But Mayo discovered promptly an especial reason for the calmness
exhibited by these men. Their slow minds had not wakened to full
comprehension.
"What do you men propose to do?" demanded Captain Mayo of a group which
had abandoned the commissioner and had strolled over to inspect the
new-comers.
"There ain't nothing we can do," stated a spokesman.
"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.