The time is the Depression years of the 1930's, the dirty thirties as they were then called. The place is the town/village of Nelsonville, Dutchess County, New York. The characters, Leroy Andrew Bridges, the printer's devil and editorial assistant employed by the
Nelsonville Times
, a weekly newspaper published in the aforesaid town/village of Nelsonville. Guy S. Bailey, the editor and publishers of the
Times
, a disabled veteran of the Great War, presently undergoing treatment for his injuries in a hospital in Virginia, the linotype operator, Clayton F. Lewis or Lewis Clayton Funk, best known as Clay, the only man Leroy knows of with two different names, and Will, for Willard or William, Barnes, the printer-compositor of the paper and Mrs. Belle Bailey, wife of the editor and publisher Guy S. Bailey and who, in the absence of her husband, is carrying on the family printing and publishing business, and many others. Those characters and many others play their parts in the story that ends up in a gory episode in the old abandoned quarry out on the Old Sharon Road.