So that's why, son, you've been seein' them lights
a-blazin'. I've been seein' 'em myself fur goin' on twenty year or more,
I reckin 'tis by now, and I've got used to 'em. But I ain't never got
over wonderin' whut kind of thoughts he must have over there all alone
by himself at night with everything lit up bright as day around him,
when by rights things should be dark. But I ain't ever asted him, and
whut's more, I never will. He ain't the kind you could go to him astin'
him personal questions about his own private affairs. We-all here in
town just accept him fur whut he is and sort of let him be. He's whut
you might call a town character. His name is Mr. Dudley Stackpole."
In all respects save one, Squire Jonas, telling the inquiring stranger
the tale, had the rights of it. There were town characters aplenty he
might have described. A long-settled community with traditions behind it
and a reasonable antiquity seems to breed curious types of men and women
as a musty closet breeds mice and moths. This town of ours had its town
mysteries and its town eccentrics--its freaks, if one wished to put the
matter bluntly; and it had its champion story-teller and its champion
liar and its champion guesser of the weight of livestock on the hoof.
There was crazy Saul Vance, the butt of cruel small boys, who deported
himself as any rational creature might so long as he walked a straight
course; but so surely as he came to where the road forked or two streets
crossed he could not decide which turning to take and for hours angled
back and forth and to and fro, now taking the short cut to regain the
path he just had quitted, now retracing his way over the long one, for
all the world like a geometric spider spinning its web.
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