Evidently deciding that he wasn’t the kind of stranger her mother had warned her about and that it would be less uncomfortable in the car than walking in the rain and mud, she nodded. Very slowly, she came around the front and climbed in at his right.
“Thanks, mister,” she said.
Shellinger started again and took a quick, sidewise glance at the girl. Her blue jeans were raggedy and wet. She must be terribly cold and uncomfortable, but she wasn’t going to let him know. She would bear up under it with the stoicism of the hill people.
But she was frightened. She sat hunched up, her hands folded neatly in her lap, at the far side of the seat right up against the door. What was the kid afraid of? Of course, the vampire!
“How far up do you go?” he asked her gently.
“’Bout a mile and a half. But that way.” She pointed over her shoulder with a pudgy thumb. She was plump, much more flesh on her than most of these scrawny, share-cropper kids. She’d be beautiful, too, some day, if some illiterate lummox didn’t cart her off to matrimony and hard work in a drafty cabin.
Regretfully, he maneuvered around on the road, got the car turned and started back. He’d miss the hunters, but you couldn’t drag an impressionable child into that sort of grim nonsense. He might as well take her home first. Besides, he wouldn’t get anything out of those uncommunicative farmers with their sharpened stakes and silver bullets in their squirrel rifles.
“What kind of crops do your folks raise—tobacco or cotton?”
“They don’t raise nothing yet. We just came here.”
“Oh.” That was all right: she didn’t have a mountain accent. Come to think of it, she was a little more dignified than most of the children he’d met in this neighborhood. “Isn’t it a little late to go for a stroll? Aren’t your folks afraid to let you out this late with a vampire around?”