Chapter I
A NON-SKIPPABLE PROLOGUE
OSMUN VAIL doesn’t come into this story at all. Yet he was responsible for everything that happened in it.
He was responsible for the whistling cry in the night, and for the Thing that huddled among the fragrant boxtrees, and for the love of a man and a maid—or rather the loves of several men and a maid—and for the amazing and amusing and jewel-tangled dilemma wherein Thaxton was shoved.
He was responsible for much; though he was actively to blame for nothing. Moreover he and his career were interesting.
So he merits a word or two, if only to explain what happened before the rise of our story’s curtain.
At this point, the boreful word, Prologue, should be writ large, with a space above and below it, by way of warning. But that would be the sign to skip. And one cannot skip this short prologue without losing completely the tangled thread of the yarn which follows—a thread worth gripping and a yarn more or less worth telling.
So let us dispose of the prologue, without calling it by its baleful name; and in a mere mouthful or two of words. Something like this:
When Osmun Vail left his father’s Berkshire farm, at twenty-one, to seek his fortune in New York, he wore his $12 “freedom suit” and had a cash capital of $18, besides his railway ticket.
Followed forty years of brow-sweat and brain-wrack and one of those careers whose semi-occasional real-life recurrence keeps the Success magazines out of the pure-fiction class.
When Osmun Vail came back, at sixty-one, to the Berkshire farm that had been his father’s until the mortgage was foreclosed, he was worth something more than five million dollars. His life-battle had been fought and won. His tired soul yearned unspeakably for the peace and loveliness of the pleasant hill country where he had been born—the homeland he had half-forgotten and which had wholly forgotten him and his.