Behind him in the doorway of the station stood Captain Sol himself. The blue cap he always wore was set back on his head, a cigar tipped upward from the corner of his mouth, and there was a grim look in his eye and about the smooth shaven lips above the short, grayish-brown beard.

Captain Sol Berry, the Depot Master, won’t admit that he still loves Olive Seabury, the women he was too stubborn to marry thirty years before. Now a Wealthy banker from off-Cape wants to tear down her home to raise his own mansion on her lot, and everyone in the Cape town of Harnis (don’t look for it on a map) is waiting to see what the captain will do about it.

The story takes place on Cape Cod at the turn of the last century when the locals were starting to notice the changes in their world brought by the wealthy off-Cape visitors. Captain Sol hosts the locals every evening at the Harnis Depot where stories are traded while they wait for the evening train. The stories they trade bring these vivid characters, small-town Cape Codders to salty life as they relate an automobile journey that ends on a boat, a scandal at a football match, or the search for romance on a fog-bound river.

The story of Captain Sol and Olive winds around the stories traded at the Harnis Depot where Captain Sol holds court. The stories provide a rich image of the changing times. It is full of salty characters living in the Cape Cod of yesterday when locals gathered together every day to talk, trade stories and laugh over their successes and losses.