Suddenly the woman turned pale. She stared at Martha. "And you were saying—your bus—no lights—"
Remembering the cold, grim interior of the bus, the white face of the driver and the one feeble headlight which had finally gone out, Martha felt an icy thrill of fear.
She saw her bag lying on the couch, and she pointed to it.
"My bus ticket," she told the woman, "is in there."
When the woman drew out the bus ticket and held it up to the light, her pale face seemed drained of every drop of blood.
She stared at her husband and then at Martha with round frightened eyes.
"I had forgotten," she said softly. "The date on your ticket reminds me. That crash was just a year ago tonight!"
THE VAMPIRE BAT
I was in the Amazon collecting background material for a projected series of stories and travel articles and I was to join a government exploring party at a small native settlement two hundred miles north of Cuyaba.
When I arrived at the settlement I was very much surprised to see a white man sitting on the screened-in veranda of a shack some distance from the huddle of native huts. The government party was not due to arrive until the next day, and I had no idea that a white man was living at the settlement.