Pursuivant, however, seemed well recovered. He kicked together some bits of kindling at the roadside. Then he asked me for a match—perhaps to make me rally my sagging senses as I explored my pockets—and a moment later he had kindled a comforting fire.
"Now," he said, "we're probably safe from any more attention of that bunch. And our fire can't be seen from the lodge. Sit down and talk it over."
Jake was mopping a face as white as tallow. His spectacles mirrored the firelight in nervous shimmers.
"I guess I didn't dream the other night, after all," he jabbered. "Wait till I tell Mister Varduk about this."
"Please tell him nothing," counseled Judge Pursuivant at once.
"Eh?" I mumbled, astonished. "When the non-shapes——"
"Varduk probably knows all about these things—more than we shall ever know," replied the judge. "I rather think he cut short his walk across the front yards so that they would attack me. At any rate, they seemed to ooze out of the timber the moment he and I separated."
He told us, briefly, of how the non-shapes (he liked and adopted my paradox) were upon him before he knew. Like Jake two nights before, he felt an overwhelming disgust and faintness when they touched him, began to faint. His last voluntary act was to draw the blade in his cane and drive it into the ground, as an anchor against being dragged away.
"They would never touch that point," he said confidently. "You found that out, Connatt."
"And I'm still amazed, more about that fact than anything else. How would such things fear, even the finest steel?"