The following few Thursdays, we put up no fight, but I did notice that the old man’s fingers were not at all talonlike. They were short and stubby, with bulging knuckles.

Then one Thursday afternoon about three months after we had bought the first, fatal two dozen, my mother decided, everything having gone wrong that day, that she would put her foot down once and for all.

“Now look here,” she said, “I’m buying no apples from that old fellow today. Even if I wanted them, I wouldn’t buy them. Even if he breaks the door down, I won’t answer it.”

Derry and I exchanged a glance of anticipation. We were going to pretend we weren’t in. We had done that before when unwanted callers came, and we enjoyed it very much. We liked keeping rigidly quiet, listening to the futile knocking at the front door, and we especially enjoyed having our mother at our mercy for those few minutes, because we all felt sure that the least squeak we made, no matter where we were in the house, would betray us to the straining ears outside. Then there was always the sense of triumph when at last we heard our little gate clang shut again and knew that we had defeated our enemy. This time, however, there was an extra suspense that we could not have explained. We were all in the kitchen when the old man’s knock came. Our kitchen was separated from our front door only by the length of a small, narrow hall, so we shut the kitchen door. We heard the first knock, and then the second, and then the third. Finally, the old man knocked several times more in rapid succession. Derry and I began to reel around, giggling helplessly, and my mother gave us a reproachful look. She was distressed anyway.

A familiar scratching noise came to our ears, and we gazed at one another, aghast.

“He must have got in somehow,” my mother said in a fearful whisper.

I opened the kitchen door very gradually. “He’s got his hand in the letter box,” I whispered over my shoulder to the others.

In the middle of the front door there was a wide slot through which the postman pushed letters and papers so that they fell inside on the hall floor. On the outside, the slot was protected by a brass flap, and the old man had lifted this and was trying to peer into the hall. We knew very well that the slot gave only a limited and indistinct view of the hall, but we were unreasonably startled to realize that he had found an opening in the house. Suddenly he began to shout through the slot.

“He’s roaring mad!” Derry whispered. “He’ll kill us all.”

“Can you make out what he’s saying?” asked my mother, who was appalled.

“He’s saying, ‘Apple, apple, apple,’ ” I said.