But now the voices down the river were coming closer. There was much far-off shouting and singing in unfinished snatches of songs; the sound of a ukulele and a mandolin played, the one with tripping assured fingers, the other very much out of tune with clumsy effort to produce harmonies. The staccato chatter and gabble of two girl voices sounded oddly in the dense woods of swamp maple; now and then shrill laughter or an artificial scream jarred on the ears of the up-stream party. Minga, still absorbed in her search for possible pearls, hardly noticed this, but Shipman, with a face as immovable as an Indian's, gave it some inquiry. "Who are in your brother's party?" he asked at last. "Our friend Dunce of the repartee and--er--who else?" "Oh, Cynthia Bradon," Minga returned, "and Gertrude, the girl we call the 'road hog,' you know. She's about the most modern girl I know," said Minga with an air of congratulation; "nothing stops her--she's sort of impulsive, you know, and yet crafty; it's quite a queer combination." Shipman thought it might be a very queer combination. "There's a whopper, that mussel down there," he bared his hairy arm and reached down for it. "Looks as if there might be a whole pearl necklace in that." But when they cut it open the pearl was too small to be of much account, so they scooped about in the dark water for others. As they worked, Minga poured out a good deal about Cynthia and Gertrude. The lively scarlet-capped girl had forgotten how all the way down South Mountain that night she had sworn to Dunstan that she hated Shipman and had called him a murderer and a man who would for sheer joy commit Terence O'Brien and any other fugitive to the electric chair for the glee of watching him done to death. Now, on her knees, she turned her sparkling blue eyes on the lawyer's dark face; they rested there like flowers magnetized by the deep stream of his being. "If you get a big pearl like Sard's, I'll love you--all my life," she said softly. Minga was trying the little iridescent antennæ with which a woman tests the toughness of a man's surface, but something genuine stirred in her, and when the great lawyer turned to look more closely into her face she had the grace to wince a little. "That's an engagement ring you wear, isn't it?" Watts asked cheerfully. "Some nice little cub spending his lunch money on flowers and candy for you." Minga tried to blush, but the time-honored suffusion somehow would not work; the girl's own consciousness, her involuntary registry as of something "wrong with the mechanism" did not escape the lawyer; he threw back his head and the forest rang with his glee.