git it all over mighty quick and put him underground right away, suh if you'll go along now.'

"I'll go," agreed the squire, almost quivering in his newborn eagerness. "I'll go right now." He did not wait to get his coat or to notify his wife of the errand that was taking him. In his shirtsleeves he climbed into the buggy, and the constable turned his horse and clucked him into a trot. And now the squire asked the question that knocked at his lips, demanding to be asked · the question the answer to which he yearned for and yet dreaded.

"Well, suh, that's a funny thing," said the constable. "Early this mornin' Bristow's oldest boy that one they call Buddy - he heared a cow-bell over in the swamp and so he went to look; Bristow's got cows, as you know, and one or two of 'em is belled. And he kept on followin' after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of them cypress slashes that's near the middle there; and right there he run acrost it this body.

"But, suh, squire, it wasn't no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard with a cow-bell on his neck - that's whut it was. Yes, suh; that there same old Belled Buzzard he's come back ag'in and is hangin' round. They tell me he ain't been seen round here sense the year of the yellow fever — I don't remember myself, but that's whut they tell me. The niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They say - the niggers do - that when the Belled Buzzard comes it's a sign of bad luck for somebody, shore!"

The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea hen. The squire didn't heed him. Hunched back in the buggy, he harkened only to those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the far-away, faint tonk-tonk! They were about half-way to Bristow's place then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before his companion heard it too.

The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over his shoulder.

"Well, by doctors!" he cried, "if there ain't the old scoundrel now, right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day he's got an old cow-bell hitched to his neck; and he's shy a couple of feathers out of one wing. By doctors, that's somethin' you won't see every day! In all my born days I ain't never seen the beat of that!"

Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the buggy top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard.

"Is he followin' us?" asked the squire in a curiously flat, weighted voice. "Which - him?" answered the constable, still stretching his neck. "No, he's gone now gone off to the left- jest a-zoonin', like he'd done

forgot somethin'."

And Bristow's place was to the left! But there might still be time. To get the inquest over and the body underground - those were the main

things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered and his sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in sight of Bristow's farm buildings.

The house was set on a little hill among cleared fields and was in other respects much like the squire's own house except that it was smaller and not so well painted. There was a wide yard in front with shade trees and a lye hopper and a well-box, and a paling fence with a stile in it instead of a gate. At the rear, behind a clutter of outbuildings a barn, a smokehouse and a corncrib-was a little peach orchard, and flanking the house on the right there was a good-sized cow-yard, empty of stock at this hour, with feedracks ranged in a row against the fence. A two-year-old negro child, bareheaded and barefooted and wearing but a single garment, was grubbing busily in the dirt under one of these feedracks.

To the front fence a dozen or more riding horses were hitched, flicking their tails at the flies; and on the gallery men in their shirtsleeves were grouped. An old negro woman, with her head tied in a bandanna and a man's old slouch hat perched upon the bandanna, peeped out from behind a corner. There were gaunt hound dogs wandering about, sniffing uneasily. Before the constable had the horse hitched the squire was out of the buggy and on his way up the footpath, going at a brisker step than the squire usually traveled. The men on the porch hailed him gravely and ceremoniously, as befitting an occasion of solemnity. Afterward some of them recalled the look in his eye; but at the moment they noted it — if they noted it at all subconsciously.

For all his haste the squire, as was also remembered later, was almost the last to enter the door; and before he did enter he halted and searched the flawless sky as though for signs of rain. Then he hurried on after the others, who clumped single file along a narrow little hall, the bare, uncarpeted floor creaking loudly under their heavy farm shoes, and entered a goodsized room that had in it, among other things, a high-piled feather bed and a cottage organ - Bristow's best room, now to be placed at the disposal of the law's representatives for the inquest. The squire took the largest chair and drew it to the very center of the room, in front of a fireplace, where the grate was banked with withering asparagus ferns. The constable took his place formally at one side of the presiding official. The others sat or stood about where they could find room all but six of them, whom the squire picked for his coroner's jury, and who backed themselves against the wall.

The squire showed haste. He drove the preliminaries forward with a sort of tremulous insistence. Bristow's wife brought a bucket of fresh drinking water and a gourd, and almost before she was out of the room and the door closed behind her the squire had sworn his jurors and was calling the first witness, who it seemed likely would also be the only witness Bristow's oldest boy. The boy wriggled in confusion as he sat on a canebottomed chair facing the old magistrate. All there, barring one or two, had heard his story a dozen times already, but now it was to be repeated under oath; and so they bent their heads. listening as though it were a

brand-new tale. All eyes were on him; none were fastened on the squire as he, too, gravely bent his head, listening - listening.

The witness began but had no more than started when the squire gave a great, screeching howl and sprang from his chair and staggered backward, his eyes popped and the pouch under his chin quivering as though it had a separate life all its own. Startled, the constable made toward him and they struck together heavily and went down - both on their all fours right in front of the fireplace.

The constable scrambled free and got upon his feet, in a squat of astonishment, with his head craned; but the squire stayed upon the floor, face downward, his feet flopping among the rustling asparagus greens - a picture of slavering animal fear. And now his gagging screech resolved itself into articulate speech.

"I done it!" they made out his shrieked words. "I done it! I own up- I killed him! He aimed fur to break up my home and I tolled him off into Niggerwool and killed him! There's a hole in his back if you'll look fur it. I done it — oh, I done it - and I'll tell everything jest like it happened if you'll jest keep that thing away from me! Oh, my Lawdy! Don't you hear it? It's a-comin' clos'ter and clos'ter it's a-comin' after me! Keep it away His voice gave out and he buried his head in his hands and rolled upon the gaudy carpet.

And now they all heard what he had heard first they heard the tonktonk-tonk of a cowbell, coming near and nearer toward them along the hallway without. It was as though the sound floated along. There was no creak of footsteps upon the loose, bare boards and the bell jangled faster than it would dangling from a cow's neck. The sound came right to the door and Squire Gathers wallowed among the chair legs.

The door swung open. In the doorway stood a negro child, barefooted and naked except for a single garment, eyeing them with serious, rolling eyes — and, with all the strength of his two puny arms, proudly but solemnly tolling a small, rusty cow-bell he had found in the cow-yard.

PERS

THE PENALTIES OF ARTEMIS

BY KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD (1879- >

DERSIS LAMBERT was asleep in her berth when the catastrophe came. The boat was not crowded · she was not a transatlantic liner nor yet a P. & O. in the season and Miss Lambert's aunt, with whom she was traveling, had, with her maid, a separate stateroom. The niece was the solitary occupant of her own. The alarm was sudden, and the ship's discipline none of the best. Mrs. Lambert's maid, having an eye to a legacy long promised, and the utter futility of the legacy if she did not survive, clothed her bulky, invalidish asset as well as she could and put her whole soul into dragging herself and the asset on deck. There were valuables, too, to collect in that hurried moment, for the chief asset would not stir without them.

The maid was sent to wake the young girl so much the second wife of Persis Lambert's uncle demanded of her - but it is a question whether her excited rattling of the stateroom door and her single cry did more than start Persis Lambert on a dallying path towards waking. It was, in any case, the hurrying feet on the deck above and the shouting of stewards in the corridor that made her sit up in her berth and decide to dress as quickly as ever she could. Not once throughout the whole experience did she set eyes on Mrs. Lambert or Mrs. Lambert's maid.

By the time Persis Lambert got on deck all the other women and children in the cabin had been thrust into the boats that were now dotting the moonlit sea at sparse and helpless intervals. Those of the under-officers and crew who were left on board were coping as best they could with a swirling, shrieking crowd of third-class passengers-men, chiefly. Those in command had done their best to sift out women and children from the malodorous throng that beset the narrow exits from the steerage. Stewards had been sent down to search for any left behind; but several of the stewards had gone overboard on their own account with life-belts, swimming for the boats as they pulled off. The ship was sinking in a heavy, businesslike fashion by the stern the captain on her bridge like a statue. He had lost his head, and the first mate was virtually in charge. The only thing that stuck, out of some twenty lucky years at sea, was the conviction that he must go down with his ship. His silence was extraordinary; he was posed there for death; and Persis Lambert herself, crawling and climbing up the companionway to the outer air, saw the last gesticulations of appeal made to him by his second officer who, even as she found support in a

From Harper's Magazine, December, 1915; copyright, 1915, by Harper and Bros. Republished in Valiant Dust (1922), by Katharine Fullerton Gerould; copyright, 1922, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Republished by the author's permission.

brass rail, and clung, trying to arrange her mazed thoughts, flung up his arms with a despairing oath and slid aft into the babel. He did not see her clinging to her rail.

Persis Lambert had put on a life-belt before leaving her stateroom, but she felt it impossible now to test its value. She was in that condition where the mind seems at once omniscient and useless. She perceived all the alternatives before her, with no power to act in any way a paralysis not so much of the motor nerves as of the will itself. She stood there, cramped and waiting, in a great lucid dream of indecision. To be sure, neither of the alternatives was tempting to try her luck with the screaming mongrels aft, or to climb to the deck rail and leap into the glittering black waste of sea. If it came to that, why not face the stern of the boat and wait until the ocean took her? She could not swim; it was folly for a non-swimming female to betake herself to the biggest ocean in the world before she had to. The only thing she felt like doing was climbing up on the bridge and standing beside the captain, at parade. That, too, was foolish. Yet she would move as soon as she was sure of not doing something silly.

All this, instead of being told as a sequence, should be placed before you, if that were possible, in one synthetic glimpse. These thoughts coexisted in her mind it was a pigeonholed instant, clear to perception as a small, slightly complicated picture. Her past life, contrary to precedent (for she was virtually drowning), did not, in any detail, occur to her.

Long before the thing could have been put into words, a man stood before her. He had somehow, between moonshine and crazy lantern-ray, made her out, clutching her rail close to the companionway whence she had emerged.

"Come along." There was nothing excited in his tone. He was as stolid as the Owara at her business of sinking, as the captain at his business of going down with the ship.

Persis Lambert scarcely recognized the man at her side, though she knew his name Angier. She had seen him on deck and in the diningsaloon, but they had never spoken. Mrs. Lambert - now tossing in one of those distant cockle-shells had given her niece little or no time for new acquaintances.

"Where to?"

Angier took her arm in his to steady her. "Anywhere out of this." "What was it?"

"Reef, I guess. Stove in in the wrong place. Oh, quick!" He pulled her towards the side of the ship. "Not much time. There'll be an explosion any second, probably."

"But where? I can't swim. Do you want me to jump overboard?" "You'll have to. No chance of those boats." He jerked a shoulder aft. "It's hell down there. Discipline all gone to pot. Not room for everybody. Pity about the captain." He turned for an instant and lifted his cap bridgeward with his free arm.

"Can you get into that?" Angier pointed over the side to a small boat. "It's not such a jump as it would have been an hour ago."