The Seattle citizenry, for the first time in some weeks, recalled the existence of the stars.  These emerged in legions and armies, all the way from the finest diamond dust to great, white spheres that seemed near enough to reach up and touch.  Little forgotten stars that had hidden away since Heaven knows when in the deepest recesses of the skies came out to join in the celebration.  Aged men, half blind, beheld so many that they thought their sight was returning to them, and youths saw whole constellations that they had never beheld before.  They continued their high revels until a magnificent moon rose in the east, too big and too bright to compete with.

It was not just a crescent moon, about to fade away, or even a rain moon—­one of those standing straight up in the sky so that water can run out as out of a dipper.  It was almost at its full, large and nearly round, and it made the whole city, which is rather like other cities in the daylight, seem a place of enchantment.  It was so bright that the electric signs along Second Avenue were not even counter-attractions.

No living creature who saw it remained wholly unmoved by it.  Wary young men, crafty and slick as foxes, found themselves proposing to their sweethearts before they could catch themselves; and maidens who had looked forward to some years yet of independent gaiety found themselves accepting.  Old tom-cats went wooing; old spinsters got out old letters; old husbands thought to return and kiss their wives before venturing down to old, moth-eaten clubs.  Old dogs, too well-bred to howl, were lost and absent-minded with dreams that were older than all the rest of these things put together.

But to no one in the city was the influence of the moon more potent than to Ben Darby, once known as “Wolf” Darby through certain far-spreading districts, and now newly come from the State capital, walking Seattle’s streets with his ward and benefactor, Ezra Melville.  No matter how faltering was his memory in other regards, the moon, at least, was an old acquaintance.  He had known it in the nights when its light had probed into his barred cell; but his intimate acquaintance with it had begun long, long before that.  Not even the names that the alienist, Forest, had spoken—­the names of places and people close to his own heart—­stirred his memory like the sight of the mysterious sphere rolling through the empty places of the sky.  It recalled, clearer than any other one thing, the time and place of his early years.

He could not put into words just how it affected him.  From first to last, even through his days of crime, it had been the one thing constant—­the unchanging symbol—­that in any manner connected his present with his shadowed past.  It had served to recall in him, more than any other one thing, the fact that there was a past to look for—­the assurance that somewhere, far away, he had been something more than a reckless criminal in city slums.