It took only a few hours for an exaggerated version of the attack on Dr. De Glew to reach all of Stanley. The big orderly told his wife; she told her sister who was married to a gas station worker; he in turn described the fight to a helper on the tank truck that serviced the Stanley station in competition with Gurmandy's. The two-man staff of the station plus four hangers-on and three children heard a tale of how a man who had turned into a wolf was vanquished by a seven-foot-tall Negro doctor armed with a pitch torch and how the wolf-man was even now stalking the towns in Washington, Bolivar, and Rapture counties.
By nightfall terror held full sway. No locks could withstand the assault of the killer. No weapons save the torch could fend him off. No areaway was free of his shadow nor any wooded place safe from his onslaught. Every dog's bay was the wolf cry of the maddened man.
On the plantations toward MacAllister and Skene, terrified tenants were brought to the main house by pickup truck to sleep on porches, in the kitchens, and in outbuildings. When the moon came up yellow that night over the flat land, the families in from the field gathered around a big fire and salted it with sulphur; their voices sounded low and awed drifting up to the windows of the dining room in the main house where the plantation owner ate with his own family.
Around the fire, old men talked of the days before the tall evergreen cane was felled, of how wolves as big as lions crept among the cabins and watched while the older boys went by, waiting to grab off the youngest of the toddlers amid the screams of desolated mothers.
Then the eyes of the youngsters around the fire grew wide. They sobbed and pressed up against their mothers, until one of the other men said sharply, 'Hush up, you're scaring the children.' There was silence then around the fire for a while, each with his own thoughts: of wolves who were truly men and men who were wolves.
No man rode horseback at night if he could avoid it, and no hitchhiker was offered a lift save by the foolhardy or the secret death-lover. For town dwellers, the walk in at twilight from the garage to the house seemed inordinately long and dark.
