The quick pad of footsteps approached, paused for a terror-filled instant and passed.
Mr. Oricto was just beginning to hope when they returned. They came softly down the alley toward the crate. He crouched helplessly against the wall while his heart thundered and all hope drained out of him.
The lean stranger bent above him, head thrust forward and down, eyes shining.
Even in his despair, a question nagged at Mr. Oricto. He could not put it into detailed words. All he managed was a faint whisper: “Why?”
The stranger looked down at him with something like mild surprise.
“Why?” he repeated. “Why?” He lifted his small neat head and chuckled with glee. His teeth gleamed.
“Why?” he said again, lowering his head. “Because you’re a rabbit—and I was born to hunt rabbits!”
Mr. Oricto tried to scream but only a thin bleat of terror came out of his mouth.
An instant later the stranger’s pointed teeth flashed toward his jugular.
THE MAIL FOR JUNIPER HILL
DAVE BAINS GAVE me the facts last year, only a few months before he passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was ninety-two when he died and he had been retired from the Juniper Hill Postmastership for over twenty years.
I knew him for over a decade; during that time he told me many anecdotes about the early history of Juniper Hill. In every instance, where verification was still possible, I found his information fully authenticated.
Forty years ago—the time Dave Bains spoke of—Juniper Hill was an isolated Connecticut village with scarcely fifty inhabitants. You reached it by a narrow twisting “mountain” road which ran the twenty-odd miles from Grangeville through deep hemlock woods. It was a hazardous road: a ribbon of treacherous mud in the spring, a nearly obliterated trace when winter snow swirled down through the hemlocks.
Vehicles along the road were scarce enough to cause comment, but there was one conveyance which traversed the road daily in spite of mud or snow. That was Ed Hyerson’s Model-T, which carried the mail to and from Grangeville. In those far days the natives persisted in referring to Ed’s Ford as “the stage”—a quaint anachronism having its roots in the previous century when the mail actually was conveyed by stagecoach.
“Big Ed” Hyerson was, Dave said, “a case.” He was in most respects Juniper Hill’s ne’er-do-well, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing rascal.
But Ed had one redeeming feature: he was always faithful to the Mail. No matter how much hard cider or apricot brandy he’d absorbed the night before, he would show up at the Juniper Hill Post Office on time the next day.
At the period Dave Bains spoke of, Ed had been driving “the stage” for nearly ten years and never once during that period had he failed to finish his run. On a few occasions he had been late, but that was all.
Ed was inordinately proud of his record. In his own mind it was probably the one thing which justified his existence. It fortified his ego and maintained his self-respect. He boasted about it, loudly and continually. Although no one denied his claim, there were many who wished he would let his performance speak for itself.
He was in his late thirties at this time, sturdy and strong as a bear. He flipped the heavy mail sack about as if it had been a bag full of confetti.
One freezing winter night early in December, it began to snow. By morning it was snowing so hard the big spruce wood north of Juniper Hill was blotted from sight. The wind arose, piling the gritty snow into the beginnings of formidable drifts.
Ed Hyerson drove off for Grangeville on schedule. Although the snow fell faster than ever, he returned two hours later with the morning mail. Tossing the mail sack onto the Post Office porch, he gave Dave Bains a sly wink and drove off, shouting back that he was going home to get some proper “warming medicine.”
By noon the storm had assumed all the aspects of a blizzard.
When Ed Hyerson reappeared at the Post Office to make the early afternoon pickup, Dave Bains was worried. He knew how bad the storm had become—and he also knew how stubborn Ed Hyerson could be.
Big Ed had been drinking. He burst into the Post Office with an Iroquois war whoop and slung the mail sack over his shoulder.
Dave rose from his creaky chair behind the sorting rack. “It’s pretty bad, Ed. You think you’ll get through?”
Slamming down the mail sack, Ed scowled at Dave as if the old man had suddenly lost his wits. “Git through?” he repeated. “You think a little snow can stop me? I been makin’ this run nigh onta ten year—and I ain’t been stopped yet! I reckon I ain’t bein’ stopped today neither!”
Talcott Willson, an old farmer who was warming his heels in the Post Office, spoke up. “Maybe you’ll get down to Grangeville, Ed, but you won’t get back. You’ll be takin’ that north wind and drift right in your teeth!”
Willson’s words seemed to drive Ed Hyerson into a rage. The liquor was working in him, of course, and now he was seized with fury because Willson doubted his ability to drive to Grangeville and back in the blizzard.
Snatching up the mail sack with an unprintable oath, he glared at the two men. “I’ll have the mail back here today, with Christ’s help—or the Devil’s. I’ll bring the mail from Hell, need be!”
So saying, he stamped out, hurled the sack into the Ford, and drove off.
Talcott Willson scrubbed his chin wryly. “I still say he ain’t gonna make it.”
Dave Bains frowned. “Trouble is, he’s crazy enough to try. If he don’t get back, he can’t brag about his record any more.”
He sat down, fretfully shuffling papers on his desk. “I’ll ’phone Fred Quender at Grangeville. Maybe Fred can talk sense enough to make him stay over—if he reaches Grangeville, that is.”
From Grangeville, Postmaster Quender promised to do his best to persuade Ed Hyerson to remain over night, if and when he arrived.
It was not until four o’clock that Quender called back. Cursing, roaring, and reeking with liquor, Ed Hyerson had driven into Grangeville two hours late. Now, in spite of all Quender could say to dissuade him, he had picked up the return mail and started back.
The storm grew steadily worse. Snow built up in great slanting drifts. The wind shrieked without interruption.
At six o’clock, when Dave Bains again tried to telephone Grangeville, the line was dead.
Morgan Rayler, who boarded with him in the living quarters adjoining the Post Office, nodded. “I knew that line couldn’t hold up against such a wind.”
Dave pressed his face to the window. “Black as the bottom of a well.” He sighed. “Another hour out there, and he’ll freeze to death.”
A probing finger of wind made the kerosene lamp flicker. Rayler waited until shadows stopped leaping in the little mail room. “Maybe,” he said, “Ed headed back to Grangeville.”
Dave Bains sat down. “He didn’t. He won’t. I know him. Big Ed will keep coming toward Juniper Hill till the car gets stuck. Then he’ll most likely try to push it the rest of the way!”
“He wouldn’t be back till seven anyway,” Rayler pointed out. “Took him three hours to reach Grangeville this afternoon.”
Someone knocked on the door. They both jumped.
Talcott Willson, whose farmhouse lay only just across the road, came in, scattering snow. The buffeting wind almost blew out the lamp.
Willson shut the door with an effort and took a deep breath. “Wust wind I remember,” he said. “Pulls your breath away.” He reached for a chair. “Wonder how Ed’s makin’ out?”
Dave Bains shrugged. “He started up from Grangeville. Morgan thinks he might have gone back, but the line’s down.”
“If he had any sense,” answered Willson, “he’d never have left here in the first place!”
For a time the three men sat silent. Snow clicked against the frosted panes. The old house shook and rattled in the wind.
Dave arose finally, opened the stove and dropped in another massive maple chunk. “Seven o’clock,” he observed.
> “You think,” Rayler asked, “he could hold out till mornin’ in the stage?”
Talcott Willson looked up. “He’d freeze to death long before mornin’.”
Dave paced the floor restlessly. “Maybe those big hemlocks, close along the road, keep down the drifts.”
Nobody said anything and he sat down again.
By eight o’clock they had begun to stop listening. Rayler walked to the window and looked out. “You think we could push down the road a mite?”
“You git outside the village,” Willson told him, “you can’t even find the road. Turn around twice and you’re lost.”
Nine o’clock came and went. Dave got up and put the big enamel coffeepot on the stove.
The three men drank coffee in silence, grateful for its warmth. In spite of the glowing stove, the wind sent icy emissaries through a hundred hidden apertures.
Conversation resumed and then ceased again as the hands of the big clock inched past ten.
Eleven o’clock came and went.
It was approaching midnight when Talcott Willson finally stood up. He voiced the thought of all of them. “We’ll never see Big Ed Hyerson here tonight. Nearly eight hours since he left Grangeville. Either he went back or—”
He stopped short at the sound of a heavy thump on the veranda outside.
The three men stared at one another, speechless. Finally Dave Bains rushed across the room and flung open the door.
At first he saw nothing. A moaning wind tore at him; snow stung his face. He glanced down.
There at his feet lay something bulky, completely sheathed in ice and frozen snow.
It was the mail sack.
Willson and Rayler crowded behind him in the doorway. The kerosene lamp in the little Post Office room flickered out in a plume of soot. The wood stove, emitting a dim red glow, furnished the only remaining light.
For a long half-minute the three men stood gazing down at the ice-coated bulging sack. Beyond the veranda was blackness.
It was Dave Bains who walked to the edge of the veranda and saw the deep dragging footprints which came to the porch and turned away again.
He sprang from the veranda and stumbled forward through the drifts. A few yards ahead, scarcely visible in the thick swirling snow, someone was retreating slowly down the drive toward the main road.
Dave cupped his hands to his mouth. “Ed! Ed Hyerson! Come back!”
The figure neither stopped nor turned. With a kind of inexorable purpose it plowed stiffly on.
Dave hurried back to the veranda where Willson and Rayler waited.
“He’s out there!” he told them, rushing past. “Get your coats!”
In the dimness of the red-lit room the three of them put on their greatcoats.
“Something’s happened to him,” Dave explained. “Mind’s wandering, likely.”
As they struggled down the drive, Willson looked around in bewilderment. “Where’s the stage?”
“Not here,” Dave replied shortly. “He must have walked in.”
The booming wind snatched at their breaths as they lurched forward. At the end of the drive where the road began, they paused, peering through the snow-driven darkness.
Again it was Dave Bains who glimpsed someone moving up the road toward the center of Juniper Hill.
They lunged after, pushing into the drifts. Once more Dave cupped his hands and shouted Ed Hyerson’s name. Big Ed paid no attention. With the abrupt regular motions of something mechanical, he beat his way forward.
But they began to close the gap. They were rested; they had not been out in the freezing wind for hours.
As they advanced Dave recognized the heavy plaid muffler which Ed Hyerson wore.
Dave called his name again when they were only scant yards away.
Suddenly Ed Hyerson stopped. He stood still. Very slowly, with movements which seemed strangely wooden, he turned around.
He looked at them.
They froze into immobility, stricken cold by a deadly chill which was not of the storm.
The eyes looking at them were terrifying eyes, red with fire. They were not Ed Hyerson’s eyes, for all that they looked out of his head.
Although he made no move toward them, the fixed gaze of his flaming eyes expressed incalculable menace. For a terror-filled interval, while they stared back with speechless dread, he watched them. Only his fearful eyes in all his bulk, seemed alive.
Then he turned, stiffly, with the movements of a marionette, and resumed his jerky forward march, impelled by a power greater than his own.
The three men saw him start across the village common toward the white clapboard church.
Talcott Willson gasped. “He can’t—he can’t want to go in there!”
Willson was right. Before he reached the church, Big Ed veered abruptly, heading toward the cemetery.
They watched him push toward the cemetery gate. After that, blowing snow hid him from sight.
Numbly, the three of them turned and started back toward the Post Office.
The mournful wail of the wind seemed to possess the earth.
Two days later, after the blizzard stopped, they found Ed Hyerson’s frozen corpse at the far end of the cemetery, huddled under feet of snow. His empty Ford, buried in a huge drift, was located half way between Grangeville and Juniper Hill.
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