r Traveler so strange-looking," she said,
curtsying. "He is quite small," she showed his smallness with a gesture,
"and it is the first time he has even seen a whole man."

THE CALLER IN THE NIGHT[16]

[Note 16: Copyright, 1917, by The Stratford Journal. Copyright,
1918, by Burton Kline.]

BY BURTON KLINE

From _The Stratford Journal_

BY the side of a road which wanders in company of a stream across a
region of Pennsylvania farmland that is called "Paradise" because of its
beauty, you may still mark the ruins of a small brick cabin in the
depths of a grove. In summertime ivy drapes its jagged fragments and the
pile might be lost to notice but that at dusk the trembling leaves of
the vine have a way of whispering to the nerves of your horse and
setting them too in a tremble. And the people in the village beyond have
a belief that three troubled human beings lie buried under those ruins,
and that at night, or in a storm, they sometimes cry aloud in their
unrest.

The village is Bustlebury, and its people have a legend that on a
memorable night there was once disclosed to a former inhabitant the
secret of that ivied sepulchre.

* * *

All the afternoon the two young women had chattered in the parlor,
cooled by the shade of the portico, and lost to the heat of the day, to
the few sounds of the village, to the passing hours themselves. Then of
a sudden Mrs. Pollard was recalled to herself at the necessity of
closing her front windows against a gust of wind that blew the curtains,
like flapping flags, into the room.

"Sallie, we're going to get it again," she said, pausing for a glance at
the horizon before she lowered the sash.

"Get what?" Her visitor walked to the other front window and stooped to
peer out.

Early evening clouds were drawing a black cap over the fair face of the
land.

"I think we're going to have some more of Old Screamer Moll this
evening. I knew we should, after this hot--"

"There! Margie, that was the expression I've been trying to remember all
afternoon. You used it this morning. Where did you get such a poetic
nickname for a thunder--O-oh!"

For a second, noon had returned to the two women. From their feet two
long streaks of black shadow darted back into the room, and vanished.
Overhead an octopus of lightning snatched the whole heavens in its
grasp, shook them, and disappeared.

The two women screamed, and threw themselves on the sofa. Yet in a
minute it was clear th