Winterbound by Margery Williams Bianco

already half asleep in the sofa corner.
    â€œWant me to walk across the road with you?” Neal asked as they stood in the doorway.
    Had it been any other evening Martin might have said yes, but tonight pride prevented him. He wouldn’t even take the flashlight Jimmie offered. It was his boast, especially before Caroline, that he never minded the dark.
    â€œWell, I’ll leave the door open awhile, so you can see your way down the path,” Neal said.
    Home was, if not exactly across the road, only a hundred yards up the road and then along the little pathway from the bars to the house. By daytime it was only a step, but at night even familiar distances have a curious and uncomfortable way of lengthening themselves out. When Martin and Caroline once left that comforting lane of yellow light flung from the Rowes’ doorway they seemed to step at once into unfathomable blackness. Martin had a queer light feeling in his feet. Even the ground felt strange; the road rose up to meet one unexpectedly andthen fell away, and the bushes and rocks all seemed to be in the wrong places. Nor did it help matters that Caroline had a tendency to clutch and stumble against him.
    â€œLook out—what you want to go treading on my feet like that for!” he snapped, but his voice was a whisper. “Leggo, can’t you?”
    â€œIt’s— dark!” Caroline whimpered. “I can’t see where I’m going!”
    â€œThen hold my hand and walk where I tell you.”
    â€œI’m scared of the fox.”
    â€œDon’t be so silly! Foxes don’t hurt you. That fox went off ages ago; he’s way up the hill by now.”
    Never had home seemed so far away. For a moment Martin almost felt himself in Neal’s shoes, years ago; he thought he knew now just how Neal must have felt on that old corduroy road. Suppose it were true that big things did come down, sometimes, still, from the forests? And the swamp was not so very far away, after all.
    It was certainly a mercy that the gray fox did not choose that particular moment to “holler” again, as Neal called it. As it was, a rustling in the dead roadside bushes ahead of them brought Martin to a sharp standstill, his heart pounding, while Caroline let out a strangled squeal. But it was only Garry, groping her way towards them.
    â€œIt’s so dark I thought I’d come out and meet you; Isaw the door open. You must have been there for hours!”
    Caroline clung to her, as she had clung a moment ago to Martin but with far greater confidence. With Garry around nothing could happen.
    â€œGarry, did you hear the fox?”
    â€œI heard something a while back; sounded like a cat fight.”
    The road was familiar again. Light showed faintly through the chinks where Kay had drawn the curtains.
    â€œLook out for the rock there, Caroline; here’s where the path turns in. Not a star out! Wasn’t it pretty black coming up the hill there?”
    â€œNot so bad. It’s only a step, anyway,” said Martin.
    Next morning there was a queer stillness outside the little house, and it seemed lighter than usual. Martin, first to wake, stumbled to his window and pulled aside the shade. Field and hillside lay smooth and white, blanketed under a three-inch snowfall.

The Boll Weevil
    â€œTWO letters for Kay, one for you, Penny, and the newspaper,” Garry announced, stamping the snow off her feet as she came in from the mailbox. “Why I never get any mail in this household I don’t know. I shall start writing letters to myself soon.”
    She knew the writing on one of the envelopes she dropped into Kay’s lap and smiled as she slipped it uppermost.
    â€œNothing from father?” said Mrs. Ellis. “Well, he never does write often.”
    â€œIt’s only ten days,” Garry reminded her. “If father writes once in three weeks he’s doing wonders. The best way is for us to miss writing to