It broke the charm. Fur
everybody jumped. I jumped myself. When the
end of the world comes and the earth busts in the
middle, it won't sound no louder than that bang
did. It was a wooden shutter. The wind was ris-
ing outside, and it flew open and whacked agin'
the building.
Then a big, heavy-set man that hadn't spoke
before riz up from one of the hind seats, like he had
heard a dare to fight, and walked slowly down
toward the front. He had a red face, which was
considerable pock-marked, and very deep-set eyes,
and a deep voice.
"Since when," he says, taking up his stand a
dozen feet or so in front of the doctor, "since when
has any civilization refused to commit murder when
murder was necessary for its protection?"
One of the top glasses of that window was out,
and with the shutter open they come a breeze through
that fluttered some strips of dirty-coloured papers,
fly-specked and dusty and spider-webbed, that
hung on strings acrost the room, jest below the
ceiling. I guess they had been left over from some
Christmas doings.
"My friend," said the pock-marked man to the
doctor--and the funny thing about it was he didn't
talk unfriendly when he said it--"the word you
insist on is just a WORD, like any other word."
They was a spider rousted out of his web by that
disturbance among the strings and papers.
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