Page:The Sunday Eight O'Clock (1916).pdf/105



ILL WITHERS and I—Bill lived just across the road from us—had been reading "Bentley Burrows, or The Skeleton Hand", a tale of ghosts and bandits and general horrors continued from week to week in the Saturday Night, a literary journal which our hired man bought every week at Cole's drug store in town. Shivering with fear, I was just finishing the last chapter in the dusk of a dull November evening, when I heard a knock at the door. I called "Come in", as was the polite custom in our community, and to my horror a real bandit entered—leather leggins, big revolver, bristling moustache, and all. I was frightened for a moment, and then I caught sight of a lock of curly red hair sticking out through a hole in the sombrero and a freckled ear