... The Peddler’s Coffin
The winter nights are long on Cape Cod. When the lonely winds howled ’round the house, and the naked branches tap-tapped against the windowpane, friends and neighbors gathered in the big, warm kitchen of the old Nickerson farmhouse down Rock Harbor Road in Orleans for an evening of story telling and popcorn or apple roasting.
Jonathan Snow, twelve years old, full of imagination and very impressionable, loved these story evenings. Jonathan would curl up in his favorite niche between the fireplace and the window, and there, munching on apples, would listen pop-eyed to the spooky stories. Here he was close enough to the bright, friendly fireplace to feel secure, but also close enough to the dark eye of the window and the wild, windy night to feel a delicious tingle of fear run up and down his spine.
One bleak and howling February night, when the stories had been especially hair-raising, a lull in the conversation and a few yawns proclaimed that it was time for all to depart for their respective homes. Jonathan knew he should leave, but he felt chained to the fireside. He couldn’t stay, was too proud to voice his fears, and yet shuddered at the thought of leaving this warm kitchen for the dark and lonely walk home. But boy’s pride won. Jonathan buttoned up his greatcoat, pulled his wool cap down over his ears, and bidding the Nickersons a brave but reluctant good night, set off for home.
It was not far from the Nickerson to the Snow home, but the night was a wild one; a night of wind and floating mist, when familiar daylight objects assumed fantastic shapes, and the road was filled with shadowy forms. Jonathan held himself in admirable check for about 100 yards. He strolled along whistling casually, but when he glanced back and could see no more the winking lights of the Nickerson house, he was casual no longer, and tore at breakneck speed down the road.
Rounding the turn that meant the halfway mark to home, in the place where the road was flanked on one side by a high stone wall and on the other by a creek which ran parallel to it, Jonathan stood stock still, blood turning to slow ice in his veins. For there, not four yards before him, gleaming in a flickering pool of moonlight that filtered through the scudding clouds, was a coffin.
Three thoughts scampered through the terrified Jonathan’s mind. He could jump the stone wall, splash through the creek, or leap over the coffin and make a dash for home and safety. And jump he did. Now a twelve-year-old Cape Cod boy can jump like a grasshopper, but Jonathan did not jump high enough. Just as he thought he had cleared the coffin, and indeed, his feet were running before they touched the ground, his ankle was clutched by a bony hand, and he was pulled right into the terrible coffin!
Reflex action and young strength bounded together simultaneously. Using all his energy, Jonathan pushed out with his hands and heels and leaped from the coffin like fat from a hot skillet. Scared near out of his wits, Jonathan broke an all-time speed record to home. There he babbled out his story to puzzled parents, who, as hardy Cape Codders, scoffed at the idea of a coffin, but decided to go and investigate anyway. So Jonathan, armed with mother and father, returned to the fateful spot, only to find that the “coffin” was a two-bushel market basket which had rolled from a peddler’s cart, and which, in the dark night, Jonathan’s aroused imagination had turned into an occupied coffin. The resident of the coffin, which Jonathan believed had clutched his ankle, was only the high basket handle which he did not clear in his leap for life.
