ested. Often he saw these
boats turn aside from the street and enter the flooded square that
marked the Barracks' parade-ground. Sometimes they disappeared beneath
him, and he heard them jar against the house-logs and their occupants
scramble in through the window. After that came the slush of water
against men's legs as they waded across the lower room and mounted the
stairs. Then they appeared in the doorway, with doffed hats and
dripping sea-boots, and added themselves to the waiting crowd.

And while they centered their looks on him, and in grim anticipation
enjoyed the penalty he was to pay, Imber looked at them, and mused on
their ways, and on their Law that never slept, but went on unceasing, in
good times and bad, in flood and famine, through trouble and terror and
death, and which would go on unceasing, it seemed to him, to the end of
time.

A man rapped sharply on a table, and the conversation droned away into
silence. Imber looked at the man. He seemed one in authority, yet Imber
divined the square-browed man who sat by a desk farther back to be the
one chief over them all and over the man who had rapped. Another man by
the same table uprose and began to read aloud from many fine sheets of
paper. At the top of each sheet he cleared his throat, at the bottom
moistened his fingers. Imber did not understand his speech, but the
others did, and he knew that it made them angry. Sometimes it made them
very angry, and once a man cursed him, in single syllables, stinging and
tense, till a man at the table rapped him to silence.

For an interminable period the man read. His monotonous, sing-song
utterance lured Imber to dreaming, and he was dreaming deeply when the
man ceased. A voice spoke to him in his own Whitefish tongue, and he
roused up, without surprise, to look upon the face of his sister's son,
a young man who had wandered away years agone to make his dwelling with
the whites.

"Thou dost not remember me," he said by way of greeting.

"Nay," Imber answered. "Thou art Howkan who went away. Thy mother be
dead."

"She was an old woman," said Howkan.

But Imber did not hear, and Howkan, with hand upon his shoulder, roused
him again.

"I shall speak to thee what the man has spoken, which is the tale of the
troubles thou hast done and which thou hast told, O fool, to the Captain
Alexander. And thou shalt understand and say if it be true talk or talk
not true. It is so commanded."

Howkan had fallen among