ing hours of nine years?

Listening to footfalls. Marking with a special emphasis of
concentration the beginning, rise, full passage, falling away, and
dying of all the footfalls. By day, by night, winter and summer and
winter again. Unravelling the skein of footfalls passing up and down
the street!

For three years he wondered when they would come. For the next three
years he wondered if they would ever come. It was during the last
three that a doubt began to trouble him. It gnawed at his huge moral
strength. Like a hidden seepage of water, it undermined (in
anticipation) his terrible resolution. It was a sign perhaps of age,
a slipping away of the reckless infallibility of youth.

Supposing, after all, that his ears should fail him. Supposing they
were capable of being tricked, without his being able to know it.
Supposing that that _cachorra_ should come and go, and he, Boaz,
living in some vast delusion, some unrealized distortion of memory,
should let him pass unknown. Supposing precisely this thing had
already happened!

Or the other way around. What if he should hear the footfalls coming,
even into the very shop itself? What if he should be as sure of them
as of his own soul? What, then, if he should strike? And what then,
if it were not that _cachorra_ after all? How many tens and hundreds
of millions of people were there in the world? Was it possible for
them all to have footfalls distinct and different?

Then they would take him and hang him. And that _cachorra_ might
then come and go at his own will, undisturbed.

As he sat there sometimes the sweat rolled down his nose, cold as
rain.

Supposing!

Sometimes, quite suddenly, in broad day, in the booming silence of
the night, he would start. Not outwardly. But beneath the pale
integument of his skin all his muscles tightened and his nerves sang.
His breathing stopped. It seemed almost as if his heart stopped.

Was that it? Were those the feet, there, emerging faintly from the
distance? Yes, there was something about them. Yes! Memory was in
travail. Yes, yes, yes! No! How could he be sure? Ice ran down into
his empty eyes. The footfalls were already passing. They were gone,
swallowed up already by time and space. Had that been that _cachorra_?

Nothing in his life had been so hard to meet as this insidious drain
of distrust in his own powers; this sense of a traitor within the
walls. His iron-gray hair had turned white. It was always this now,
from