Munsey's Magazine, April 1920

# Barber John's Boy

This Hardiston novel by Ben Ames Williams, illustrated by Lee Conrey, follows Barber John Bolton's return from eighteen years in prison. Bolton killed a drunken country doctor who fatally poisoned Bolton's wife Nellie with cyanide instead of medicine. Bolton left behind his young son, John Carmichael, now a grown man working at the town bank and engaged to Emily Yates. As Bolton arrives by train with his brother Cal, a horse-trader who narrates a lengthy anecdote about shrewdly trading a mare with bone spavin to a man named Jem Howe, Bolton anticipates reunion with his son and gauges Hardiston's reception. Cal reassures him that former townspeople—bank president Eli Yates, lawyer Henry Canter, furnace operator Charley Marsh—support him. Bolton struggles with eighteen years of accumulated time: automobiles replace horses, trolley-cars run through town, industrial pipe-works line the creek. At the station, lawyer Canter greets him warmly as old acquaintances gather.