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.