Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

With a furious blush he shook his head as though to shake off a fatal spell; he turned to Shipman and Minga. "I—I beg your pardon; I shouldn't have spoken. It comes over me like that; I forgot for the moment."

Watts Shipman stood strangely quiet. The lawyer's look was that of a man who himself gropes for a clue and yet is suspicious. "But, yes," he said quietly, not without a slight touch of patronage, "if there is anything you want to straighten out, speak out, don't be afraid of us."

But Colter groaned. His look first of horror was altered to that of great mental struggle. The hands clenching at his side, the fine face blunted and torn by some doubt and fear; it was all too much for the girl who had rescued him. Sard started toward him; she put out her hand as to protect. "Hush!" she said, "you must not try to remember;" then, soothingly, "try to keep your mind just where it is now. Here! With us!"

The man turned slowly toward her; he straightened up obediently, looking from face to face, then all around the scene where they stood; the clear "race" murmuring about them, the little sandy shore, the tea baskets and shawls tumbled on the ground; he passed his hand over his face and, half-groaning, a baffled expression as of a half-formed word broke from his lips. "Did I frighten you?" he asked piteously. "I am afraid I frightened you. I—I was——" He groaned, and it was a groan like human tears.

Sard, who was trembling now in every limb, denied it stoutly, but Minga looked resentful and suspicious. The older girl who had originally guessed what was the matter with Colter, that complete forgetfulness had swept his mind blank of vital things, felt her own sense of dismay. That the man was not playing at this thing, that he had altogether lost his sense of personal identity, she was sure, but back of that, what lay back of that? Then with a hot shame she remembered the tenderness that had come into her voice as she said, "Hush," to this man; as if she had spoken to a child.

But now the voices down the river were coming closer. There was much far-off shouting and singing in unfinished snatches of songs; the sound of a ukulele and a mandolin played, the one with tripping assured fingers, the other very much out of tune with clumsy effort to produce harmonies. The staccato chatter and gabble of two girl voices sounded oddly in the dense woods of swamp maple; now and then shrill laughter or an artificial scream jarred on the ears of the up-stream party. Minga, still absorbed in her search for possible pearls, hardly noticed this, but Shipman, with a face as immovable as an Indian's, gave it some inquiry.

"Who are in your brother's party?" he asked at last. "Our friend Dunce of the repartee and—er—who else?"

"Oh, Cynthia Bradon," Minga returned, "and Gertrude, the girl we call the 'road hog,' you know. She's about the most modern girl I know," said Minga with an air of congratulation; "nothing stops her—she's sort of impulsive, you know, and yet crafty; it's quite a queer combination."

Shipman thought it might be a very queer combination. "There's a whopper, that mussel down there," he bared his hairy arm and reached down for it. "Looks as if there might be a whole pearl necklace in that."

But when they cut it open the pearl was too small to be of much account, so they scooped about in the dark water for others. As they worked, Minga poured out a good deal about Cynthia and Gertrude. The lively scarlet-capped girl had forgotten how all the way down South Mountain that night she had sworn to Dunstan that she hated Shipman and had called him a murderer and a man who would for sheer joy commit Terence O'Brien and any other fugitive to the electric chair for the glee of watching him done to death. Now, on her knees, she turned her sparkling blue eyes on the lawyer's dark face; they rested there like flowers magnetized by the deep stream of his being.