry realized all this that had come to pass he gave no
outward sign of such knowledge. He even forgot to pause impressively
upon the top step of the post-office those days, as he always had
formerly, before he made his straight-backed descent with the pouches
slung over one shoulder. There were mornings when he came perilously
near to ignoring altogether the double line which, with a new
deference, greeted his daily passage to the waiting buggy, and yet
there was not one who dared so much as to whisper that there was
anything in his air of preoccupation that savored of studiously
planned forethought. But it is doubtful if he did realize the change
that had taken place, at least in that first week or two, for Old
Jerry had much of a strictly private nature to occupy his mind.

He was never quite able to remember the things he had said that
morning to the girl with the too-white face and tumbled hair, huddled
in the half-light at the table before the window, or to recall in any
sort of a connected, coherent sequence his own actions in those first
few days which followed it.

It aggravated him for a day or two, this inability to piece out the
details; it b