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.