Short Stories
JUST MEAT
by Jack Lo nd on
He strolled to the corner and glanced up and down the inter-
secting street, but saw nothing save the oases of light shed by
the street lamps at the successive crossings. Then he strolled
back the way he had come. He was a shadow of a man sliding
noiselessly and without undue movement through the semi-
darkness. Also he was very alert, like a wild animal in the jun-
gle, keenly perceptive and receptive. The movement of anoth-
er in the darkness about him would need to have been more
shadowy than he to have escaped him.
In addition to the running advertisement of the state of
affairs carried to him by his senses, he had a subtler percep-
tion, a feel, of the atmosphere around him. He knew that the
house in front of which he paused for a moment contained
children. Yet by no willed effort of perception did he have this
knowledge. For that matter, he was not even aware that he
knew, so occult was the impression. Yet, did a moment arise in
which action, in relation to that house, were imperative, he
would have acted on the assumption that it contained chil-
dren. He was not aware of all that he knew about the neigh-
borhood.
In the same way, he knew not how, he knew that no danger
threatened in the footfalls that came up the cross street. Before
he saw the walker, he knew him for a belated pedestrian hurry-
ing home. The walker came into view at the crossing and disap-
peared on up the street. The man that watched noted a light that
flared up in the window of a house on the corner, and as it died
down he knew it for an expiring match. This was conscious iden-
tification of familiar phenomena, and through his mind flitted
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