it back across his knees. With his chin
resting upon one big palm he sat motionless, staring out beyond his
sprawling, unpainted sheds toward the dim bulk of his hilly acres,
with their jagged outcroppings of rock.

"Twelve thousand dollars!" He muttered the words aloud, under his
breath. Eight hundred in three years had seemed to him an almost
miraculous amount for him to have torn from that thin soil with
nothing but the strength of his two hands. Now, with a bitterness that
had been months in accumulating, it beat in upon his brain with
sledgelike blows that he had paid too great a price--too great a price
in aching shoulders and numbed thighs.

Methodically, mechanically, his mind went back over the days when he
had gone to school with Jed Conway--the same Jed The Red whom the
whole town was now welcoming as "our own Jeddy," and the longer he
pondered the greater the problem became.

It was hard to understand. From his point of view comprehension was
impossible, at that instant. For in those earlier days, when anybody
had ever mentioned Jed Conway at all, it had been only to describe him
as "good for nothing," or something profanely worse. Young Denny
remembered him vividly as a big, freckle-faced, bow-legged boy with
red bristly hair--the biggest boy in the school--who never played but
what he cheated, and always seemed able to lie himself out of his
thievery.

But most vividly of all, he recalled that day when Jed Conway had
disappeared from the village between sundown and dawn and failed to
return. That was the same day they discovered the shortage in the old
wooden till at Benson's corner store. And now Jed Conway had come
home, or at least his fame had found its way back, and even Old Jerry,
whipping madly toward the village to share in his reflected glory,
had, for all the perfection of his "system," failed to leave the very
bundle of mail which he had come to deliver.

For a long time Young Denny sat and tried to straighten it out in his
brain--and failed entirely. It had grown very dark--too dark for him
to make out the words upon it--when he reached into the pocket of his
gray flannel shirt and drew out the card which he had found lying upon
the kitchen floor that previous Saturday night, after he had lighted
Dryad Anderson on her way home through the thickets. But he did not
need, or even attempt, to read it.

"And it took me a month," he said aloud to the empty air before him,
"almost a month to