Then again the marsh, a boat and Mazie, and after that the mysterious assailant. Then came that tragic scene, the death of poor, old Ben Zook.
The den of the underworld, the dancing girl, Jensie; the attack, Pant’s life saved by the girl, the mysterious light, mystifying darkness, then the outer air.
The building on Randolph Street, the mysterious load of chemicals, the fight with Knobs Whittaker. Flight. The fire that seemed hotter than the flames of a volcano.
“And here we are,” he whispered to himself. “How does it all connect up? Or does it? Sometimes it seems to; at others it appears not to. How is it all to end?”
Pant suddenly interrupted his reveries.
“Johnny,” he said, “men don’t know much about light, do they?”
“I suppose not, Pant.”
“Of course they don’t. It’s all sort of relative, isn’t it? If I have a torch in a dark room it seems a brilliant light. Take it into the sunlight and it dwindles to nothing. Now if an extraordinarily bright light struck your eyes for a second and the next second vanished, the lights of a room might seem no light at all, just plain darkness?”
“Possibly,” said Johnny, without really thinking much about it.
Since this was the last great night of the greatest carnival ever held in the city’s most popular pleasure resort, though the hour was late, the cares were here and there given bits of color by the costumes of pleasure-seeking revelers.