Because what happened to me last August went so far outside anything I’d known all the rest of my life that even while it was going on I often thought I must be imagining.

On one day—Saturday, the thirtieth of July, to be exact—I was Janet Ruell, a respectable small-town librarian, driving north in my new car from Eldreth, Minnesota, for the first vacation I’d ever taken without my mother. My life had been openly humdrum and secretly desperate—the way life in a small town is for a girl who’s still unmarried at twenty-nine.

And then the next day I was agreeing to go to an unknown resort under conditions which—well, Eldreth would have looked at them slant eyed.

Agreeing to go. There’s no getting away from the fact that I went to that resort of my own free choice. Even when I chose I knew something was hidden under the surface of what was offered me. I went of my own volition into those days when I heard death crying in the night, when I saw it indicated by a plantain leaf and discovered in a plaything, when I saw it rising in a muddy bundle from the lake. The time was to come when I felt myself living in the very house of death and eating at its table. And in the end . . .

I wonder if I’d have had the courage to take what Steve Corbett offered me if I’d had premonitions.

If it hadn’t been so hot on that thirtieth of July I’d never have stopped at the Coldspring Tourist Cabins and so never have met the boy and the man at all. I had an entirely different destination in mind when I left Eldreth at seven that morning; two Eldreth teachers had recommended Graymoose Lodge on Lake Superior.

The sun threw white-hot ingots at me out of the east as I drove down Eldreth’s main street, thanking heaven I wouldn’t see it or the library again for a month. When I stopped on the curve around Rochester for gas the attendant told me it was ninety-seven. He was stripped to the waist. I sat looking at his freckled shoulders as he wiped my windshield; there was a drop of perspiration on every freckle.

After that I just abandoned myself to being hot. Cows drooped in pastures, leaves hung as if they’d lost their skeletons, fields faded visibly as the sun scorched out the green. I drove through Minneapolis to Lyndale without even looking at the tall buildings. In the afternoon I was a cooking waffle between two irons, the steely paving and the chromium sky; heat from below pressed up and heat from above pressed down until the juice oozed out of my bones and each eye was a separate furnace.

And while my physical being sizzled my mental state reached a boiling point and went up in steam, too. I’d been working up that pressure for a long time. I think it was George Train’s proposal to me the night before that made me reach the steaming stage. George Train. Forty. Eldreth bank cashier and no ambition to be anything else. A neck that looked as if his hair had been clipped under a bowl. He’d hinted that we’d reached a sensible age; of course I’d want to keep my job and not bother with children.

I had hated Eldreth for eight years, ever since Ted Williams jilted me and I heard the first whisper, "You can’t tell me there isn’t a reason." That whisper had changed with the years; it had become, "She still holds her head pretty high for a jilted girl, don’t she?" Small towns never forget, not when they can take malicious triumph in remembering. I’d stuck it out, partly because I never can bear to give up in a fight, partly because I had a job there and my mother wanted me to stay until she’d lived out her ailing life. Well, I had.

Now she was gone I was offered George Train, Eldreth’s only unmarried male older than I was, as an apology for the life I’d had so lightly taken from me.

"Get away, never go back." That was the tune the wheels ran to on tires that seemed to stick and melt against the paving. "Get away. Never go back. Any chance for adventure you get this month, take it. Any man that smiles at you, smile back. If you never get anything else gather up one adventure for your life."

Then I thought dully that nothing exciting could ever happen to me.

The small sign announcing the Coldspring Tourist Cabins loomed up on my left just before five o’clock. At the same time I seemed to feel a breath of breathable air. I was close enough to Duluth so the land was a desert of gravel with thin beige weeds, but back of the sign I saw what looked like an oasis: a darkly green hollow with big oaks around it, small white cabins under the oaks and a larger porched white house in front.

Three more hours of driving would bring me to Graymoose, but three more hours seemed intolerable. I made one of those sudden decisions.

A stout woman with reddish hair and wattles came out of the white house when I stopped before it. She told me I was lucky, this was the coolest spot in the state. I drove down into the hollow and, miracle of miracles, it was cool there. Red water from some underground river churned up through red sand; the air at the spring’s brink had the scent of ice. I lay on my stomach so I could put my face in the water; I forgot Eldreth and George Train.

By the time I went to supper I was almost human. The table was on the house porch—a long white table set farm style with about twenty places. Vaguely I noticed family groups down the table sides, and across from the place I took, a very small blond boy in a dark blue wash suit, propped on books. I cut once into the Swedish sausage on my plate and had the piece halfway to my mouth when a frog jumped out of the little boy’s clothes somewhere and landed where the sausage had been.

My fork dropped on the table, and the next instant I was holding a gravy-smeared frog, feeling its heart’s wild beat against my fingers. Instinct got me that far then let me down; I sat at a total loss. The by-sitters went into orchestrated hysterics, with a loud shout of laughter from the man beside the little boy furnishing the bass.

"Not raw frogs, please," I said with italics.

The boy was standing on his chair, obviously about to follow the frog across the table into my plate. The man jerked him back.

"It’s my srog!" the boy said in a clear imperative. "He’s all my srog. I want my——"

The frog had been gathering himself for a convulsive effort. It got him out of my hand and to the middle of the table; his next leap took him over the boy’s head. After that, with the small boy leaping first, everyone jumped toward or away from the frog. The wattled woman won; she held the door open.

By the time I’d scrubbed my hands and returned to a new assortment of food—no gravy by request—the boy was back on his books. He wasn’t eating; his hands were tucked under his blue wash-suited legs. He was one of those thin pale youngsters with a head too big for his neck and shoulders; he wasn’t crying, but he kept focused on me the most accusingly reproachful big blue eyes I’d ever wilted under. He couldn’t have been three; he still had his baby hair, thin and colorless and fine, parted manfully at the side and brushed over.

Youngsters sidle around Eldreth library all day; I knew their minds as well as their spilling pockets. I knew I’d been completely inadequate.

I smiled across. "After supper should we go down by the frog’s house to see if he’s back?"

He lit up immediately. "I got my srog by the srog’s house. Let’s go now."

From someone he had learned to speak. Except for a few baffling sounds, the consonants came clearly, and each syllable was given its full value.

I promised. "We’ll go the minute you finish supper."

He lit into a plate that had been untouched before. It struck me then that something was missing—his mother. He seemed alone with the khaki-clad man next to him. The man was putting away blueberry pie in a quick, definite, aloof way, apparently withdrawn to some dark inside recess of thought that left his face empty but still belligerently hard. He was perhaps thirty; the eyes were dark under thickly browed overhanging banks of socket; the brown hair stood up a little like tufted grass before it brushed over. When he turned sidewise the light struck the plane of his left cheek, and I saw he had a hole in his face, an odd depression in his left cheekbone, shaped like the bowl of a teaspoon, but deeper.

He raised his eyes then and caught me looking at him; at once he started staring me down as if I were thoroughly contemptible.

I know how I look. My hair is yellow, just plain yellow, long and straight. I wear it twisted in ropes around my head; that’s as plain as I can make it. Since a childhood illness I’ve had two patches of red over my cheekbones and when I’m tired or hot, shadows as dark as mascara darken under my eyes until they nearly reach the red. I know it’s theatrical. That’s one thing Eldreth held against me.

I stared haughtily back.

He settled into his chair and almost absently kept that scorn on his face.

From beside him a small voice asked slowly, "See srogs now?"

I’d forgotten the boy. The child had quit eating; he was holding his back stiffly erect, but his head drooped until he caught it back with a jerk.

"Of course we’ll go now." I stood up, but instead of sliding from his books he answered with a sigh.

"I guess I lazy." His head went sidewise to the table; I think he was asleep before it touched.

The man scooped up the child without a word, turned and strode off. He walked with a sort of effortless competence, quickly, scarcely lifting his feet from the ground. He wore the khaki shirt and breeches and high boots as if he’d been born in them, married in them, and if he should die would be buried in them. He was perhaps five feet eleven and he was very wide; the khaki shirt covered shoulders that looked knobbed like the padded shoulders of football players.

"Some travelers ain’t friendly that way," the wattled woman consoled beside me. I awoke to the fact that I’d again been made to look graceless.

She added, "Poor kid, an orphan with a daddy like that."

"Perhaps his mother doesn’t feel like eating."

"No, there ain’t no woman with ‘em."

Man alone with a little boy. The mother dead perhaps, the child tended by that dark, resentful, unfriendly man, learning that exquisite speech.

Something there that didn’t fit.

The camp’s washroom was at the rear of the main house; I walked toward it late that night for a last-minute shower bath. The moon was too small a melon rind to give much light; most of the cottages, too, were dark. But as I passed one that was still lit I saw a curtain lift inward on a breeze, and inside a man’s bent back. It was unmistakably the man who had the boy; he was polishing something with a cloth. He raised what he was working on and I saw it.

A revolver.

It halted me where I stood. Guns to me meant holdups and gangsters. My first impulse was to rush to the wattled woman and tell her what I’d seen, but with my hand on her door I remembered that men could have permits to carry guns. Somewhat warily, and feeling nervous at slight sounds, I returned to my cabin, abandoning the idea of a bath. My imagination worked overtime a bit, but the last thing I would ever have thought was that that revolver would come into my possession.

After breakfast the next morning I made just one trip into the heat that wavered and streamed over Minnesota, and decided that whatever other people did I wouldn’t leave the spring that day.

The car was gone from the cabin where I had seen the man; I never expected to see him again. I sat on a red rock by the water and exhausted the Sunday papers, from Soglow’s Little King to an account of the suits being brought by the victims of a month-old airplane crash in St. Paul, and a Sunday magazine story of missing heirs, which led off with the tale of one James Maartens, once a well-known man about town in St. Paul, who had disappeared the day after his father’s death and never returned to claim an inheritance of a quarter million. I thought if that were my quarter of a million it wouldn’t be unclaimed very long.

It was when I wandered toward the big house in sheer boredom that I saw that although the car was gone the little boy wasn’t. He was out in the sideyard alone in a red seersucker sun suit, sitting flat on the grass with his thin legs before him, resting back on his hands and looking sullen. As I came across the yard he got on his hands and knees and scrabbled over to a patch of shade. The wattled cabin keeper’s voice came from the porch.

"Little boy, get back in the sun!"

He yelled obstinately and loudly, flinging his head back, "No!"

"Want me to take you back?"

"No!" he yelled again, and moved so the sun just hit his legs.

He was limp from sweating, and his shoulders were more than pink. I hesitated, but after all I had decided it might be all right about the gun, and I couldn’t see any child get seriously sunburned. I slammed the porch door behind me and said so. The woman shook her wattles and went on peeling potatoes.

"I can’t help it. His father said keep him in the sun."

"He doesn’t look used to hot sunshine."

She shrugged. "I got to do what I’m told. His dad paid me two bucks for watchen him whiles he went off."

"I’ll take the responsibility."

I started off to get the boy, but she made me tell her who I was and what experience I’d had with children before she gave a grudging consent; she seemed afraid I’d claim the two dollars.

The boy came willingly to my cabin, where I gave him a sponge bath and let him nap. When he woke he was an enchanting chatterbox. He told me his name was Cottie, that his daddy gave him a train and could make the car go "hurryer" and "hurryer," but not a word that suggested who or what his father really was or why he carried a gun. The afternoon we spent by the pool, both of us soon sopping because Cottie wanted me to hold in my lap all the frogs he caught. He was astoundingly quick, but the frog supply never got large; a frog would leap, he would make an almost identical leap, I would leap to keep him from drowning, and all the prisoners would leap for freedom. Whereupon Cottie would shriek with mixed regret and glee and we’d start over.

It was just as I’d made a particularly wild grab for his muddy bottom that I came up to see his father standing on the south shore of the pool, his eyelids as straight as his mouth, and the hollow in his cheek almost flat.

"I told Mrs. Golloy to keep that kid in the sun."

Cottie ran to throw himself like a climbing monkey halfway up the man’s leg, with howls of greeting. The man lifted him, still shedding fury my way.

It might not be a good idea to have the possessor of a gun too furious at me. I defended myself.

"If I hadn’t kept the boy in the shade he’d be in a hospital tonight with a sunburn that would make a fireburn look sick. Don’t you know people can die from too much sun?"

"I know kids need all the sun they can get."

"Not between ten and two o’clock when it’s one hundred and six."

Cottie put in a placating "She held my srogs, Daddy."

His father turned and walked off. In his anger the roll was intensified; I thought his feet had at some time learned to cling to a deck. The small face looked seriously back at me over the man’s shoulder.

The two weren’t at supper, and the car was again gone from their cabin. Minneapolis was within an evening’s drive; again I thought I’d never see them again. Time had never been as interminable as it was that evening; I wandered out to the pool in the faintly moonlit dark; not a soul was there, but I stayed a while. Coming back along the cabin row, I saw that the car was back at Cottie’s cabin, and quickened my step; that gun would then be back in camp, too.

A man sat on my doorstep. He stood up as I came near, his dark shoulders stretching widely to both sides.

He said, "Miss Ruell, I’d like to see you about my kid."

I surprised myself by feeling alert but unafraid. "How do you know my name?"

"Mrs. Golloy told me."

My reasoning self balanced his manner, the gun he no doubt had on him, and the fact that he was Cottie’s father. Then the part of me that had been uppermost yesterday sent a flash of liquid quicksilver across my chest. I didn’t have much to be robbed of, and my life wasn’t so pleasant I couldn’t bear to have it changed.

I could at least find out what was offered.

"Come in." I passed him to unlock my door and switch on the uncovered bulb in the ceiling. He followed, but he didn’t sit down when I pushed a chair at him or when I sat down; he just went off into a silence that seemed to last five minutes, with his eyes not on me but over my head.

When he did talk he said, "You’re too fond of drugstores."

It wasn’t what I’d expected, but I’ve learned to take that remark. "I don’t get my face in a drugstore."

The first thing I knew he had a handkerchief in his hand and was rubbing it, hard, over my right cheek. I swiped with my hand at his fist and got to my feet.

"What possible——"

He said, "I don’t mind a little paint, but yours would have been too much," and stowed the handkerchief calmly in his pocket as if I weren’t giving him a wildcat glare. "I’m taking the kid to a lake for a month. He could use a girl—use a woman to look after him. I’d pay thirty a week."

I had one of those caught-unaware sensations—the mind with a large space filled with gray mist. Was this a guise adventure could take?

I asked incredulously, "You want to hire me as a nursemaid?"

"You’d have to be more responsible than a nursemaid."

"I’m a librarian. On my vacation.Why should I——"

He said without any change in his face or voice, "I saw you liked the kid."

For the first time I realized why the evening I had just spent had been so long.

I asked slowly, trying to piece together my emotions, "You’d be willing to leave the boy with me?"

"No. I’d be there, too."

Suspicion reared its head. "I don’t own anything to be robbed of and I——"

He smiled in the middle of that, humorlessly, just the wide mouth stretching back to show the line of white meeting teeth.

"I’m not interested in anything you own or you either."

He didn’t seem to be. Except when his eyes flicked over me to read my thoughts, he kept his gaze away from me as if I were an abomination he could scarcely bear to look at. Absurd anger worked up in my chest; I wanted to fight back at him, not with my innocuous virginal respectability that he would only scorn, but with some daring that would force even his respect. I tried not to yield.

"It’s impossible. I don’t even know your name."

"If that helps you any—Steve Corbett."

"You work somewhere, I suppose?"

"Highway engineer. I handle my own jobs."

I wasn’t supposed to know he had a gun; I couldn’t very well come out with that.

"If I could write for references——"

He said steadily, "No."

"Could I choose the resort? I know one where——"

"I’ve already rented the cottage."

"Where is it?"

"At Crying Sisters Lake."

That was the first time I heard that name, the Crying Sisters. Even then it hit my ears with an eerie, suggestive sound.

The whole thing was ridiculous. "Do you realize you’re asking me to go alone with a strange man to a strange resort? It just isn’t done."

"Isn’t done." He looked at me then, shrugging. "That’s your answer all the time, isn’t it?"

He turned to go.

All the desperation I’d been seething under the day before hit me. In the split second it took him to make the one step to the door I looked again at the Eldreth life ahead of me. Breakfast with George Train. Butter on George’s mouth from the toast; he always got butter on his mouth. Hurrying to the library at nine, standing aside at the door to let some of yesterday’s stale air out before I dived in. Watching Mrs. Binns to see she dusted the back stacks. Checking Love Is a Rose from sloppy Mrs. Lindblom’s card, suggesting she’d like Stardust in Her Hand. Hunting up Dilly the Silly for Budge Lindblom, Mrs. Lindblom’s dahlia-cheeked stolid four-year-old, not mine. Never any child of mine. Getting down Nancy of Wyngate for Jean Schwartz; she’d want Party Girl instead. Having Wentworth Olson bring in a new Tecos Tom with the binding ripped, watching his already wise eyes see me keep my tongue hushed. No one fines the son of the town’s one factory owner; no one smacks him down, just once, to make a decent boy of a good youngster who’s rapidly becoming ungood.

No man ever came into Eldreth Library. Except George Train.