Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

The music stopped with a splurge. Sard stood staring at the young fellow. "You've broken it?" her glance went quickly to Minga, who was leaving the ballroom with Shipman,—the dark head bent down to the little curly bob. "Oh-h!" Sard accused him mockingly. "You're jealous! you couldn't mean that about Minga! She's everybody's sweetheart; she always will be. Why, even my father——"

Young Troop stiffened. "I don't mind ordinary things, the game, you know—I——" Tawny had the grace to hesitate, then snapped, quite finally for one of his youth—"I like any line that's decent, but when you see your fiancée in the arms of a hired man, a tramp she's spent the whole afternoon with, why you——"

"What do you mean?" asked Sard.

Tawny Troop, a young person of not very fine instinct, had forgotten or did not know the mettle of the girl to whom he spoke.

"Oh, it's nothing against Minga; she can do what she likes, but," with insufferable American swagger, "she's forfeited the Troop jewels; she doesn't wear my brown diamonds any more, that's all." He laid a hand on Sard's arm. "Don't eat the air," he suggested.

Sard switched away from his hand; her eyes hotly repudiated him. "Do you care to explain?" the girl asked coldly. "Minga Gerould is my friend, you understand, visiting me; if you have anything to say I will hear it."

Tawny stood irresolute. He had a grudge against Dunstan Bogart; it was well to make this girl, Dunstan's sister, feel something. The alert young bantam figure of the unformed boy-of-the-world took an unlovely attitude of assured insolence. Tawny smiled, his thick lower lip in a sneer. "I've got the Gang with me," he said in a low tone. "We all know you and Minga hunt in couples; you hang together because you're peculiar in your tastes—what? Only, when that hired man of yours shows his preference for one of you, the lovey-dovey business will crack! See what I mean?"

They stood on the piazza that overhung the river. The night boat, like a great caterpillar, set with golden jewels, forged up midstream. The search-lights with their white eyes probed the bank, moving over palisade and promontory. Now a white ray picked out some millionaire's home on the east bank, now some white temple-like building on the west, now it shot up to the sky, now it rested like the long honey-sucking tube of a great moth on some arbored, flower-like cottage along the rocky shore.

The music had begun again; this time it had an Indian plaint, a long skirling cadence that might have been sung in days gone by among the rocks and trees of these very shores by a red maiden standing wrapped in her blanket on a moonlit crest or staring with great burning eyes into the rising sun. Sard saw Watts and Minga go back into the ballroom; the rose-colored light played over the little face lifted to the man's dark tenderness, Sard looked after them uneasily. "Everyone looks like that at Minga, but—but it would be different if Watts Shipman——" Sard suddenly realized the power of the personality that was shadowing Minga. Before this, the girl had seen Shipman dominate things; did he then guess the thing she herself was just learning? Were there protection and care in the grim face with its look of power and divining? Sard's eyes suddenly filled with quick tears. "I could kill Tawny," the girl told herself. "I could kill him if——" but the "if" that dwelt in her heart Sard would not allow herself to say. She looked out on the river and spoke gently to the boy at her side. She thought suddenly of Colter sitting up there in the room over the garage with his books and magnifying glass. It made her quiet. To be like Colter, calm and patient with things, that was what she must try.