He hurried along the sidewalk toward Maple Street. At the corner of the square was a drug store with gas jets flaring behind two glass globes—one red, the other blue—the two dragonish eyes of the monstrous long shape of the block looming behind and over them. All the blocks around seemed unnaturally huge. They crowded close to the street, and stared down at him with their ghastly blank windows—nervous, startled fronts of buildings that shivered and echoed to the sound of his steps. There were no other sounds now but a small whispering wind, and his own steps and their pursuing echoes. The red and blue globes in the corner drug store glared intolerably. As he passed they began suddenly to flow and whirl all over their glassy slopes.
He turned to the right, past the great brick Ward School building, out of Easter Street into Buckeye Street, which was only an unpaved road; and here his feet made no noise in the dust; neither were there any lights; so that he went softly in the darkness. A row of little wooden shanties were on the right, and on the left the mass of the Ward School building. Still higher, the roof of a steepleless church, whose apse overhung the empty lot behind the school, rose up, splitting the sky with its black wedge. In front of him were the buildings of the Beck Carriage Factory, bigger than church and school together. The vacant spaces between them, these buildings and shanties, were by day overflowed with light, overrun by school children and factory hands, over-roared by the tumult of the nearby thoroughfares of Bank and Maple Streets. By night they were the darkest and stillest places in Port Argent. One man might pass another, walking in the thick dust of the cart road and hardly be aware of him. It was too dark to see the rickety fence about the schoolyard, or make out the small sickly maples.
He came to a sidewalk with a curb, and saw up the hill to the left the dim glow from the lights of Maple Street, and went toward them. At the corner of Maple Street he stopped and thrust his head cautiously around the angle of the building.
A block below, a policeman stood in the glare of the arc light, swinging his club slowly by its cord, and looking around for objects of interest, not apparently finding anything of the kind. Allen drew back his head.
It might be better to go back and cross Bank Street at another point and so come to the bridge along the docks by the river. It would take some time. He would have to pass an electric light in any case.
Footsteps were approaching on Maple Street from the other direction. Presently four men appeared on the other corner and crossed to the corner where he stood flattened against the wall, and in the shadow. All walked unsteadily, with elaborate care. Two of them maintained a third between them. The fourth followed a few paces in the rear.
As they passed, Allen pulled his cap over his eyes, and dropped in behind them, and so they approached Bank Street, and he drew close to the three in front.
“Hullo!” said the policeman calmly; “jagged?”
“Say!” exclaimed the maintainer on the left, stopping; “tha's mistake. Smooth as silk. Ain't it?”
“You're out late, anyhow,” said the policeman.