“But don't you understand that this man is here with full power from the state to put you off this island?”
“Oh, they have threated us before. But something has allus come up. We haven't been driv' off.”
“But this time it's going to happen! Why don't you wake up? Where are you going?”
“That's for somebody else to worry about. This ain't any of our picking and choosing.”
“What's the use of trying to beat anything sensible through the shells of them quahaugs?” snarled Captain Candage, with 'longcoast scorn for the inefficient.
“Not much use, I'm afraid,” acknowledged the young man. “But look at the children!”
Those pathetic waifs of Hue and Cry were huddled apart, dumb with terror which their elders made no attempt to calm. They were ragged, pitiful, wistful urchins; lads with pinched faces, poor little snippets of girls. Their childish imaginations made of the affair a tragedy which they could not understand. Under their arms they held frightened cats, helpless kittens, or rag dolls. The callous calm of the men mystified them; the weeping of their mothers made their miserable fear more acute. They stared from face to face, trying to comprehend.
“What can I say to them?” asked Polly Candage, in a whisper. “It's wicked. They are so frightened.”
“Perhaps something can be done with that agent. I'm trying to think up something to say to him,” Mayo told her.
An old man, a very old man, sat on an upturned clamhod and yawled a discordant miserere on a fiddle. His eyes were wide open and sightless. A woman whose tattered skirt only partly concealed the man's trousers and rubber boots which she wore, occasionally addressed him as “father.” She was piling about him a few articles of furniture which she was lugging out of their home; that house was the upper part of a schooner's cabin—something the sea had cast up on Hue and Cry. She was obliged to bend nearly double in order to walk about in the shelter. Dogs slinked between the feet of their masters, canine instinct informing them that something evil was abroad that day. The children staring wide-eyed and white-faced, the weeping women, the cowed men who shuffled and mumbled! Among them strode the god of the machine, curt, contemptuous, puffing his cigar! He came past Captain Mayo and his friends.