Then her attention centered on Margaret. She stood erect. Her face betrayed no sign of fear. Instead—she smiled!
Then, as Jennie watched, Margaret moved toward the door, opened it, and walked out into the night.
She was never seen again!
Jennie called to her frantically, but there was no reply. She had moved as one might walk in a sleep—her eyes wide open, but fixed straight before her, gazing vacantly.
Within the next three months, until about the beginning of the spring rains, other strange things occurred in the valley.
Lucy Duval met the monster at dusk one evening as she followed the path through the woods behind the Rhodes’ place. She had swooned from terror, and, recovering, fled in panic to her home, fainting again from exhaustion as she reached the door. Safely within the house, she noticed for the first time that her long hair, which had been coiled upon her head, now hung unfettered. The pins and two side-combs, which had held it in place, were missing! Aside from the shock she was uninjured.
A school child, too, saw the beast as she came from school, and while it was yet daylight. Her parents went in frantic search when she failed to arrive at the usual time, and found her cringing in terror by the roadside. Her leather school-bag, containing her books and writing materials, was nowhere to be found.
It was a very long time before the child recovered from the fright inspired by “the big hairy man” as she described the monster.
Again, on a gusty, moon-haunted night, it was heard by Jule Darien and his wife—right in their yard! Had they dared, they could have looked from the window and seen it, but instead they bolted the door of their room and lay face down upon the bed—a fact they were not at all ashamed to admit.