ad talked for a week.
He'd said all there was to say, now, hadn't he? But it let the Judge
out, just the same, for he just gave the circle behind him the the
high sign and set the crowd to laughing for a minute or two, until the
tension was relieved. I didn't laugh myself. There didn't seem to be
much of a joke about it after seeing that boy's eyes. It was
Bolton--Young Denny, they called him--and I got his story, their side
of it at least, after he shut the door behind him.

"It's another thing I'd be more likely to understand than you would,
Flash, because you've never lived in a village like that, and I have.
Back a hundred years or so the first settlement had been named for his
family--Boltonwood, they'd called it--but I guess the strain must have
petered out. From all I could gather the Boltons had been drinking
themselves to death with unfailing regularity and dispatch for several
generations back, and I heard a choice detailed description, too, of
the way the boy's own father had made his final exit--heard it from
that moon-faced leading citizen who did all the talking--that made me
want to kick him in the face. I don't know yet why I didn't. I was
sitting on the tavern desk with my feet on a level with his face. I
should have bashed him a good one. It's one of the lost opportunities
which I'll always regret, unless maybe I take a Saturday off some day
and run up and beat him up proper!

"He gave me a nice little account of how the boy's dad had gone over,
screaming mad, with the town's elite standing around saying, 'I told
you so,' and that big scared kid kneeling beside his bed, trying to
pray--trying to make it easier for him.

"Did you ever see a flock of buzzards circling, Flash, waiting for
some wounded thing beneath them to die? No? Well, I have, and it isn't
a pretty sight either. That was what they made me think of that night.
And I learned, too, how they'd been waiting ever since for that boy to
go the way his father had traveled before him; they even told me that
the same old jug still stood in the kitchen corner, and would have
pointed out his tumble-down old place on the hill, where they had let
him go on living alone, only it was too dark for any one to see.

"Odd, now wasn't it? But it didn't come to me at that moment. I never
gave it a thought that there was a man who had licked Conway once and
might do it again. But I didn't forget him; I wanted to, that night,
but I couldn't. And I guess I w