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tiny cot in the backroom. He slept close to the old cook stove that had been in the house since the early days of the railroad. The railroad company built all of the tiny houses in order to supply housing for railroad personnel. The employee living in each house was responsible for the maintenance of the track from his house to the next one down the line. The idea was abandoned when the danger of Indian reprisals passed. All of the little houses still belonged to the railroad, so the people living in them were squatters with no legal rights. Every year or so a representative from headquarters would inspect the tracks, but he never bothered to inspect any of the decrepit houses.
    By the time that the older boys finally got out of bed, their daddy had prepared bread and cooked some late harvest apples, that were picked from a tree down the tracks. Everyone was hungry and the aroma was tantalizing. the rain continued to be heavy outside, just as the night before. Tom was concerned that the stream would be flooding out of its banks. The footbridge that the children crossed was well above the stream, but it was old and some of its wood was in need of replacement.
    Suddenly there was a brilliant flash of lightning, followed almost instantly by a loud clap of thunder. It was unusual to have powerful thunderstorms this late in the season. Tom had always heard that thunderstorms in late October were a bad omen. He brushed the thought from his mind. The rain was falling in sheets now, but the kids were too busy eating to notice.
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    The last thing that Carl said to the other three boys on that Friday afternoon at the schoolyard, was that they would meet later that same night. He figured that old lady Boatwright probably realized that they were up to something. She should have known that she could not keep them apart after they left the school grounds. The other boys were going to meet him at his family’s barn shortly after dark.
    Sam showed up first, and Jay and James came in together. When Sam entered the barn from the side door, he told Carl that it was raining like a son of a bitch. Jay and James were cursing too, and bickering with each other, just as brothers sometimes do. The four of them had been planning Halloween tricks for three months now. Rain was not going to dampen their spirits. Hell, Sam thought to himself, it might even make everything better.
    The boys started stealing eggs, a few at a time, and catching rats and snakes in the early part of August. They even caught six opossums and a baby raccoon. Carl created a secret room in the old barn by using bales of hay, and their temporary menagerie was completely hidden there. The boys had been very careful to keep their secret. Since Halloween fell on a Monday this year, they had all weekend to play tricks on the community.
    Carl’s eyes used to sparkle when he heard his daddy talk about the Halloweens of the past. Sam’s daddy was friends with Carl’s daddy back in those days, and there were two or three other boys too,….who knows what ever happened to them? Nothing was sacred to those boys on Halloween night. They chopped down trees across the mountain roads. They broke every single window in the old schoolhouse, and they turned over outhouses throughout the community. Their greatest pleasure was turning over the outhouse of their mean old school teacher, and she was in it at the time. Everyone used to laugh until they coughed and wheezed when they talked about that episode. Carl and Sam were chips off of the old block.
    Since it was pouring rain like water out of a bucket, the boys kept their mean antics to a minimum on that Friday night. They divided the six opossums among the group. Carl kept two, Sam got two, and the brothers got the last two. Carl decided to keep the baby raccoon, because it reminded him of a bandit that he saw in a movie at the Abingdon movie house. Each boy would choose the winners of their own version of a Halloween contest. The