f the cold, and had to be left behind at a farm, where the
people were kind and gentle and promised to nurse them until their
companions could return for them. But the heaviest blow to all that
company was the sickness and death of the child. Tenderly the rude
sailor men nursed the little fellow one by one, and when nothing
availed to keep his sweet face among them they mourned his loss as
the worst disaster that had yet befallen them. The mother herself was
distraught, and in the madness of her agony turned on Adam and
reproached him, saying he had brought her child into this wilderness
to kill it. Adam understood her misery too well to rebuke her
ingratitude, and the same night that her babe was laid in his rest
with a cross of willow wood to mark the place of it, she disappeared
from their company, and where she went or what became of her no one
knew, for she was seen by them no more.

But next morning they were overtaken by a number of men riding hard,
and one of them was the woman's husband, and another the High Sheriff
of the Quarter. These two called on Adam to deliver up the child, and
when he told them that it was dead, and the mother gone, the husband
would have fallen upon him with his knife, but for the Sheriff, who,
keeping the peace, said that, as accessory after the fact of theft,
Adam himself must go to prison.

Now, at this the crew of the ship began to set up a woeful wail, and
to double their fists and measure the strength of nine sturdy British
seamen against that of ten lanky Icelanders. But Adam restrained them
from violence, and indeed there was need for none, for the Sheriff
was in no mood to carry his prisoner away with him. All he did was to
take out his papers, and fill them up with the name and description
that Adam gave him, and then hand them over to Adam himself, saying
they were the warrant for his imprisonment, and that he was to go on
his way until he came to the next district, where there was a house
of detention, which the guide would find for him, and there deliver
up the documents to the Sheriff in charge.

With such instructions, and never doubting but they would be
followed, the good man and his people wheeled about, and returned as
they came.

And being so easily rid of them the sailors began to laugh at their
simpleness, and, with many satisfied grunts, to advise the speedy
destruction of the silly warrant that was the sole witness against
Adam. But Adam himself said, no--t