Dudley
Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible
pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no
straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added
strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp
oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point
midway of the block--or square, to give it its local name--then go
slanting back again to the right-hand corner of the next street
crossing, so that his path was in the pattern of one acutely slanted
zigzag after another. He was keeping, as well as he could within the
circles of radiance thrown out by the municipal arc lights as he made
for his house, there in his bedchamber to fortify himself about, like
one beset and besieged, with the ample and protecting rays of all the
methods of artificial illumination at his command--with incandescent
bulbs thrown on by switches, with the flare of lighted gas jets, with
the tallow dip's slim digit of flame, and with the kerosene wick's
three-finger breadth of greasy brilliance. As he fumbled, in a very
panic and spasm of fear, with the latchets of his front gate Squire
Jonas' wife heard him screaming to Aunt Kassie, his servant, to turn on
the lights--all of them.
That once was all, though--the only time he found the dark taking him
unawares and threatening to envelop him in thirty years and more than
thirty.
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