"But I wouldn't shoot a colt. I wouldn't be so mean," she declared, her eyes full of tears.
"You had rather shoot merely a man," Shattuck suggested, lightly.
"We ought to have you bound over to keep the peace, Mrs. Yates." Rhodes resumed his note of severity.
"For I have the permission of the owner of the land to open the graves and to search for curiosities and relics, and I shall do so, relying on the protection of the law," Shattuck added.
"You'd better do like ye done the t'other night," Letitia put in, unexpectedly; "kem whenst all be asleep."
Shattuck turned a look of questioning amazement upon her.
"Oh, I hearn ye!" she said, impatient of the denial in his face—"I hearn yer pickaxe a-striking inter the ground agin the rock coffins o' the Leetle People."
Once more Rhodes looked ill at ease. A strange ghoulish guest this seemed even to his standpoint of superior education—to haunt the vicinage of those pygmy graves in the light of the midnight moon.
But Shattuck's face had a distinct touch of anxiety upon it. "Why, who could that have been?" he exclaimed, with so genuine a note of surprise that Rhodes's suspicion was disarmed.
"Never mind, never mind," he said, with his coarse jocularity; "there'll be a few pygmies left for you, I'll be bound! Come along, we must be getting home."