Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 75: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

clatter always stealing over the wide, red plains. Why would it never stop? Day and night, week on week, it was always going in exhaustless relays, as persistently as the red dusty winds that carried it. Audrey loathed it more than her husband did, for he saw in it a compensating element of protection. It was with this sense of a mighty, intangible bulwark against evil that he got in his corn crop and prepared cabin and stable for the coming winter. The autumn was abnormally warm, and except for their primitive cookery the Davises found scant use for the stone fireplace Walker had built with such care, Something in the unnaturalness of the hot dust-clouds preyed on the nerves of all the settlers, but most of all on Audrey's and Walker's. The notions of a hovering snake-curse and the weird, endless rhythm of the dis- tant Indian drums formed a bad combination which any added element of the bizarre went far to render utterly unendurable. Notwithstanding this strain, several festive gatherings were held at one or another of the cabins after the crops were reaped: keeping naively alive in modernity those curious rites of the harvest-home which are as old as human agriculture itself, Lafayette Smith, who came from southern Missouri and had a cabin about three miles east of Walker's, was a very passable fiddler; and his tunes did much to make the celebrants forget the monotonous beating of the distant tom-toms. Then Hallowe’en drew near, and the settlers planned another trolic—this time, had they but known it, of a lineage older than even agriculture: the dread Witch-Sabbath of the primal pre-Aryans, kept alive through ages in the midnight blackness of secret woods, and still hinting at vague terrors under its latter-day mask of comedy and lightness. Hallowe'en was to fall on a Thursday, and the neighbors agreed to gather for their first revel at the Davis cabin. It was on that thirty-first day of October that the warm spell broke. The morning was gray and leadcn, and by noon the incessant winds had changed from searingness to rawness. People shivered all the more because they were not prepared for the chill, and Walker Davis’s old dog, Wolf, dragged him- self wearily indoors to a place beside the hearth. But the distant drums still thumped on, nor were the white citizenry less inclined to pursue their chosen rites. As early as four in the afternoon the wagons began to arrive at Walker’s cabin; and in the evening, after a memorable barbecue, Lafayette Smith’s fiddle inspired a very fair-sized company to great feats of saltatory grotesque- ness in the one good-sized but crowded room. The younger folk indulged in the amiable inanities proper to the season, and now and then old Wolf would howl with doleful and spine-tickling omunousness at some espectally spectral strain from Lafayette’s squeaky violin—a device he had never heard before. Mostly, though, this battered veteran slept through the merriment, for he was past the age of active interests and lived largely in his dreams. Tom and Jennie Rigby had brought their collie Zeke along, but the canines did not fraternize, Zeke seemed strangely uneasy over something, and nosed around curiously all the evening. Audrey and Walker made a fine couple on the floor, and Grandma Comp- ton still likes to recall her impression of their dancing that night. Their worries seemed forgotten for the nonce, and Walker was shaved and teimmed 73 conmiclbooks. conn