Her eyes glowed brightly. "I know. I know. I've known those same obsessions ever since I can remember."
Doctor Spechaug felt strangely uneasy then, a kind of dreadful loneliness.
"Superstition," he said. "Our Old World background, where superstition is the rule, old, very old superstition. Frightened by them when we were young. Now those childhood fixations reveal themselves in crazy symptoms."
He took off his coat, threw it into the brush. He rolled up his shirt sleeves. No blood visible now. He should be able to catch the little local passenger train out of Glen Oaks without any trouble. But why should there be any trouble? The blood——
He thought too that he might have killed the tramp, that popping sound.
She seemed to sense his thoughts. She said quickly: "I'm going with you, Doctor."
He said nothing. It seemed part of the inevitable pattern.
They entered the town. Even for mid-morning the place was strangely silent, damply hot, and still. The 'town' consisted of five blocks of main street from which cow paths wound off aimlessly into fields, woods, meadows and hills. There was always a few shuffling, dull-eyed people lolling about in the dusty heat. Now there were no people at all.
As they crossed over toward the shady side, two freshly clothed kids ran out of Davis' Filling Station, stared at them like vacant-eyed lambs, then turned and spurted inside Ken Wanger's Shoe Hospital.