nd the
dusk thickened from twilight to dark while he stood there waiting,
leaning heavily upon the pike-pole, shifting more and more uneasily
from one tired foot to the other. He had turned at last to go and set
a light in answer to the one which was calling insistently to him from
the blackness before the Judge's place when the shrill squeal of
complaining axles drifted up to him from far down the long hill road.

Old Jerry came with exasperating slowness that night. The plodding
ascent of the fat white mare and creaking buggy was nerve-rackingly
deliberate. Young Denny shifted the shaft of his pike-pole to the
other hand to wipe his damp palm against the checkered coat as the rig
loomed up ahead of him in the darkness. Old Jerry was complaining to
himself bitterly in a whining, cracked falsetto.

"'Tain't reg'lar," the boy heard him whimpering. "'Tain't accordin' to
law--not the way I figger it, it ain't. The Gov'mint don't expect
nobody to work 'til this hour!"

The buggy came to a standstill, with the little, weazened old man
leaning far out from the torn leather seat, shading his eyes with one
unsteady hand while he peered into the shadows searching for the
big-shouldered figure that stepped hesitatingly nearer the wheel.
There was something birdlike in the brilliancy of the beady little
eyes; something of sparrowlike pertness in the tilt of the old man's
head, perked far over to one side.

"Still a-waitin', be ye?" he exclaimed peevishly. "Well, it's lucky
you ain't been kept a-standin' there a whole sight longer--half the
night, mebby! You would a-been, only for my havin' an orig'nal system
for peddlin' them letters that's all my own. It's system does it--but
it ain't right, just the same. The Gov'mint don't expect nobody to
work more'n eight hours to a stretch, and look at me, two hours late
and I ain't home yet! I'd complain, too--I'd complain to the
authorities at Washington, only--only"--his thin, high-pitched voice
dropped suddenly to a furtively conciliating whisper--"only a-course I
don't want to make no trouble for the Judge."

Denny Bolton cleared his throat and shuffled his feet uneasily, but
this hint for haste was utterly wasted upon Old Jerry. The latter
failed completely to note the strained intensity of the face that was
upturned before him and went on grumbling as he leaned over to fumble
in the box beneath the seat. And the tirade continued in an unbroken,
half-muffled stream until he strai