Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/230

 constant efforts to trap them and drive them out with maledictions.

There were two oil stoves and parts of a third one in the corner opposite the kitchen box. Besides these oil stoves were old and rusty oilcans, two containing glass bottles—household oil cans. A third contained kerosene. Over the oil stoves were sections of several patches, for every once in a while, during the painful cooking operations, there would be a flare up. Storit would lose some of his whiskers, some of his hair, and some of his eyebrows. Nevertheless, he always had managed to save his canvas from burning, probably because some of the waterproofing which he spread on the canvas was partly waterproof—an asphalt composition, say.

Thus Storit lived in tatters and rags, a glittering-eyed human reptile at one time and a whipped cur at another. He was a little man of shrunken figure and shrunken mind, but in the late years he also had been a feeble-minded man in addition to his paucity of ideas and narrowness of vision—feeble in the sense that at times he had no control over himself, clouded by visions and streaks of perversity, during which periods he acted but without knowing what he did, nor could he remember what took place during those spells.

His spells exasperated him a good deal. There