to their
homes, holding them through the rights of the squatter-law, which
conceded them the use of the land when once they raised a hut upon it.
Sterner and sterner the authorities of Ithaca had made the game laws
until the fishermen, to get the food upon which they lived, dared only
draw their nets by night. In the winter whilst the summer residents were
to be found again in the city, Nature herself made harder the lot of
these squatters, by sealing the lake with thick ice, but they faced the
bitter cold and frozen surroundings with stolid indifference.

A grim silence had reigned during which the three men had worked with
feverish haste, driven on by the vicissitudes of their unwholesome
lives. Moving his crooked legs upon the hot sand and closing a red lid
over one white blind eye, Ben Letts spoke viciously.

"Tess air that cussed," said he, "that she keeps on saying fishes can
feel when they gets cut. She air worse than that too."

"And she do say," put in Jake Brewer, grasping a large pickerel and
thrusting his blade into its quivering body after removing the scales,
"that it hurts her insides to see the critters wriggle under the knife.
She air that bad too."

Ben Letts scratched his head tentatively.

"She ain't had no bringin' up," he resumed, again plying the
sharp-bladed knife to his scaly victims, "and they do say as how when
she air in a tantrum she'll scratch her dad's face, jumpin' on his back
like a cat. Orn air a fool, I say."

"So says I too," agreed Brewer; "no wonder his shoulders air humped. But
you never hears as much as a grunt from him. He knows he ain't never
give her no bringin's up, that's why."

"Some folks has give their kids bringin's up," interposed Ben Letts with
a glance at the third man, who was industriously cleaning fish and had
not yet spoken. "And they hain't turned out no better than Tessibel
will."

At this the industrious one turned.

"I spose ye be a hittin' at my poor Myry, Ben," he muttered. "I spose ye
be, but God'll some time let me kill the man, and then ye won't be
hittin' at her no more, 'cause there won't be nothin' to hit at. It air
dum hard to keep a girl from the wrong way, love her all ye will."

For an instant Ben Letts dropped his head.

"We always wondered who he was, but more wonder has been goin' on why ye
ain't made no offer to find the fellow."

"Ain't had no time," said the desperate cleaner of fish; "had to get
bread and beans, to say nothin'