the air. She felt a moment of anxiety. She felt almost sure he couldn’t catch her, even if he started after her again. But—oh—he was so—One of the pine cones slid a few feet further. He seemed to listen. Then he went over the edge after the sound of it.
Brenda’s heart was shaking the flat bosom of her shirt. While the rotten-smelling man stumbled back and forth among the dusty rocks in the quarry bottom hunting her, she waited and listened. It took him a long time to abandon the search. But at last the moment for which Brenda had been waiting came. He left his hunting and began to struggle up the quarry side.
He slid back. Brenda leaned forward, tense and expectant. Her eyes were bright. He started up again. Once more he slid back.
It was clear to the watching child much sooner than it was to the man in the depths of the quarry that he was imprisoned. He kept starting up the sides clumsily, clawing at the loose handholds, and sliding back. But his blobbish limbs were extraordinarily inept and awkward. He always slid back.
At last he gave up and stood quiet. His head dropped. He made no sound. But the penetrating rottenness was welling out from him.
Brenda got to her feet and walked toward him. Her pale lips were curving in a grin. “Hi!” she called over the edge of the quarry. “Hi! You can’t get out, can you?”
The mockery in her tone seemed to cut through to his dull senses. He raised his grayish head. There was a flash of teeth, very white against their inky background. But he couldn’t get out. After a moment, Brenda laughed.
Brenda hugged her secret to herself all the rest of the day. She was reprimanded for being late to lunch; her father said she needed discipline. She was not bothered. That night she slept soundly and well.
Early next morning she went to see Charles. Charles was a year older than she, and tolerated her better than anyone else on Moss Island. Once he had given her a cast-off snake skin. She had kept it in the drawer with her handkerchiefs.
Today he was making a cloud chamber with rubbing alcohol, a jar, and a piece of dry ice. Brenda squatted down beside him and watched. After five minutes or so she said, “I know what’s more fun that that.”
“What?” Charles asked, without looking up from his manipulations.
“Something I found. Something funny. Scary. Queer.”
The exchange continued. Brenda hinted. Charles was mildly curious. At last she said, “Come and see it, Chet. It’s not like anything you ever saw before. Come on.” She laid her hand on his arm.
Up until that moment, Charles might have accompanied her. The cloud chamber was not going well, and he did not actively dislike the girl. But the dryness and tensity of her touch on his—the touch of a person who has never received or given a pleasant physical contact—repelled him. He drew away from her hand. “I don’t want to see it. It isn’t anything anyway, just some sort of junk. I’m not interested,” he said.
“But you’d like it! Please come and see.”
“I told you, I’m not interested. I’m not going to go. Can’t you take a hint? Go away.”
When he used that tone, Brenda knew there was no use in arguing with him. She got up and walked off.
After lunch her father had her help him with the barbecue pit he was building. While she shoveled dirt and mixed concrete her thoughts were busy with the man in the quarry. Was he still standing motionless at the bottom, or was he once more stumbling back and forth hunting her? Or was he trying to clamber up the side again? He’d never make it, no matter how much he tried. But if he stayed there long enough, some of the other children might find him. Would they be more frightened than she had been? She didn’t know. She couldn’t form any mental picture of what might happen then.
When her father finished his work for the day, she lay down in the hammock. Her hands were sore and her back ached, but she couldn’t relax. Finally, though it was almost supper time, she got up and walked off quickly toward the quarry.
He was still there. Brenda let out a deep breath of relief. The bitter, rotten smell hung strong in the air. She must have made a noise, for he raised his head and let it drop forward again on his chest. Other than that, he was motionless.
Charles wouldn’t come to see him. So… Brenda looked around her. Farther along the edge of the quarry, twenty feet or so from where she was standing, were two long boards. She measured their length with her eyes.
It was thirty feet or more to the bottom of the quarry. The boards were not quite long enough. But the zone of loose, sliding stuff did not extend all the way up; once the man in the excavation was past it, he ought to be able to get up easily enough. Charles had said that what she had found wasn’t anything. Just some junk. Brenda began to move the boards.
Her hands were sore, but the boards themselves were not heavy. In fifteen minutes or so she had laid a narrow path from the bottom of the quarry to within a few feet of the top.
She stood back. The man in the quarry did not move. Brenda felt a moment of anxious exasperation. Wasn’t he going to do anything, after all her trouble? “Come on!” she said under her breath and then, more loudly. “Come on!”
The sun was beginning to decline toward the west. The shadows lengthened. The man below turned his head from side to side, as if the waning light had brought him a keener perception. One blobby gray hand went up. Then he started toward the boards.
Brenda waited until his uncertain feet were set upon the second of the lengths of wood. She could stand it no longer.
She whirled about and ran as hard as she could toward home. She did not know whether or not he followed her.
Brenda did not go to the woods next morning. She stayed around the house until her mother sent her out to help her father, who sent her back, saying that he had got to a place in his construction where she could be only in the way. Brenda went to the kitchen and got herself a sandwich and a glass of milk. When she came back with them, her mother, pale and disturbed, was on the terrace outside the house talking to her father. Brenda went to the door and leaned her head against it.
“I don’t see how it could be a tramp,” her mother was saying. “Elizabeth said nothing had been taken. She was quite emphatic. Only the roast chicken. And even it hadn’t been eaten, only torn into pieces.” She hesitated. “She said there were spots of grayish slime all over it.”
“Elizabeth exaggerates,” Brenda’s father answered. He gave the mortar he was smoothing an impatient pat. “What’s her idea anyway, if it wasn’t a tramp? Who else would break in her kitchen? There are only six families on Moss Island.”
“I don’t think she has any definite idea. Oh, Rick, I wish you could have heard her talking. She mentioned the dreadful smell over and over. She said she was phoning the other families to warn them. She sounded afraid.”
“Probably hysterical,” he answered contemptuously. His eye fell on Brenda, standing in the shadow of the door. “Go up to your room, Brenda,” he said sharply. “Stay there. I won’t have you listening behind doors.”
“Yes, father.”
Brenda did not resent the order. She was afraid. Would Charles remember her hints of yesterday, connect them with the raid on Mrs. Emsden’s kitchen (the man from the quarry must be hungry—but he hadn’t eaten the chicken), and tell on her? Or would something worse happen, she didn’t know what?
She moved about her room restlessly. The bed was made, there was nothing for her to do. She could hear the rumble of her parents’ voices indistinctly, a word now and then rising into prominence. For the first time she felt a sharp curiosity about the man who had been in the quarry, about the man himself.
She got out her diary and opened it. But it wouldn’t do; the volume had no lock, and she knew her mother read it. She never wrote anything important in it.
She looked at the scribbled pages with dislike. It would be nice to be able to tear them out and crumble them up in the wastebasket. But her mother would notice and ask her why she had destroyed her pretty book. No…
She hunted about the room until she found a box of note paper. Using the lid of the box as a desk, she printed carefully across the top of one of the narrow gray sheets: THE MAN.
