ancient seat and heritage. It came up the inlet in two largish gasoline launches, moving slowly, because towing each a string of smaller fishercraft behind. Out of these boats there clambered to the shore this nation—family groups of dark-skinned beings; members of both sexes in their prime, bowed and wrinkled old women, gnarled and twisted old men, children of all ages from infancy to adolescence, with here and there papooses astride their mothers' hips. All beyond infancy were more or less grotesquely dressed in more or less of white man's clothing—oldish men with rusty frock coats above overalls; stout, squat women in calico aprons, yet wearing blankets; middle-aged men in moccasins but wearing reefers or sweaters or even celluloid collars.
Having debarked at the inlet's edge, this ancient, tiny patriarchal nation began a reconnaissance in full force. Still in family groups, carrying their children or leading them, patient with the aged tramping slowly, with bright-colored handkerchiefs about their brows, the expedition moved through the ruins and stared about with a curious look of new proprietorship in its glance. Pigeon-toed, knock-kneed, inarticulate, seeing much and saying little, the Indians ambled along the front and up Whitman Avenue to come at length to a stand before the courthouse; for their reconnaissance was by no means aimless, and they had been proceeding under escort.
This escort was a white man, tall and awkward-looking, wearing a suit of clerical blacks; a spare and bony man, with a dead white and not unhandsome face and small dark eyes that glowed with a fanatic ardor. He sheltered a shock of crisp black
