At one o'clock that morning, Jud Crandall's telephone rang, shrilling in the empty house, starting him awake. In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B & A coupling shed with George Chapin and René Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey -- jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it -- while outside a nor'easter blew its randy shriek over the world, silencing all that moved, including the rolling stock of the B & A railroad. So they sat and drank around the potbellied Defiant, watching the red glow of the coals shift and change behind the cloudy isinglass, casting diamond-shaped flame shadows across the floor, telling the stories which men hold inside for years like the junk treasures boys store under their beds, the stories they store up for nights such as this. Like the glow of the Defiant, these were dark stories with a glow of red at the center of each and the wind to wrap them around. He was twenty-three, and Norma was very much alive (although in bed now, he had no doubt; she would not expect him home this wild night), and René Michaud was telling a story about a Jew peddler in Bucks-port who --

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