of his
shoulder-stoop--still mercifully only a prophecy of what the next
twenty years of toil might leave it--an even more pitiful thing. His
sheer bigness should have been still unspoiled; instead it was
already beginning to lose its rebound; it was growing imperceptibly
slack, like the springy stride of a colt put too soon to heavy
harness.

Late afternoon was giving way to nightfall--a long shadowed twilight
that was heavy with the scent of spring in spite of the scattered
patches of wet snow that still lurked in the swamp holes. As the boy
stood, facing toward the east and the town that sprawled in the
hollow, his great, shoulder-heavy body loomed almost like a painted
figure against the cool red background of the horizon. Even in spite
of the pike-pole which he grasped in one hand and the vividly
checkered blanket coat that wrapped him, the illusion was undeniable.
Stripped of them and equipped instead with a high steeple-crowned hat
and wide buckled shoes, his long half-saddened face and lean body
might have been a composite of all the Puritan fathers who had
wrestled with the rock-strewn acres behind him, two hundred years and
more before.

Denny Bolton was waiting--Young Denny, the townsfolk preferred to call
him, to distinguish him from Old Denny of the former generation.
Somehow, although he had never mentioned it to anybody, it seemed to
him that he had always been waiting for something--he hardly knew just
what it was himself--just something that was drearily slow in the
coming.

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. And with
the minister, too, it happened, although not so often, for the
minister of Boltonwood called at almost every door on his rounds and
stayed longer at each, so sometimes for months at a time he never got
around to the shabby place on the hill at all. But the boy believed
that he did understand this and often he smiled to himself over it,
without any bitterness--just smiled half wistfully. He lived alone in
the tumble-down old house and did his own cooking and--well, even a
most zealous man of the gospel might have beamed more heartil