Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

Dunstan, seeing the whole squalid meaning of his party, burst into flames. He strode to the other boy now getting out and meeting him on the shore. With a grip like that of a young gorilla, Dunstan seized the Exquisite Troop by his silken shirt collar. "Come out, you sissy," he snarled, "come out here, you piece of pallid pie-crust. You feed girls drugged candy, do you? Well, you'll get fed, fed up nicely."

But Tawny Troop was not the son of a moving-picture producer for nothing. After all there was a grand stand with two ladies in it. The Troop gesture meant something; with a sound as much like an answering snarl as he could make it, Tawny drew up in magnificent hauteur. This attitude greatly irritated the other. "Ah! Come on, you marionette," he muttered. Dunstan cast about for something that should rouse the other. "You paid escort, you Messenger Boy." It was cub rage, but it was adolescent cub, and it was somehow significant.

The girl Cinny rose slowly on her elbow staring at them with heavy eyes. Gertrude clapped her hand over her mouth to keep back a howl. The two boys clinched, and it was an ugly clinch.

Dunstan's hand went straight to the throat of the other. Here they met and the lad seemed to forget all fair rules of fighting. A look of crazy joy came into the hot brown eyes. Oh, this was a man's size job! a good thing to do. Then Dunce saw the horrible look of Tawny's face changing under his hands; yes, but was this the way? Suddenly by some strange underground channel of thought awakened by emotion, Dunstan remembered the morning in the dining-room his own jeering aside under his father's sternness and "be hanged by the neck till you are dead"—that was what his father had said when—men—when men were sentenced for murder. Terence O'Brien, poor Terry, young, young! Dunstan looked again at the face under his hands; it was colored dark; this was the right way!—to throttle like this!

Then the boy looked about at the trees, at the white faces of the girls, voiceless, and his hands, flaccid, suddenly fell away. "We'll stop," he said thickly, "we'll stop. I don't want to fight. Oh! I don't want to, don't want to fight!"

Tawny, a look of relief hiding some other look, staggered against a tree, where he gasped wretchedly. "You, you coward!" he shrieked, choking. Something like a frightened sob gulped out of him; then there was a sound of footsteps in the thicket behind them. Four forms emerged. Sard first, alert and making straight for the ready built fire, which she quickly and deftly lighted; Shipman next, and after them Colter with a small form held in his arms, covered with mud and soaked in black ooze, Minga with face and hair a mass of slime.

There was very little explanation. The fire blazed up and the little figure wrapped in rugs given something hot to drink. The others stood around and watched her. Gertrude, with a hard stare, turned in the firelight to Tawny. The girl was one cold glitter of gold snakes and swamp dark eyes. "Your fiancée?" she questioned, smiling. She was ironical. While the other party waited for Minga's resuscitation, the quartette started to get under way. But on the down-creek trip it was Tawny who paddled Gertrude's boat, and they soon outstripped Dunstan, who came more slowly with Cinny asleep at his feet.

The moon spotted the black of the forest and spread silver on the waterways. All around the slow-moving canoes were the waiting ones, the little wood creatures who come out innocently for their pure trysts and unwitting obediences to the great laws they honestly serve. These stayed cleanly apart from the canoes with their human freight, the strange mystical human beings who are torn between their two great allegiances, the animal and the spiritual. But only Dunstan saw these things, and paddled solemnly and felt like crying and wondered what serene wisdom the summer night withheld.