He went cautiously, stealthily, from room to room, made a full round of the doughnut. He never saw anybody. In some rooms there were a number of shoes on the floor, and clothes were strewn around haphazardly, the way men will do when they are living close together. Here was a pipe lying for no apparent reason in the middle of the floor. Here was a chessboard, laid out on a table with a game half completed. Everywhere there was a general sense of confusion, as if these men had suddenly dropped what they were doing and run away. The further he walked, the more he saw, the more fantastic it became. In one room he found four pairs of shoes sitting on the floor, four complete suits of clothes dropped over them exactly as if-- "Dundon!" he cried. --as if the men in the clothes had ceased to exist. III Sometime during the night the door of the truck opened and another body was laid beside Ivy on the floor. Until then Ivy had believed that whatever was going to happen at the end of this ride would be reserved for her, and she thought she knew what that happening would be. With the addition of this new body, however, which was also a girl, Ivy was not so sure. She was completely paralyzed and she could not move a finger. Beside her the other girl did not move either. But she, this other one, was also young and pretty, and Ivy began to think through her terror. Rape, to Ivy's mind, was the most likely possibility. She fled from the thought. That she was being abducted for other, more permanent reasons was also possible, but she had no idea what they could be. Kidnapping for ransom money was out of the question. Her parents were not wealthy and she herself had only about thirty-three dollars in the bank. The only other thing she could think of was that she was being abducted into white slavery. She made a futile attempt to scream. Two more bodies, both young girls, joined her in the truck before morning. White slavery began to look horribly believable. At last the morning came and the truck stopped, and the doors at the rear were thrown open. Ivy was the first to be lifted out. She found herself being carried up the side of a heavily wooded hill, toward a long low house half-hidden in the pines. She had a chance to look at the man who carried her, and at the other men who were gathered at the back of the truck, and one thing struck her immediately. All of the men were old. And they all looked strangely alike. They were quite small and round-shouldered, every one of them, with large peculiar eyes and thickly lined faces. There was about them an almost brotherly resemblance, particularly about the nose, which was invariably tiny, thin and sharp, like a small beak. The eerie regularity of their faces was unnerving. She began to realize that there was something here which was more than just abduction.