Not a light had appeared the length or breadth of the whole barge colony since the police launch slipped up to the _Minnie M. Baxter_ yet Skippy knew that every man and woman in Brown’s Basin was awake and watching all that had transpired. His father had told him that these strange, lawless people had a surprising faculty for learning of the law’s arrival in the inlet. And hating the law as they did, they kept silently out of its sight, nor did they want to be drawn into it through another’s troubles.