Page:Frank Owen - Rare Earth, 1931.djvu/92

 If only he could flee from it to a place where there was eternal light.

"Eternal light," mechanically he repeated the phrase over and over again. "Eternal light. Why, that must be death. No, death cannot be light. Death is this awful grim place of blackness in which I live."

He must get out into the fields. He must get away, keep moving onward, onward. Although he did not know it his mother had once attempted to flee from the wraiths of mist and fog that engulfed the house upon a certain day. She was trying to escape from those drifting clouds of gray menace.

Scobee wished to flee not from a gray menace but a black, a black morass that was limitless.

Cautiously so as to make no sound he felt his way down the stairs and out through the open door into the fields. The doors of the Trent homestead were always open during the spring and summer so that the smell of the fields might pervade the house.

At last Scobee was out in the road but still