OLIVER
OCTOBER
BY
GEORGE BARR McCUTCHEON
AUTHOR OF
“BEVERLY OF GRAUSTARK,” “SHERRY,”
“VIOLA GWYN,” ETC.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1923
COPYRIGHT, 1922, 1923,
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I OLIVER IS BORN IN OCTOBER 1
II HIS RELATIVES AND HIS NEIGHBORS 15
III WOMEN IN RED SHAWLS 36
IV HIS FORTUNE—GOOD AND BAD 46
V OLIVER IS FOUND TO HAVE A TEMPER 65
VI A PASTOR PROMISES AID 85
VII THE MINISTER’S WIFE 94
VIII GLIDING OVER A FEW YEARS 109
IX HOME FROM THE WAR 128
X IDLE DAYS 140
XI OLD OLIVER DISAPPEARS 155
XII ONE WAY OF LOOKING AT IT 166
XIII THE GOOD SAMARITAN PAYS 174
XIV JEALOUSY WITHOUT LOVE 185
XV THE THIRD FAIR LADY 196
XVI MR. JOSEPH SIKES INTERVENES 201
XVII MR. GOOCH DECLARES HIMSELF 212
XVIII JOSEPHINE AND HENRY THE EIGHTH 228
XIX OLIVER COMPLAINS 242
XX DETECTIVE MALONE 252
XXI LOVE WITHOUT JEALOUSY 265
XXII THE CORPUS DELICTI 281
XXIII THE BREWING OF THE STORM 294
XXIV THE HANGING 308
XXV MR. GOOCH SEES THINGS AT NIGHT 322
Oliver October
CHAPTER I
OLIVER IS BORN IN OCTOBER
Oliver Baxter, junior, was born on a vile October day in 1890—at seven
o’clock in the morning, to be exact. People were more concerned over the
plight of a band of gypsies, camped on the edge of the swamp below the
Baxter house, however, than they were over the birth of Oliver, although
he was a very important child.
The gypsies, journeying southward, had been overtaken by an unexampled
and unseasonable blizzard, and citizens of Rumley, in whom curiosity
rather than pity had been excited by the misfortunes of the shivering
nomads, neglected for the moment that civic pride which heretofore had
never failed to respond to any increase in population as provided solely
by nature.
First off, Rumley was a very small place at the beginning of the
’nineties. A birth or a death was a matter of profound importance. In
the case of the former, all Rumley knew about it months before it
happened, and rejoiced. A form of anticipatory interest, amounting
almost to impatience, centered upon any expectant mother who ultimately
was to add another inhabitant to the town. It was absolutely impossible
for a baby to be born in Rumley without the whole town knowing about it
within the hour. For that matter, it was equally impossible for any one
to die with any degree of privacy unless he went about it deliberately
as did Bob Cheever who stole off into the woods back in ’81 and hung
himself so cunningly that twenty-four hours passed before his body was
discovered.
But, on the whole, the births were what counted most, for, with a true
philosophy, the people of Rumley, anticipating that every one had to die
some time or other, depended on nature to do its part toward repairing
all losses in population by producing a brand-new citizen for every old
one who happened to drop put. With a scant five hundred inhabitants,
Rumley could ill afford to have its birth rate surpassed by its death
rate. The year in which Oliver Baxter, junior, was born had been a lean
one; there had been thirteen deaths up to October and only seven births.
The surprising mortality was due to the surrender of five old men and
three old women who had hung on well beyond the age of ninety, and then,
with unbecoming perversity, had combined upon an unusually barren year
in which to die.
In view of the fact that no one else could possibly be born in 1890, now
that October was at hand, it would seem that Oliver was entitled to a
great deal more consideration than he received on his natal day. But
when one considers the simultaneous arrival of a blizzard and a band of
wandering gypsies at a time of the year when neither was expected, and
offers in opposition the arrival of an infant that had been expected
ever since the preceding February, it is only fair to say that there
were extenuating circumstances and that Rumley was not entirely to blame
for its default in civic pride.
Oliver’s parents were prominent in the commercial, social and spiritual
life of the town. His father was the proprietor of the hardware store, a
prominent member of the Presbyterian church, and a leader in the local
lodge of Odd Fellows. He was well on to forty-five when his namesake,
was born, and as this son and heir was the first and only child born to
the Baxters it is easy to understand the interest and concern that
accompanied his approach and arrival into the world—that is to say, up
to the distracting intervention of the October cold snap which came
apparently out of nowhere and confounded everybody.
Baxter was a hard-cased bachelor of forty when he succumbed to the
charms of Mary Floyd, the daughter of the toll-gate keeper at the edge
of the village, and asked her to marry him. A full three years elapsed,
however, before they could be married. This was due to Mary’s stubborn
and somewhat questionable fidelity; her ancient father, it appears, was
irascibly certain that he could not manage the affairs of the toll-gate
without her assistance: how was he to keep house for himself, or get his
own meals, or do his own washing and ironing, or take care of the cow
and the pigs? In fact, he was the sort of man who did not believe in
trying to do anything for himself as long as there were able-bodied
women about the place to do it for him. For twenty years Mary had been
his right-hand woman, beginning at the tender age of ten, within fifteen
or twenty minutes after the death of her mother, who, by the way, had
taken care of Martin for a matter of twenty-five years without rest or
recompense. Two older brothers had exercised the masculine prerogative
and, having families of their own, left Mary to wither, so to speak, “on
the parent stem.”
Old Martin died when Mary was thirty-two. Instead of observing the
customary year of mourning, she married Oliver inside of three months
after the joyous bereavement, much to the surprise and passing grief of
her neighbors, who were unable, for the life of them, to understand how
she could do such a thing when her father was hardly cold in the grave.
Joseph Sikes, who ran a feed store in connection with and back of
Baxter’s hardware establishment, and was a Godless man, set a good many
people straight by sardonically observing that anybody as mean as Martin
Floyd never would be cold in his grave, owing to the heat that was
getting at him from below.
Now as for Oliver Baxter, the elder. He was a scrawny man with a
drooping sandy mustache and a thatch of straw-colored hair that always
appeared to be in need of trimming no matter how recently it had been
cut by Ves Bridges, the barber. In the matter of stature he was a trifle
above medium height on Sundays only, due to a studied regard for the
dignity that accrued to him as deacon in the church and passer of the
collection box at both services. Moreover, he wore a pair of Sabbath day
shoes that were not run down at the heel. On week days, in his well-worn
business suit and his comfortable old shoes, he was what you would call
a trifle under medium height. He was a shy, exceedingly bashful sort of
man, with a fiery complexion that cooled off only when he was asleep,
and he was given to laughing nervously—and kindly—at any and all
times, frequently with results that called for a confused apology on his
part and sometimes led to painful misunderstandings—for example, the
time he made tender and sympathetic inquiry concerning the health of
young Mrs. Hoxie’s mother and cackled cheerfully when informed that the
old lady was not expected to last the day out, she was that bad.
How he ever screwed up the courage to propose to Mary Floyd was always a
mystery to the entire population of Rumley, including Mary herself, who
in accepting him was obliged to overlook the two perfectly inane spasms
of laughter with which his bewildered plea was punctuated. She took him,
nevertheless, for she was a prudent spinster and had got to the age
where people not only were beginning to pity her but were talking of
putting her in charge of the public library as soon as old Miss Lowtower
died.
Mary at thirty-two was a comely, capable young woman, fairly well
educated in spite of Martin Floyd’s exactions, and was beloved by all.
If it had not been for the fact that Oliver Baxter was prosperous,
honest and a credit to the town, people no doubt would have said she was
throwing herself away on him, for it must be said that the Floyds,
despite their reduced circumstances, were of better stock than the
Baxters. Martin Floyd, in his younger days, had been a schoolmaster and
had studied for the law. Moreover, he had been thrice elected justice of
the peace and during Grant’s last administration was postmaster at
Rumley. Whereas, Oliver Baxter’s father had been a farmhand and Oliver
himself an itinerant tin-peddler before really getting on his feet. But
as the fortunes of the Floyds went down those of the frugal and
enterprising Baxter came up, so, on the whole, Mary was not making a bad
bargain when she got married—indeed, she was making a very good bargain
if one pauses to consider the somewhat astonishing fact that she really
loved the homely and unromantic little bachelor.
When, after two years, it became known that on or about the twentieth of
October Mary Baxter was going to have a baby, the town of Rumley and the
country for miles about experienced a thrill of interest that continued
without abatement up to the very eve of the new Oliver’s natal day,
when, as before mentioned, it was stifled by a sudden change in the
weather and the belated descent of the gypsies.
It must not be assumed that the gypsies were welcome. Far from it, they
were most unwelcome. Their appearance on the outskirts of Rumley was the
occasion of dire apprehensions and considerable uneasiness. The word
gypsy was synonymous with thievery, kidnaping, black magic and devilry.
More than one instance of curses being put upon respectable people by
these swarthy, black-eyed vagabonds could be mentioned, and no one felt
secure after foolishly subjecting herself to the dire influence of the
fortune-telling females of the tribe. Little children were kept indoors,
stables and cellars were locked, and backyards zealously watched during
the time the gypsies were in the neighborhood.
Small wonder then that the young and tender Oliver failed to hold his
own against such overwhelming odds. Nearly twenty-four hours elapsed
before the town as a whole took notice of him. By nightfall it was
pretty generally known that he was a boy and that his name,
provisionally selected, was to be Oliver and not Olivet, as it might
have been had his sex been what everybody prophesied it was bound to be.
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter, in the second year of their married life, had gone
to a nearby city to see a performance of the comic opera “Olivet,” and
were so delighted with it—especially the song “In the North Sea Lived a
Whale”—that they decided then and there if a girl should ever be born
to them they would call her Olivet, that being as near to Oliver as they
could possibly come.
They yearned for an Oliver, of course, but in the event he did not
materialize, it would be a rather satisfactory compromise to substitute
a “t” for the “r” which they would have preferred.
So they called him Oliver and added October to that, as a tribute to the
month in which he was born.
The Baxter residence, a two-story frame building, stood at the top of a
tree-covered knoll on the edge of the town, overlooking an extensive
swamp in the center of which lay a reed-encircled pond where at certain
seasons of the year migratory wild ducks and geese disported themselves
in perfect security, for so treacherous was the vast morass guarding
this little body of water that even the most daring and foolhardy of
hunters feared to cross it. These evil acres bore the name of Death
Swamp. They belonged to Oliver Baxter. He bought the whole tract, four
hundred acres or more, for twenty-five dollars, and with a droll sense
of humor described it as his back yard.
The wild October gale had been blowing all day long, a bleak legacy of
the blizzard that swept over the land during the night. There were high,
white drifts in sheltered nooks and corners; a fine, sleety snow cut
mercilessly through the air, beating against window panes like sweeps of
bird shot, scuttling through reluctantly opened doors, swirling in
restless fury across porches, all to the tune of a shrill wind that came
whistling out of the north. In an upstairs corner room, warmed by a big,
carefully tended sheet-iron stove, young Oliver first saw the light of
day. No finer “young-un” had ever been born, according to Mrs. Serepta
Grimes, and Serepta was an authority on babies. It was she who took
command of Oliver, his mother and his father, the house itself, and all
that therein was. She was there hours ahead of Dr. Robinson, and she was
still there hours after his departure. Throughout the town of Rumley,
Serepta was known as a “blessing and a comfort.” Her word was law. Fond
mothers and frightened fathers submitted to her gentle but arbitrary
regulations without a murmur of protest. Joe Sikes claimed—and no one
disputed him—that you couldn’t come into or go out of the world
properly without being assisted by Serepta Grimes. She was that kind of
a woman.
She saw to it that all the cracks around the window frames were securely
stuffed with paper to keep the wind from coming in; she kept Oliver’s
beaddled father from darting into the room every time he heard the baby
cry; she gave peremptory directions to neighbor-women who came in to see
what they could do; she kept the fire going, the kitchen running, and,
by virtue of her own vast experience and authority, she kept the doctor
in his place. Perhaps a hundred times during the day she had patiently
answered “Yes” to the senior Oliver’s tremulous question: “Is she going
to pull through, Serepty?”
In this cozy little room and in the presence of the doctor and Serepta
Grimes, young Oliver was weighed by his father. For this purpose, a
brand-new, perfectly balanced meat-scales, selected from stock, was
brought up from the hardware store by Mr. Sikes, who, while being denied
the privilege of witnessing the ceremony, subsequently was able to
collect fifty cents from another bosom friend of the family, Mr. Silas
Link, undertaker and upholsterer. The infant weighed nine and a quarter
pounds, Joseph winning his wager by a scant quarter of a pound. The two
worthies also had made another bet as to the sex of the infant, Mr.
Sikes giving odds of two to one that it would be a boy. Up to seven
o’clock in the evening, fully twelve hours after the baby was born,
neither Mr. Sikes nor Mr. Link had the slightest idea who had won the
bet, for, try as they would, there seemed to be absolutely no way of
getting any authentic information from upstairs, owing to the speechless
condition of Oliver senior and the drastic reticence of Serepta Grimes.
And so, as the story of Oliver October really begins at seven o’clock in
the evening, regardless of all that may have transpired in the preceding
twelve hours of his life, we will open the narrative with Mr. Joseph
Sikes hovering in solitary gloom over the base-burner in the
sitting-room to the right of the small vestibule hall whose door opened
upon the snow-covered, wind-swept front porch. For the better part of an
hour he had been sitting there, listening with tense, apprehensive ears
to the brisk footsteps in the room overhead. The sitting-room was cold,
for Joseph had neglected to close the front door tightly on entering the
house and the wind had blown it ajar, permitting quite an accumulation
of snow to carpet the hall. He had purposely left the sitting-room door
open in order to hear the better what was going on at the top of the
stairs. His attention was called to this almost criminal act some
fifteen or twenty minutes after its commission by the sound of a man’s
voice in the upper hall. It was an agitated voice and it was raised
considerably in the effort to make itself heard by some one on the other
side of a closed, intervening door.
“Say, Serepty, I—I think the front door is open,” the voice was saying.
Joseph wasn’t sure, but he thought it belonged to Oliver Baxter. At any
rate, the speaker was in the upper hall. After a moment it continued.
“Like as not Mary and the baby will ketch cold and die if—”
A door squeaked upstairs and then came the voice of Serepta Grimes.
“My goodness! Of course, it’s open. Haven’t you got sense enough to go
down and shut it? Who left it open anyway? You?”
“I thought I heard somebody come in a little while ago. Must have
been—”
“Go down and shut it this instant. And stay downstairs, you goose.”
The door closed sharply and Mr. Sikes, recovering from a temporary
paralysis, clumsily got to his feet and hurried into the hall.
“Never mind, Ollie,” he whispered hoarsely to the figure descending the
stairs. “I’ll shut it. Some darned fool must have forgot to close it.”
“Isn’t that snow on the floor?” demanded Mr. Baxter, pausing midway on
the stairs. The light from the sitting-room door fell upon his pinched,
worried face as he peered, blinking, over the banister.
“Must have blowed in,” mumbled Joseph guiltily. “You don’t suppose she’s
taken cold, do you, Ollie?”
“She probably has,” groaned Mr. Baxter. “She’s—she’s dying anyhow,
Joe—she hasn’t got more than half an hour to live. I—”
“Is the doctor up there?”
“No. He ain’t been here since five o’clock. Oh, the poor—”
“I guess she’s all right or he wouldn’t have gone off and left her,”
said Mr. Sikes consolingly. “I guess it wouldn’t be a bad idea to sweep
all this snow out. Where’ll I find a broom?”
“In the kitchen—in the kitchen, Joe. My God, what have I ever done that
we should have a blizzard like this on the one day that—”
“Come on down, Ollie, and let me give you a swig at this bottle I
brought along with me. I can hear your teeth chatterin’ from here.”
“I haven’t got any shoes on,” protested Mr. Baxter. “I’m trying not to
make any more noise than I can help. Besides I don’t want Mary to smell
liquor on me. No, I can’t come down. I’d never forgive myself if she was
to die and me not up here where I could hear her calling for me. Yes,
sir—she’s not going to pull through, Joe—she’s not going to get well.
I—”
“What does Serepty say?”
“Serepty? Oh, she says she’s all right and as fit as a fiddle—but I
know better. She’s just saying that to brace me up. She—”
The door squeaked above him and Mrs. Grimes spoke.
“Didn’t I tell you to close that door, Oliver Baxter? Who is that you’re
talking to?”
“Don’t tell her,” whispered Mr. Sikes, springing nimbly to the door.
“She don’t like me anyhow, and—Oh, the danged thing’s stuck! I’ll have
to get the broom.”
Mr. Sikes hurried to the kitchen and returned with the broom. Baxter was
still standing on the stairs, in a listening attitude.
“Sh!” he hissed. “Don’t do that? I thought I heard—” He turned and
darted up the stairs, leaving Mr. Sikes to his task. Presently he came
half way down again and addressed the sweeper, who had just completed
his job and was closing the door against the pressing wind. “I’m up here
in the spare bedroom, Joe, if you need me for anything. I’ve just been
thinking that the house might catch fire with all these stoves going and
the wind blowing so hard. If you smell anything burning come up and let
me know.”
“Just a second, Ollie,” whispered Joseph, from the bottom of the steps.
“Is it a boy or a girl?”
But Oliver failed to answer. He had disappeared, tiptoeing in his
stocking feet past the closed and guarded door at the bend in the hall.
His friend went back to his place by the base-burner and sat down. In
skirting the table in the center of the room he paused long enough to
take a cigar from the box of “Old Jim Crows” that Oliver had purchased
for distribution among congratulatory friends. He hesitated a long time
before lighting it, however. He knew from past experience that Serepta
Grimes objected to men smoking in the house, and, while this was not her
house, nevertheless for the time being she was complete mistress of it.
To look at Joseph Sikes you would never believe that he could be afraid
of anything or anybody. He was a burly, rugged, middle-aged man with
broad shoulders, a battling face and a thick shock of black hair that
might well have supplied you with a corporeal picture of what Samson
must have looked like before he was shorn. He looked somewhat ill at
ease and uncomfortable in his Sunday suit of clothes and his starched
shirt and the bothersome collar that appeared to be giving him a great
deal of trouble, judging by the frequency with which he ran his
forefinger around the inside of it and twisted his puckered, uplifted
chin from time to time as if in dire need of help. Mr. Sikes was an
unmarried man. He was not used to tight collars.
The combination sitting-and dining-room was on the side of the house
facing the main thoroughfare of the town. Its windows looked out across
the porch and down the wooded slope to the street, a hundred yards away.
Mr. Sikes on his arrival after a scant supper at his boarding-house in
Shiveley’s Lane had found the entire lower part of the house in darkness
except the kitchen. He took it upon himself to light the two kerosene
lamps in the sitting-room and subsequently—in some dismay—to draw down
the window shades. He replenished the fire from a scuttle of coal and
then, on second thought, went down into the cellar and replenished the
scuttle. After performing these small chores, he removed his overcoat
and hat and hung them over the back of a chair alongside the stove. He
forgot to remove his goloshes, and it was not until he became aware of
the smell of scorching rubber that he remembered where he had put them
on sitting down for the second time in front of the stove. He had put
them on the bright nickel-plated railing at the bottom of the
base-burner with only one thought in mind: to get his feet warm.
He was aghast. That odor of calamity was bound to ransack the house from
bottom to top, with desolating consequences. Mary would think the house
was afire, Oliver would lose his head completely, Serepta would—and the
child? It didn’t take much to suffocate a baby. Mr. Sikes was not long
in deciding what to do. He opened a window, jerked off the offending
goloshes, and hurled them far out into the snowdrifts.
It was while he was in the act of disposing of the damning evidence that
he heard the kitchen door slam with a bang. Somewhere back in his mind
lurked an impression that some one had been knocking at the front door
during the tail end of his profound cogitation. He had a faint, dim
recollection of muttering something like this to himself:
“You can knock your fool head off, far as I’m concerned.”
The slamming of the kitchen door irritated Mr. Sikes. His brow grew
dark. This was no time to be slamming doors. He strode over to
investigate. If the offender should happen to be Maggie Smith, Baxter’s
hired girl, she’d hear from him. What business had she to be away from
the house for more than an hour, just at supper time, and probably
catching cold or—