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Updated: July 29, 2025
And the sight of the round bulk of the latter, huddled alone upon a baggage truck before the deserted Boltonwood station-shed, fully vindicated his judgment. It was still only a scant hour since daybreak. Heavy, low-hanging clouds in the east, gray with threatening rain, cut off any warmth there might have been in the rising sun and sharpened the raw wind to a knifelike edge.
His home, the farmhouse of the Boltons, for which the straggling village of Boltonwood below had been named, was nearest of all the outlying places on the post route, yet last of all to be served, for when the rural delivery had been established they had begun delivery at the other end of the circle. Young Denny had never been able to understand quite why it was so but it was, for all that.
He knew he was going to like Ogden like him for the same reason that he had liked the fat, brown-clad newspaper man in Boltonwood because of the charming equality of his attitude and the frankness in his eyes. "No," he decided, "I I'm afraid I can't. I didn't mean to stir him up so, either, only only I thought, just for a minute or two, that he was laughing at me.
They merely stood and stared the townsfolk and yet they only half understood, for when it was noised about the street a few days later that John Anderson had given up forever his occupation of chiseling tombstones for the bleak Boltonwood cemetery an occupation which at least had yielded him a bare living and had locked himself up in that back room to "putter with lumps of clay," he was instantly convicted of being queer in the eyes of the entire thrifty community, even without his senseless antagonism of the Judge in the years that followed to clinch the verdict.
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.
Eight hundred dollars was a large sum in Boltonwood and Denny's acres were mostly rocks. Old Denny would have sold the last scythe and fork in the dilapidated barn to fill the stone jug, save for the fact that fork and scythe had themselves been too dilapidated to find a purchaser.
And yet the acre of neglect and ruin still clung like an unsightly burr to the hem of his smooth-rolling acres. The people of Boltonwood were given to calling John Anderson a fool, and not alone because he persisted in his senseless antagonism of a man as great in the township as was Judge Maynard. There was at least one other reason.
The circle in the Boltonwood tavern convened early that night, and long after hope had all but died a death of stagnation the regulars stuck stubbornly to their places about the cheerlessly cold, fat-bellied stove.
It was more than a few years since the last time Judge Maynard had driven up to the gate of that old, drab cottage; and now standing there with one slim outstretched hand lovingly patting the bundle of paper patterns which represented her afternoon's work, she smiled with gentle derision for the mental picture she had carried all those years of the wealthiest man in Boltonwood.
One other thing marked Judge Maynard's proffered hospitality as totally different from all the other half-similar affairs which Boltonwood had ever known.
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