The Waters of Kronos Read Online Free PDF Page A

boys took going home from school. Beyond, he could see Kronos Street lying peaceful, leafy and unchanged, with snug houses under the trees and the Methodist church and old tannery on opposite corners. The driver took his team and wagon across without pausing for traffic. Looking up and down the old street, the passenger could feel an almost frightening solitude. There were no headlights as far as he could see. Sleepy lights slanted from a few houses, from the post office up the hill and from stores scattered among the dwellings.
    “I’ll get off here, if I may,” John Donner said. The driver pulled up his horses but his passenger didn’t get off. “Are you acquainted in Unionville?” he asked.
    “A little.” The driver took a fresh chew.
    “Do you know any of the stores?”
    “Well, there’s Smith and Reinbold, and Kipps, Donner and Company.”
    At the latter name, the stranger felt a tightening in his chest.
    “Do you know if Harry Donner could still be living?”
    “Living! I didn’t know he was dead! I seen him a month ago up at Primrose delivering in the Patch.”
    Emotion and a certain excitement came up in John Donner. Suddenly he remembered.
    “My coat. I forgot it. I left it up in the car.”
    “You come on the railroad?” And when the other didn’t reply: “Well, first thing I noticed about you was you had no coat and no hat on. A man don’t hardly need a coat this kind of weather, but it’s unhealthy to go without your hat. It chills the brain. Now, I don’t have an extra hat but I have a coat I don’t use much. It was Jake Stroud’s. His widow gave it to me when he died. You can have it till you get yours. If you don’t mind wearing a dead man’s coat. It could turn cold on you overnight this time of year.”
    “Thank you,” the stranger said. “I’ll leave it at Donner’s store for you to pick up next time you come through.” Heclimbed down over the wheel and waited for the wagon to pass. It moved by with extraordinary slowness. The driver lifted his hand good-by. There was something strange about him, John Donner told himself, but then there had always been something strange about “die leit ivver der barrick,” the over-the-mountain people.
    He started up the Methodist church hill. How incredibly quiet and peaceful it was. Nothing had changed. The sidewalk, moist and slippery as when he was a boy, still shone faintly in the darkness, reflecting unseen light. You had to lift your feet to keep from stumbling over the unpredictable bulges where unseen roots had lifted the bricks in giant mole-like waves. He passed the house of Mr. Nagle, chief clerk for the Markles, who owned Primrose Colliery. It had the peculiar dreamlike look of certain houses when he was young, of importance without and hushed withdrawal from the world within. Across the street the white horse of Dr. Sypher, who had brought him into the world, stood hitched to the buggy, head drooping, perhaps asleep. At the top of the hill was the old post office, tinier than ever in its square boxlike building that had once been a squire’s office. It must be after six o’clock in the evening but the stamp window was still up,with Katie Gerber calmly reading someone’s paper behind the partition of call and lock boxes. No one was visible on the public side. In an hour it would be jammed with townspeople chatting to each other, waiting for the seven-thirty mail from Lebanon to be “changed,” everyone keeping an eye on his or her box not to miss when a letter or paper might be popped in.
    As he went on, someone emerged from the shadows and came toward him, a boy touching the trees as he passed, darting away from the stranger, tagging the post-office tree by sidling around it like a squirrel, then into the post office with the letter in his hand and out again almost in the same motion, returning down the street he had come. He left in the man a baffled feeling. That slender face he thought he had seen before, but where? And