The story follows Oliver Baxter, born during a bitter October storm, and chronicles his upbringing and fortunes in a small rural town whose gossip, politics, and neighbors shape community life. The narrative sketches family ties, a temperamental youth, a pastor and his theatrical wife, wartime absence and return, romantic entanglements and jealousies, and a sequence of legal and moral complications involving a detective, contested evidence, and a consequential hanging. Shifting between lighthearted local color and darker melodrama, the book examines how private secrets and public passions collide in a close-knit setting.