y upon
better cooks than was Denny, without any great qualms of conscience.

One other reason existed, or at least Young Denny imagined that it
did, but whenever he stopped to think about it--a thing he had come to
do more and more often in the last few months--he never smiled.
Instead, his lips straightened until the wistful quirk at the corners
disappeared into a straight line and his eyes smouldered ominously.

There was a select circle of white-haired old men--the village old
guard--which sat in nightly session about the fat-bellied old
wood-stove in the Boltonwood Tavern. It convened with the first
snowfall of the winter and broke up long after the ice had gone out in
the spring; and this circle, when all other topics had been whipped
over at fever heat, until all the zest of bitter contradiction was
gone from them, always turned at last with a delightful sort of
unanimity to the story of the night when Old Denny had died--the
Bolton of the former generation.

An almost childish enthusiasm tinged their keen relish for the tale.
They squirmed and puckered their wrinkled old faces and shivered
convulsively, just as a child might have shivered over a Bluebeard
horror, as they recalled how Old Denny had moaned in agony one moment
that night, and then screamed horribly the next for the old stone
demijohn that always stood in the corner of the kitchen. They
remembered, with an almost astonishing wealth of detail, that he had
frothed at the mouth and blasphemed terribly one instant, and then
wept, in the very same breath--wept hopelessly, like the uncouth,
overgrown, frightened boy who knelt at the bedside.

The strangest part of the whole thing was that not one of them had
realized at the time, or ever recalled since, that Old Denny's eyes
were sane when he wept that night and blurred with madness when he
cursed. But then, too, that would have smashed the dramatic element of
the whole tale to flinters. They never missed a scene or a sob,
however, in the re-telling, and they always ended it with an ominous
tilt of the head and a little insinuating crook of the neck toward the
battered, weather-torn old house where Young Denny had lived on alone
since that last bad night. It was very much as though they had said
aloud, "He's the next--he'll go just like the rest."

Perhaps they never really thought of it, and perhaps it was because
Young Denny's failure to fulfil their prophecy had really embittered
them, but the who