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Mickey,” I said, pinning my hope to flattery.
    The huge beast came straight at me. I closed my eyes. There was silence. I knew I was still alive because I could feel my heart beating. Very slowly, I opened my eyes. Mickey was sitting two feet from me, tongue out, ears forward, head on one side. Behind him about twenty feet was McLeod. On top of a horse.
    “You’re early.”
    “Yes.”
    “What are the bags for?”
    “Books from school.”
    “You needn’t have brought them. I have others.” I thought,
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    Thanks a lot for telling me. McLeod’s horse was sure nervous. He kept backing and sidling and tossing his head, which was queer, because his rein wasn’t tight. I looked to see if McLeod had on some kind of a spur, which would be just like him, but he didn’t. The horse was really beautiful, a goldenly bay. Next to airplanes I like horses. “Why’s he so nervous? Your horse?”
    “Because you’re standing there. He doesn’t like strangers. Go on up to the house.”
    You could see just how psychotic the man was, I thought, as I lugged the books up that practically ninety-degree incline. Well—at least forty-five degree. I have ridden on and off most of my life whenever I could get a chance, and it’s been my observation that it’s the rider that makes a horse nervous, not some inoffensive bystander—particularly when he’s already being threatened by man’s best friend, Mickey.
    A few minutes later I came through the last clump of trees and now, in daylight, got the whole effect of the headland, with the house on it, and it was really something. At least, the view was. The house faced straight into the Atlantic, which this morning, under the early sun, was kind of a gauzy purple, a little blurred at the horizon. From where I was standing the top of the cliff seemed to jut halfway to the sky. Nothing below—the rocks, the peninsula, the harbor, and the village, which I knew were off to the right— was visible. Between me and the house was a wide stretch of grass, and dotted here and there were some trees, gnarled and bent backward.
    The house was old, you could tell by the roof and the windows and the walk on top of it. And there was something about the house, maybe because it needed a coat of paint, that made me think about that widow’s walk and how some
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    woman had walked around it for hours and days and maybe years, watching and hoping for a ship that never made it home. It was that kind of a house.
    I was standing there gawking (and resting for the umpteenth time) when I heard the sound of hooves back and to the left. Turning, I saw McLeod leap the bay over a barred gate between two trees at the end of what looked like a path going down through the trees in another direction. Then he cantered back of me to a small bam attached to the other side of the house. Dismounting, he took the horse in.
    When he came out and towards the front door I was waiting.
    “It’s open,” he said curtly.
    I opened the door and walked into the hall that I vaguely remembered from the night before. In the daylight it looked smaller. There were wide oaken floor planks, the staircase. No carpet, just a chest along one wall.
    “To your left,” McLeod said, coming up behind me.
    We went into a big room. The outside of the house might be crummy, but the inside was really together. That is, if you like books. There were two walls of them. There was also a big desk near the windows that looked over to the cliff, a table, and two big chairs.
    “Put the books there on the table,” McLeod said. He had on dark pants of some kind stuffed into rough-looking boots and a gray sweater. It was hard to tell what age he was. He was lean and athletic-looking, but his hair had as much gray scattered throughout as it did black and the half of his face that wasn’t raw steak was lined. Maybe forty, maybe fifty.
    I hauled the bags over and emptied out the books. McLeod turned them over. “All right,” he said, after a while. He