Richard, Eldest Statesman, gazed in dark reflection upon the prisoner,
meditating her sentence; the prisoner, young enough to tremble in the
suspense, old enough to enjoy the nerve-tension and the moment of
drama, gazed back at him. Her hair lay in damp rings, and hung in
rats'-tails about her forehead. Her small face, with the silver-clear
skin, stippled here and there with tiny freckles, was faintly flushed,
and moist with the effort of her last great but unavailing run for
freedom; her wide eyes were like brown pools scooped from the brown
flow of the Ownashee.
"I adjudge," said Richard, in an awful voice, "that the prisoner shall
amass three buckets of the best gravel. The same to be taken from the
shallow by the seventh stepping-stone."
The prisoner's little brown arm, with a hand thin and brown as a
monkey's, went up; the recognised protest.
"Not the seventh, most noble Samurai," she said, anxiously; "Won't it
do from the strand?"
"I have spoken," replied the Eldest Statesman, inflexibly.
"Then I won't!" exclaimed Christian; "I--I couldn't! The river giddys
me so awfully when I stand still on the stones--"
"Prisoner!" returned Richard, "once the law is uttered, it can't be
unuttered! Off you go!"
"Well then, and I _will_ go!" said Christian, with a wriggle so
fierce and sudden that it loosed the grip of her guards.
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