“How can you say you aren’t a traitor?” Chick challenged, motioning with the paper he clutched, keeping the table between himself and the man he no longer trusted, watchful, alert, angry.
“What’s that, you got there?” asked Doc, making an effort to get to his feet. He fell back, groaning, and Chick, in some surprise, noted that there was a handkerchief made into a rude bandage about his head.
“You know, well enough!” Chick spoke through the rumble and thud of thunder whose echoes reminded him of heavy cannon balls rolling along on cleats fastened to an inclined trough, as thunder was simulated in the local motion picture house for one of its “sound effects.”
“I never saw that, what you got, no I never!” declared Doc. “Here I come in the swamp, I do, for salt water weed to mix my herbs, and I see a storm coming fast, I do, and shelter here.”
“That’s good!” scoffed Chick.
“It’s truth, it is so! I come here, I do, and—” his face, in the spectral yellow gleams from the lantern, and the contrasting glare of intermittent lightning showing through the door, looked pale and weird, “—and I see—something I never thought I’d see outside of a nightmare, so I do——”
Chick’s attention was arrested.
“What do you mean,” he demanded. “‘See what you wouldn’t see outside of a nightmare!’ What is that!”
“I can’t tell you, that I can’t! It was—too awful!”
Quickly Chick recovered from his momentary dismay. The man was trying to divert him from his accusation, he decided.