Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

He called up to the empty window. "I say, Eleanor, please bring that letter stuff down and read it here; if you've got to do the deadly thing, let me help!"

So the morning ended by her coming down, and they sat very contentedly with Pudge making paper dolls out of the envelopes his mother gave him. Eleanor, with a sort of desperate haste, tore packet after packet of letters. All those relating to her husband's early life she had said she would set aside, "something for Pudge to have." Others she tore up so vehemently, into such small pieces, that the lawyer, a mere man, wondered, and little Pudge, carrying baskets of fragments to the trash-box, thought how much Hop-o'-My-Thumb would have liked these paper fragments for his trail back to his mother. That the fragments were in reality part of the trail of a weak man, father to her sturdy little boy, made a drift like falling snow in Eleanor's heart. One letter she had saved to show to Watts, and as the lawyer read it his eyebrows went up.

When at last Shipman put down the closely written sheets he bent his deep gaze on her.

"Well, that does look as if——" he turned questioningly. "You surely don't believe Ledyard is alive," incredulously, "Martin Ledyard, the great scientific adventurer, alive and the world not know it!"

Eleanor nodded. "I've always believed it." Her eyes wandered to the bloomy-purple of the line of mountains back of them. "Of course, I never could understand why, if he was anywhere in the world, why, when that happened he didn't come to us, to George and me. And after George went, I wondered more but I've always felt him alive, in the world, somewhere."

Watts was thoughtful. "He might have been afraid; he might have thought it would hurt him some way, do you think that?"

"No," the woman lifted her head decidedly. "That's not a Ledyard trait. Martin was as devoted to George as I—almost——" She shivered a little on the word and the lawyer sadly watching her realized that that word "almost" regulated the great gulf between the deep faith of a man's loving, and the shattering blasts of a woman's power of sorrow. Eleanor was silent a moment; then she said dreamily, "They adored each other at college, camping, on expeditions, everywhere. Martin might have been crushed by George's trouble, saddened beyond words, but he wouldn't have deserted; he would have come to us if he could have!"

"But," the lawyer turned to the letter in his hand, "this chap says that nearly all of the men in that West African expedition died of smallpox. I remember that year; it was fearful along the Niger; there was a lot of red tape and the Entente governments fought over whose job it was to stamp the thing out. It swept the Congo, I know. They all died, this chap Morrow says."

Eleanor Ledyard assented. "Nearly all, but they never accounted for all. Tarrant, the man Martin loved so, went first; and after that McCall, their surgeon; very bravely, I believe. Then the Southerner who partly financed the thing, did you read that awful part where they had to send them down the Niger in the canoes made of hollowed out trees? Well, they and the natives say that six canoes came down and that they burned all the smallpox victims in quick-lime. But, you see, there was one letter from Martin himself, very distressed, out of West Africa, at Monrovia, I think, as he waited to embark for England, and he says—this letter, dated long after, sounds pretty nearly out of his head—'they are all gone but me, and I was taken from the same canoe as Tarrant. I was trying to paddle him down to a village for burial; he had been dead four days when we got there, a putrid corpse! Tarrant, my friend, my beloved brother-in-science.'"

For a long time there was silence. The man and woman sat staring at the blue Ramapo as the strange scenes of the stricken men in the tropical river drifted through their minds. At last Eleanor spoke: "And then came 'George's Trial.'" Watts saw the terrible effort it was to her to say the words, how she glanced at Pudge at her feet, and then, "George went and Martin never came to me. Nobody came to me."