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Avory allowed them to row about for an hour before lunch. This they did, Robert and Mary and Horace and Hester in the Hermione, and Janet and Gregory and Jack in the Rosalind. After lunch, while they were waiting about in the hall looking at the pictures, and not quite sure what to do, Mr. Imber of Philadelphia approached them. "I wonder," he said, "if you would do me a favour.
"It be there on the paper, the things we did. We were old men, and we did not understand. Even I, Imber, do not now understand. Secretly we slew, and continued to slay, for with our years we were crafty and we had learned the swiftness of going without haste.
Imber had said nothing about the postcards being strictly of Stratford-on-Avon, he had bought only what pleased himself: all being what are called comic cards dreadful pictures of mothers-in-law, and twins, and surprised lovers. Mr. Imber laughed, and told him to keep them.
"Mebbe so, mebbe so," said Jimmy, returning to Imber, who still demanded the chief man of the white men. He was a stalwart young fellow, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, legs cleanly built and stretched wide apart, and tall though Imber was, he towered above him by half a head.
He was a romantic little chap, and he likened the immobile old heathen to the genius of the Siwash race, gazing calm-eyed upon the hosts of the invading Saxon. The hours swept along, but Imber did not vary his posture, did not by a hair's-breadth move a muscle; and Dickensen remembered the man who once sat upright on a sled in the main street where men passed to and fro.
"As the hunter looks upon the snow and says, Here but yesterday there passed a rabbit; and here by the willow scrub it stood and listened, and heard, and was afraid; and here it turned upon its trail; and here it went with great swiftness, leaping wide; and here, with greater swiftness and wider leapings, came a lynx; and here, where the claws cut deep into the snow, the lynx made a very great leap; and here it struck, with the rabbit under and rolling belly up; and here leads off the trail of the lynx alone, and there is no more rabbit, as the hunter looks upon the markings of the snow and says thus and so and here, dost thou, too, look upon the paper and say thus and so and here be the things old Imber hath done?"
And thou shalt understand and say if it be true talk or talk not true. It is so commanded." Howkan had fallen among the mission folk and been taught by them to read and write. In his hands he held the many fine sheets from which the man had read aloud and which had been taken down by a clerk when Imber first made confession, through the mouth of Jimmy, to Captain Alexander. Howkan began to read.
Them also I slew, and left them to the wolverines. And at the Five Fingers there was a man with a raft and much meat." At the moments when Imber paused to remember, Howkan translated and a clerk reduced to writing. The court-room listened stolidly to each unadorned little tragedy, till Imber told of a red-haired man whose eyes were crossed and whom he had killed with a remarkably long shot.
He read at hazard from the document: "In that year, before the break of the ice, came an old man, and a boy who was lame of one foot. These also did I kill, and the old man made much noise " "It be true," Imber interrupted breathlessly, "He made much noise and would not die for a long time. But how dost thou know, Howkan? The chief man of the white men told thee, mayhap?
And while they centred 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.
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