oss-road that toiled up the grade to the wind-racked old Bolton
place on the hill north of town.

They had always had a forbidding aspect--Young Denny's black,
unpainted farmhouse and dilapidated outbuildings--even when he had
been certain that just as surely as he reached the crest he would find
the boy's big body silhouetted against the skyline, waiting for him,
they had not been any too prepossessing. Now they never served to
awake in him anything but actual dread and distrust.

Old Jerry laid it to the lonesomeness of the place--to the bleak
blindness of the shaded windows and the untenanted silence--but he
took good care that no loitering on his part would be to blame for his
arrival at the house after dusk.

No one, not even he himself, knew how strong the temptation was that
week to make tentative advances of peace to the members of the circle
of Tavern regulars, for the more he dwelt upon it the finer the
dramatic possibilities of the thing seemed. But he had misread in the
hushed respect of his former intimates a chill and uncompromising
disapproval, and he had to fall back upon a one-sided conversation
with himself as the next best thing.

"I wa'n't brought up to believe in ghosts," he averred to himself more
than once. "Ghosts naturally is superstition--and that ain't accordin'
to religion, not any way you look at it. But allowing that there could
be ghosts--just for the sake of argument allowing that there is--now
what would there be to hinder him from just kinda settlin' down up
there, as you might say? It's nice and quiet, ain't it? Sort of out of
the way--and more or less comfortable, too?"

At that point in the mumbled monologue the white-haired driver of the
buggy usually paused for a moment, tilting his head, birdlike, to one
side, wrapped in thought. There were those shelves lined with
countless white figures which also had to be considered.

"He must've worked mighty steady," he told himself time and again in a
voice that was small with awe. "He must hev almost enjoyed workin' at
'em, to hev finished so many! And he kept at it nearly all the time, I
reckon. And now, that's what I'm a-gettin' at! Now I want to ask how
do we know he's a-goin' to quit now--how do we know that? We don't
know it! And Godfrey 'Lisha, what better place would he want than that
back kitchen up there? Ain't there a table right there by the window,
all a-waitin' for him--an'--an'----"

Invariably he broke off there, to