ng her head forward
between her lean shoulders, and on the lean shoulders and arms
receiving the blows. Heroic mother! She knew just what she was doing.
The boy, still shrieking, was making his get-away to the wagons.

And all the while the four men lay beside me and watched and made no
move. Nor did I move, and without shame I say it; though my reason was
compelled to struggle hard against my natural impulse to rise up and
interfere. I knew life. Of what use to the woman, or to me, would be
my being beaten to death by five men there on the bank of the
Susquehanna? I once saw a man hanged, and though my whole soul cried
protest, my mouth cried not. Had it cried, I should most likely have
had my skull crushed by the butt of a revolver, for it was the law
that the man should hang. And here, in this gypsy group, it was the
law that the woman should be whipped.

Even so, the reason in both cases that I did not interfere was not
that it was the law, but that the law was stronger than I. Had it not
been for those four men beside me in the grass, right gladly would I
have waded into the man with the whip. And, barring the accident of
the landing on me with a knife or a club in the hands of some of the
various women of the camp, I am confident that I should have beaten
him into a mess. But the four men _were_ beside me in the grass. They
made their law stronger than I.

Oh, believe me, I did my own suffering. I had seen women beaten
before, often, but never had I seen such a beating as this. Her dress
across the shoulders was cut into shreds. One blow that had passed her
guard, had raised a bloody welt from cheek to chin. Not one blow, nor
two, not one dozen, nor two dozen, but endlessly, infinitely, that
whip-lash smote and curled about her. The sweat poured from me, and I
breathed hard, clutching at the grass with my hands until I strained
it out by the roots. And all the time my reason kept whispering,
"Fool! Fool!" That welt on the face nearly did for me. I started to
rise to my feet; but the hand of the man next to me went out to my
shoulder and pressed me down.

"Easy, pardner, easy," he warned me in a low voice. I looked at him.
His eyes met mine unwaveringly. He was a large man, broad-shouldered
and heavy-muscled; and his face was lazy, phlegmatic, slothful, withal
kindly, yet without passion, and quite soulless--a dim soul,
unmalicious, unmoral, bovine, and stubborn. Just an animal he was,
with no more than a fain