over, leaving him without will-power or strength to
move his head or shift his gaze. Over the white, plastered wall
alongside his bed an unearthly red glow sprang up, turning a deeper,
angrier red as it spread and widened. Against this background next stood
out two perpendicular masses like the broad shadows of uprights--like
the supporting uprights of a gallows, say--and in the squared space of
brightness thus marked off, depending midway from the shadow crossing it
at right angles at the top, appeared a filmy, fine line, which
undoubtedly was the shadow of a cord, and at the end of the cord dangled
a veritable jumping-jack of a silhouette, turning and writhing and
jerking, with a shape which in one breath grotesquely lengthened and in
the next shrank up to half its former dimensions, which kicked out with
indistinct movements of its lower extremities, which flapped with
foreshortened strokes of the shadowy upper limbs, which altogether so
contorted itself as to form the likeness of a thing all out of
perspective, all out of proportion, and all most horribly reminiscent.

* * * * *

A heart with valves already weakened by a chronic affection can stand
just so many shocks in a given time and no more.

* * * * *

A short time later in this same night, at about eight-forty-five
o'clock, to be exact, a man who lived on the opposite side of the
unfenced common gave the alarm of fire over the telephone. The
Chickaloosa fire engine and hose reels came at once, and with the
machines numerous citizens.

In a way of speaking, it turned out to be a false alarm. A bonfire of
leaves and brush, abandoned at dusk by the boys who kindled it, had,
after smouldering a while, sprung up briskly and, flaming high, was now
scorching the clap-boarded side of the Dramm house.

There was no need for the firemen to uncouple a line of hose from the
reel. While two of them made shift to get retorts of a patent
extinguisher from the truck, two more, wondering why Uncle Tobe, even if
in bed and asleep at so early an hour, had not been aroused by the
noise of the crowd's coming, knocked at his front door. There being no
response from within at once, they suspected something must be amiss.
With heaves of their shoulders they forced the door off its hinges, and
entering in company, they groped their passage through the empty front
room into the bedroom behind it, which was lighted af