face seemed drained of every drop of blood.She stared at her husband and then at Martha with round frightened eyes."I had forgotten," she said softly. "The date on your ticket reminds me. That crash was just a year ago tonight!"

THE VAMPIRE BAT

I was in the Amazon collecting background material for a projected series of stories and travel articles and I was to join a government exploring party at a small native settlement two hundred miles north of Cuyaba.When I arrived at the settlement I was very much surprised to see a white man sitting on the screened-in veranda of a shack some distance from the huddle of native huts. The government party was not due to arrive until the next day, and I had no idea that a white man was living at the settlement.He walked out to meet me and introduced himself as Cecil Hubbers. He said that he had been staying at the settlement for nearly six months and that he represented a South American pharmaceutical firm which was endeavoring to establish a permanent base in that area.He was middle-aged, gaunt and faded-looking, with an expression of chronic weariness etched on his wan face. A huge, high-crowned straw hat accentuated the strained lines of his pinched countenance. He acted jumpy and nervous.He was certainly a pathetic figure, and I felt sorry for him, but he seemed sincerely glad to see me and he was hospitable enough.After I had washed and taken some food, I sat on his screened porch and he talked. He said that except for the natives he was alone for months at a time. The company he worked for had parties further in the interior but they remained in the jungles for long periods, collecting roots and herbs and bark which were used to concoct precious drugs.He had come down from Panama some years before with a fair grubstake, he said, but he had lost his money in a mining venture and since then he had drifted from one poor-paying job to another. When the pharmaceutical company offered him work at the settlement, he was flat broke and he had accepted it.His job was easy enough. He had to store and check supplies, list and pack outgoing raw materials and recruit and pay the native guides. But it was obvious to me that there was some aspect of the job, or of the locale, which he detested.After he had talked for nearly an hour, I finally learned what was preying on his mind. He lived in constant fear of a vampire bat which he said was systematically draining him of blood and life. I say bat, not bats, because he had a weird conviction that a single bat was to blame.When he first mentioned the bat, he made some effort to describe his predicament in a detached and objective manner, but it was impossible for him to do so. He 

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