SON OF THE WIND
stairs. Entering his room, he groped his way across it, lit the lamp and looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes. His sense of the necessity for action was so keen he did not stop to think about it. His ideas seemed born with the procedure of his actions. His light was a blind to make the Raders believe him still in his room; his room itself was but a route by which he passed to the door of the outside stair. He went softly down. As he reached the foot of it, he saw the light in the living-room was out. He kept as close as he could to the wall, making a detour by the back of the house, and was startled, hurrying up into the pines, to feel the flowered carpet beneath his feet. The edge of it all but tripped him. He shuffled over it, hardly realizing what it was, passed the scholar's study and then, beyond sight of windows, began to run downward. The moon gave him a half shut eye that helped him through the trees, but running at night through a wood, and running of necessity without sound, was no easy business. With his arms now flung up to protect his face, now out to feel where the trees came, expecting each moment a branch to knock the breath out of him, or a sharp edge of rock to catch his foot, his instinct for direction stood him in good stead, carrying him straight in a long, slanting cross-cut for the edge of the road.
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