And all the while the four men lay beside me and watched and made no move.  Nor did I move, and without shame I say it; though my reason was compelled to struggle hard against my natural impulse to rise up and interfere.  I knew life.  Of what use to the woman, or to me, would be my being beaten to death by five men there on the bank of the Susquehanna?  I once saw a man hanged, and though my whole soul cried protest, my mouth cried not.  Had it cried, I should most likely have had my skull crushed by the butt of a revolver, for it was the law that the man should hang.  And here, in this gypsy group, it was the law that the woman should be whipped.

Even so, the reason in both cases that I did not interfere was not that it was the law, but that the law was stronger than I. Had it not been for those four men beside me in the grass, right gladly would I have waded into the man with the whip.  And, barring the accident of the landing on me with a knife or a club in the hands of some of the various women of the camp, I am confident that I should have beaten him into a mess.  But the four men were beside me in the grass.  They made their law stronger than I.

Oh, believe me, I did my own suffering.  I had seen women beaten before, often, but never had I seen such a beating as this.  Her dress across the shoulders was cut into shreds.  One blow that had passed her guard, had raised a bloody welt from cheek to chin.  Not one blow, nor two, not one dozen, nor two dozen, but endlessly, infinitely, that whip-lash smote and curled about her.  The sweat poured from me, and I breathed hard, clutching at the grass with my hands until I strained it out by the roots.  And all the time my reason kept whispering, “Fool!  Fool!” That welt on the face nearly did for me.  I started to rise to my feet; but the hand of the man next to me went out to my shoulder and pressed me down.

“Easy, pardner, easy,” he warned me in a low voice.  I looked at him.  His eyes met mine unwaveringly.  He was a large man, broad-shouldered and heavy-muscled; and his face was lazy, phlegmatic, slothful, withal kindly, yet without passion, and quite soulless—­a dim soul, unmalicious, unmoral, bovine, and stubborn.  Just an animal he was, with no more than a faint flickering of intelligence, a good-natured brute with the strength and mental caliber of a gorilla.  His hand pressed heavily upon me, and I knew the weight of the muscles behind.  I looked at the other brutes, two of them unperturbed and incurious, and one of them that gloated over the spectacle; and my reason came back to me, my muscles relaxed, and I sank down in the grass.

My mind went back to the two maiden ladies with whom I had had breakfast that morning.  Less than two miles, as the crow flies, separated them from this scene.  Here, in the windless day, under a beneficent sun, was a sister of theirs being beaten by a brother of mine.  Here was a page of life they could never see—­and better so, though for lack of seeing they would never be able to understand their sisterhood, nor themselves, nor know the clay of which they were made.  For it is not given to woman to live in sweet-scented, narrow rooms and at the same time be a little sister to all the world.