OFF TO SCHOOL Possibly you are wondering why two boys, each of whom was possessed of a perfectly good home of his own, should select the Tannersville Public Library as a place in which to converse.

The answer is that Steve's father and Tom's father were in the same line of trade, wholesale lumber, and had a few years before fallen out over some business matter.
Since that time the two men had been at daggers drawn during office hours and only coldly civil at other times.

Steve was forbidden to set foot in Tom's house and Tom was as strictly prohibited from entering Steve's.

Had the fathers had their way at the beginning of the quarrel the boys would have ceased then and there to have anything to do with each other.

But they had been close friends ever since primary school days and, while they reluctantly respected the dictum as to visiting at each other's residences, they had firmly refused to give up the friendship, and their fathers had finally been forced to sanction what they could not prevent.
At the time this story opens, the quarrel between the two men, each a prominent and well-to-do member of the community, still continued, but its edge had been dulled by time.