The Smiling Dogs

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The setting for the scene was a little like the setting for a nightmare. It was about the time to have nightmares, too — almost twelve o’clock at night.

You know how, in nightmares, you sometimes seem to see long vistas, with horror at the other end? Or endless lines of walls around you, shutting you in with fear? Or interminable flights of stairs with some devil coming up them a step at a time after you?

Well, it was the latter with Spencer Sewell.

Sewell was looking down the endless stairs, straight at terror. It took Sewell a minute to realize that this was not a nightmare, and that the stairs really existed.

They were the long, long stone steps leading down from the Capitol Building into Capitol Park.

And it also took Sewell a minute to realize that he was not having nightmares, even though he was practically asleep on his feet.

Sewell had been in the Capitol Building, in a cloakroom near the Senate wing, since ten o’clock that morning. He had been there with Senator Burnside. Sewell was Burnside’s secretary; and when Burnside was busy, which he had been that day, seeing countless people and working on several plans, then Sewell was busy, too.

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