le village had given the boy plenty of solitude in
the last few years in which to become on terms of thorough intimacy
with the demijohn which still occupied its place in the kitchen
corner.

And yet that stone demijohn was almost the only tangible reminder
there was left of the Bolton who had gone before. There were a few in
the village who wondered how, in the three intervening years, the big
silent, shambling boy had managed to tear from his acres money enough
to clear the place of its debt--the biggest thing by far in his
heritage. 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.

But the same scythe had an edge now and a polish where the boy's hands
had gripped and swung it, and it took a flawlessly clear-grained piece
of ash to make a shaft that would stand the forkfuls of hay which his
shoulders heaved, without any apparent effort, into the mow. The
clapboards on the house, although still unpainted, no longer whined
in the wind; they were all nailed tight. And still the circle around
the stove in the Boltonwood Tavern tilted its head--tilted it
ominously--as if to say: "Just wait a bit, he'll come to it--wait now
and see!" But the prophecy's fulfilment, long deferred, was making
them still more bitter--strangely bitter--toward the boy, who stood
alone at sundown watching the road that wound up from the village.

All this Young Denny knew, not because he had been told, but because
the part of him that was still boy sensed it intuitively. He was just
as happy to be let alone, or at least so he told himself, times
without end, for it gave him a chance to sleep. And tonight as he
stood at the crest of the hill before the dark house, waiting for Old
Jerry to come along with the mail, he was glad, too, that his place
was the last on the route. It gave him something to look forward to
during the day--something to expect--for although he rarely received a
letter or, to be more exact, never, the daily newspaper was, after
all, some company. And then there were the new farm implement
catalogues and seed books, with their dyspeptic looking fruits and
vegetables. They made better reading than nothing at all.

But it was not the usual bundle of papers which came at the end of
each week for