Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

"The strange part of it is, Tuck, it's easy enough to get children, but to get children who shall, no matter what befalls them, be parented by high human love and faith, that is another thing." The deep eyes stared into the shallow dog eyes. "Well," sighed Shipman, "it's very seldom that I care like this. It's the beginning of autumn, that's all. You don't suppose, Tuck, that I really care?"

Yet the man knew remorselessly that in the past week things had happened about which he unutterably cared. The chance mingling with the young life of the Willow Roads had shown him to himself in a way that he could not ignore or brush aside. He was a human man, a soul and body undeveloped, unrealized, inorientate in the great human plan. He had blown, like life seed, down the dry roads of philosophy and introspection, and had lain for a while by the springs of youth and action until some hidden principle within him had germinated. Now he craved direction, fruition!

There floated through the mind of the lawyer the pictures of Minga, with her vivid capricious demands on him, her unwitting tempting of him; what would another man have done? Of what worth were his hesitations and restraints, Sard, with her high compulsions and swift fires? Why should he, Shipman, have let these fresh wonders of womanhood flit by like shadows? He groaned, knowing why—because do what he would, think what he would, Eleanor Ledyard held him. The woman of ice, the enshrined mystery of woman whom another man had called "wife," but who, Shipman believed, had never been true soul-wife, controlled his, Shipman's, deepest, most inaccessible self.

Of course, what had come to him was his own choice. There were many ways a man might take to come to grips with active life. Cowardly men, sly men or men who had not thought the thing out had taken these ways. Cynical men took them and then wondered why their lives were forever hurt by smirched and bleared life pictures, pictures that stayed in their minds. The ways of such men were not for him. Passion in its highest, most superb moments, Shipman knew himself to be capable of, but devotion, tenderness, the fair way of the approach of men and women to each other's mystery was what his nature craved. His love principle was not that of a hot moment of gratification. It was of the long, slow endeared proving of devotion. Plunged in thought, driven to his body's uttermost endurance with the sense of stirred, hungry, unsatisfied, uncompleted things, the lawyer at a footfall angrily raised his head.

"Curse it, can't I be alone?" demanded Watts unreasonably. "Get out, will you?" He did not turn his head. "Get out," he called curtly. "This is private property; can't you read the signs?"

The footfall paused and a voice came quietly, "I am Colter, Judge Bogart's man. Could you see me a few moments?"

With a smothered word the lawyer turned, smiling at his own rudeness, and held out his hand.

"I thought it was some Curiosity Bump climbing up here. I'm not at all sure this sort of life is good for one. It makes one want to hog the very air." Watts, still smiling, looked keenly into the eyes of his visitor. Suddenly he glanced about him for Friar Tuck. "Well, by all pedigreed pups," he breathed, "Tuck viséd you, did he? Let you pass? If he barked, I didn't hear him."

Colter, taking the cigarette from the case held out to him, returned the searching gaze straightly. It was Shipman's method to put any who sought him out instantly on a harmonious social ground. This was Judge Bogart's hired man. It was also Sard's protégé, but more than that it was Shipman's private enigma. The situation was tense with possibilities for both men. Colter answered without self-consciousness.

"Dogs don't always bark at everyone." He was thoughtful for a moment. Lighting the cigarette and pushing the match end under his worn canvas shoe, he remarked simply, "The only dogs I can remember barking at me are the shepherd dogs of Greece. And," laughingly indicating the little village up the river, "the dogs of Morris when I was tramping it."