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It took his open, and remove the lid from the white cardboard box

There the bristly thing lay on its snowy tissue bed, as is stuffed in an old sofa Andrew Lemon chuckled

“Indians con, a warning Well There!”

And he fitted the new patent-leather black shining toupee to his naked scalp He tugged at it like so his cap to passers-by

The toupee fit perfectly, covering the neat coin-round hole which e ht

“Hey there, who’re you? Face’s faosh now, pass you on the street without looking twice! Why? Because, it’s gone! Darn hole’s covered, nobody’d guess it was ever there Happy New Year, man, that’s what it is, Happy New Year!”

He walked around and around his little apart, but not yet ready to open the door and surprise the world He walked by thepast there and each tihed and shook his head Then he sat down in the rocker and rocked, grinning, and tried to look at a couple of copies of Wild West Weekly and then Thrilling Movie Magazine But he couldn’t keep his right hand fro his face, tree above his ears

“Letfellow!”

He opened the fly-specked ulps fro hi

Outside in the dark hallway there was a sound like a field

“Miss Fremwell!” he said to the mirror

Suddenly the toupee was off his head and into the box as if, frightened, it had scuttled back there of itself He clapped the lid doeating cold, afraid of even the sound that wo by like a summer breeze

He tiptoed to a door that was nailed shut in one wall and bent his raw and now furiously blushing head He heard Miss Fremwell unlock her door and shut it and move delicately about her room with little tinkles of chinaware and chio-round to make her dinner He backed away from that door that was bolted, locked, latched, and driven shut with its four-inch hard steel nails He thought of the nights he had flinched in bed, thinking he heard her quietly pulling out the nails, pulling out the nails, touching at the bolts and slithering the latch … And how it always took him an hour to turn away toward sleep after that

Now she would rustle about her roorow dark The stars would be out and shining when he tapped on her door and asked if she’d sit on the porch or walk in the park Then the only way she could possibly know of this third blind and staring eye in his head would be to run her hand in a Braille-like ers had never moved within a thousand miles of that scar which was no more to her than, well, one of those pockht His toe brushed a copy of Wonder Science Tales He snorted Perhaps if she thought at all of his das and poe time back a meteor had run and hit him and vanished up there where there were no shrubs or trees, where it was just white, above his eyes He snorted again and shook his head Perhaps, perhaps But however she thought, he would see her only when the sun had set

He waited another hour, fro out theinto the warht