And even now, as the night comes, and the shadows
gather round,
And you tell the old-time story, I can almost hear
the sound
Of the horses' hoofs in the silence, and the voices of
struggling men;
For the night is the same forever, and the time
comes back again.
—JAMES W. STEELE
FROM the beginning of things in the Walnut Valley, the Kickapoo Corral had its uses. Nature built it to this end. The river course follows the pattern of the letter S faced westward instead of eastward. The upper half of the letter is properly shaped, but the sharpened curve at the middle leaves only a narrow distance across the lower space. In this outline runs the Walnut, its upper curve almost surrounding a little wooded peninsula that slopes gently on its side to the water's edge. But the farther bank stands up in a straight limestone bluff forming a high wall of protection about the river-encircled ground. A less severe bluff crosses the open part of the peninsula, reaching the hither side of the river below the sharp bend. The space inside, stone-walled and water-bound, made an ideal shelter for the wild life that should inhabit it. And Nature saw that it was good and went away and left it, not forgetting to lock the door upon it. For the enemy who would enter this protecting shelter must come through the gateway of the river. There was only one right place to do this. Deceivingly near to the shallow rock-based ford before the Corral, so near that only the wise ones knew how to miss it, Nature placed the cruelest whirlpool that ever swung an even surface up stream, its gentle motion telling nothing of the fatal suction underneath that level stretch of steady, slow moving, irresistible water.
What use the primitive tribes made of this spot the river has never told. But in the day of the Kickapoo supremacy it came to its christening. Here the tribe found a refuge and harbored its stolen plunder. From this wooded covert it sent its death-singing arrows through the heart of its enemy who dared to stand in relief on that stone bluff. Here it laughed at the drowning cries of those who were caught in the fatal whirlpool beyond the curve in the river wall, and here it endured siege and slaughter when foes were valiant enough, and numerous enough to storm into its stronghold over the dead bodies of their own vanguard.
Weird and tragical are the legends of the Kickapoo Corral, left for a stronger race to marvel over. For, with the swing of time, the white man cut a road down the steep bluff at the sharpest bend and made a ford in the shallow place between the whirlpool and the old Corral, and the Nature-built stockade became a peaceful spot, specially ordained by Providence, the Sunrise Freshmen claimed, as a picnic ground for their autumn holiday. At least the young folk for whom Professor Burgess was acting as chaperon took it so, and reveled in the right.
Interest in Greek had greatly increased in Sunrise with the advent of the handsome young Harvard man, and his desired seclusion for profound research had not yet been fully realized. Types for study were plentiful, however, especially the type of the presumptuous young fellow who dared to admire Elinor Wream. By divine right she was the most popular girl in Sunrise, which pleased Professor Burgess up to a certain point. That point was Victor Burleigh. The silent antagonism between these two daily grew stronger; why, neither one could have told up to this holiday.
The day had been perfect—the weather, the dinner, the company, the woodland—even the amber light in the sky softening the glow as the afternoon slipped down toward twilight in the sheltered old Corral.
“Come, Vic Burleigh, help me to start this fire for supper,” Dennie Saxon called. “We won't get our coffee and ham and eggs ready before midnight.”
“Here, Trench, or some of you fellows, get busy,” Vic called back to the big right guard of the Sunrise football squad. “Elinor and I are going to climb the west bluff to see what's the matter with the sun. It looks sick. I've been hired man all day; carried nineteen girls across the shallows, packed all the lunch-baskets, toted all the wood, built all the fires, washed all the dishes—”
“Ate all the dinner, drank all the grape juice, stepped on all the custard pies, upset all the cream bottles. Oh, you piker, get out!” Trench aimed an empty lunch-basket at Vic's head with the words.
Being a chaperon was a pleasant office to Professor Burgess today but for the task of throwing a barrier about Elinor every time Vic Burleigh came near. And Burleigh, lacking many other things more than insight, kept him busy at barrier building.
“Miss Wream, you can't think of climbing that rough place,” Burgess protested, with a sharp glance of resentment at the big young fellow who dared to call her Elinor.
The tiger-light blazed in the eyes that flashed back at him, as Vic cried daringly.
“Oh, come on, Elinor; be a good Indian!”
“Don't do it, Miss Wream,” Vincent Burgess pleaded.
Elinor looked from the one to the other, and the very magnetism of power called her.
“I mean to try, anyhow,” she declared. “Will you pick me up if I fall, Victor?”
“Well, I wouldn't hardly go away and leave you to perish miserably,” Vic assured her, and they were off together.
The Wream men were slender, and all of them, except Lloyd Fenneben, the stepbrother, wore nose glasses and drank hot water at breakfast, and ate predigested foods, and talked of acids and carbons, and took prescribed gestures for exercise. The joyousness of perfect health was in every motion of this young man. His brown sweater showed a hard white throat. He planted his feet firmly. And he leaped up the bluffside easily. If Elinor slipped, the strength of his grip on her arm reassured her, until climbing beside him became a joy.
The bluff was less surly than it appeared to be down in the Corral, and the benediction of autumn was in the view from its crest. They sat down on the stone ledge crowning it, and Elinor threw aside her jaunty scarlet outing cap. The breezes played in her dark hair, and her cheeks were pink from the exercise. Victor Burleigh looked at her with frank, wide-open eyes.
“What's the matter? Is my hair a fright?” she murmured.
“A fright!” Burleigh flung off his cap and ran his fingers through his own hair. “Not what I call a fright,” he asserted in an even tone.
“What's that scar on your left arm? It looks like a little hole dug out,” Elinor declared.
Vic's brown sweater sleeve was pushed up to the elbow.
“It is a little hole I put in where I dug out the flesh with a pocket knife,” he replied, carelessly.
“Did you do that yourself?” Elinor cried. “What made you be so cruel?”
“I wasn't so cruel. 'I seen my duty and I done it noble,' as the essay runs. I made that vacancy to get ahead of a rattlesnake that got me there, a venomous big one with nine police calls on its tail, and that's no snake story, either. I cut the flesh out to get rid of the poison. I was n't in a college laboratory and I had to work fast and use what tools I had with me. I killed the gentleman that did the mischief, though,” Vic added carelessly, deftly slipping down his sleeve as if to change the subject.
“Oh, tell me about it, do,” Elinor urged. “You were killing a snake the first time I saw you.”
How dainty and sweet she was sitting there in her neat-fitting outing suit of dark gray with scarlet pipings and buttons and pocket flaps, and the scarlet of her full lips, and the coral tint of her cheeks, the white hands and white throat and brow, the dark eyes and finely shaped head with abundant beautiful hair.
Vic Burleigh sat looking straight at her and the light in his own eyes told nothing of the glitter that had flashed in them when he glared at Professor Burgess down in the Corral.
“I wasn't killing snakes. I was looking up at a girl on the rotunda stairs the first time,” he said, “and I don't want to tell about this scar, because I've wished a thousand times to forget it. See how much darker it is down there than it is up here.”
The shadows were lengthening in the Corral where the supper fires were gleaming. Across the low bluff the imprisoned sun was sending a dull red glow along the waters of the Walnut.
“Look at that still place in the river, Victor. The ripples are all on the farther side,” Elinor said, looking pensively downstream.
“Watch it a minute. Do you see that bit of drift coming upstream in the still water?” Vic asked.
“Why, the water does move; toward us, too, instead of down the river. I'd like to boat around in that quiet place.”
She was leaning forward, resting her chin in her hand. In outline against the misty background shot through with the crimson light from the storm-smothered sun, with the gray shadows of the old Kickapoo Corral below them, hemmed in by the silver gleaming waters of the Walnut, a picture grew up before Victor Burleigh's eyes that he was never to forget. Like the cleft of the lightning through the cloud, like the flash of the swallow's wing, the careless-hearted boy leaped to the stature of a man, into whose soul the love of a lifetime is born. Unconsciously, he drew away from her, and long afterward she recalled the sweetness of his deep voice when he spoke again.
“Elinor Wream, I'd rather see you helpless up here with the hungriest wild beast between us that ever tore a human form to pieces than to see you in that quiet water below the shallows.”
“Why?” Elinor looked up into his face.
“Because I could save your life here, maybe, even if I lost mine. Down there I could drown for you, but that would n't save you. Nobody ever swam that whirlpool and lived to tell about it. There's a ledge underneath that holds down what the infernal slow suction swallows. But it's dead sure.”
“Why, that's awful,” Elinor said, lightly, for she had no picture of him engulfed in the slow-moving treachery below them.
“There's an old Indian legend about that pool,” Vic said, staring down at the water.
“Tell me about it.” Elinor was breaking the twigs from a branch of buck-berry growing beside her.
“Oh, it's a tragical one, like everything else about that place,” Vic responded, grimly. “Old Lagonda, Chief of the Wahoos, I reckon, I don't know his tribe, did n't want to give up this valley to the sons and heirs of Sunrise to desecrate with salmon cans and pop bottles and Harvard-turned chaperons. He held out against putting his multiplication sign to the treaty, claiming that land was like water and air and could n't be bought and sold. But the white men with true missionary courtesy held his head under water till he burbled 'Nuff,' and signed up with a piece of charcoal. Then he went down the river to this smooth-faced whirlpool, and laid a curse on the sons of men who had taken his own from him.”
The twilight had deepened. The sun was lost in the cloudbank out of which a hot wind was sweeping eastward. Vic was telling the story well, and the magnetism of his voice was compelling. Elinor drew nearer to him.
“What was the curse? I would n't want to go near that place, unless you were with me.”
The very innocence of the words put a thrill in Vic Burleigh's every pulse beat.
“Don't ever do it, if you can help it.” Vic could not keep back the words. “Old Lagonda decreed a tribute to the river for the wrong done to him, a life a year in that pool. And the Walnut has been exacting in its rights. Life after life has gone out down there until sometimes it seems like the old chief's curse would never be lifted.”
“I hope it may be, while I am at Sunrise, anyhow,” Elinor said. “I don't like real tragedies about me. I like an easy, comfortable life, and everybody good and happy. I hope the curse will be staid until I go back home.”
Vic hadn't thought of this. Of course, she would leave Sunrise some time. Her home was in Cambridge-by-the-Sea, not on the Prairie-by-the-Walnut. She belonged to the dead-language scholars, not to crude red-blooded creatures like himself. He turned his face to the west and the threatening sky seemed in harmony with his storm-riven soul. He was so young—less than half an hour older than the big whole-hearted fellow who started up the bluff in picnic frolic with a pretty girl whom Professor Burgess adored. That was one reason why he had brought her up. He wanted to tease the Professor then. He hated Burgess now, and the white teeth clinched at the thought of him.
A sudden shouting and beating of tom-toms down in the Corral, and the call in crude rhyme to straggling couples to close in, announced supper. High above other whooping the voice of Trench, the big right guard, reached the top of the bluff:
Victor Burleigh and Elinor Wream, Better wake from Love's Young Dream, Before the ants get into the cream.
The beating of a dishpan drowned the chorus. Then down by the river Dennie's soprano streamed out,
The sun is sot,
The coffee's hot,
The supper's got.
What?
Yes! Got!
Answering this call from the north end of the Corral, a heavy base growled,
Dennie is sad, The eggs are bad; The Professor's mad At a College lad. Burleigh! Burly! Burlee! Come home! Come home! Come home!
“The Kickapoos are on the warpath. Let's go down and get into the running.”
Vic lifted Elinor to her feet with a sort of reverence in his touch. But she did not note that it was otherwise than the good-natured grip of the comrade who had helped her up the steep places half an hour ago.
Descent was more difficult, and it was growing dark rapidly. Vic held her arm to keep her from falling, and once on a sliding rock, he had to catch both of her hands, and half-lift her to solid footing. Her shining eyes, starbright in the gloom, the dainty rose hue of her cheeks, the touch of her soft white hands, and her need for his strength, made the shadowy path delicious for her companion.
The call of the wild was in that evening camp in the autumn woodland, in the charm of the deepening twilight warmed with the red glow of the fires, in the appetizing odor of coffee, the unconventional freedom, the carelessness of youth, the jolly good-fellowship of comrades. To Professor Burgess it had the added charm of newness. All the pleasures of popularity were his this evening, for he was young himself, he dressed well, and he had the grace of a gentleman. The enjoyment of the day gave him a thrill of surprise. He was already dropping the viewpoint of Dr. Joshua Wream for Dean Fenneben's angle of vision. And in these picturesque surroundings he forgot about the weather and the prudence of getting home early.
“Throw that log on the fire, Vic. It begins to look spooky back here. I've just had my ear to the ground and I heard an awful roaring somewhere.” Trench, who had been sprawling lazily in the shadows, now declared, “Say, I'd hate to be penned into this place so I couldn't get out. There's no skinning up that rock wall even if a fellow could swim the river, and I can't,” and the big guard stretched himself on the ground again.
“What's that old story about the Kickapoos here?” somebody asked. “Dennie Saxon knows it. Tell us about it, Dennie, AND THEN WE'LL ALL GO HOME.” The last words were half-sung.
“Be swift, Dennie, be quite swift. I heard that noise again. I'm afraid it's a stampede of wild horses.” Trench, who had had his ear to the ground, sat up suddenly. But nobody paid any attention to him.
“Come, Denmark Saxon, let's close the day in song and story. You tell the story and then I'll sing the song,” somebody declared.
“Aw-w-w!” a prolonged chorus. “Make your story long, Dennie; make it lengthy.”
“Don't you do it, Dennie. I tell you this ground is shaking. I feel it,” Trench insisted.
“Say, who's got the bromo-seltzer? The right guard's supper is n't treating him right. Go ahead, Dennie,” the crowd urged.
They were all in a circle about the fire. Its flickering glow lighted Vic Burleigh's rugged face, and gleamed in his auburn hair. Elinor sat between him and Vincent Burgess. Dennie was just beyond Vincent, who noted incidentally the play of light and shadow on the blowsy ripples of her hair that night and remembered it all on a day long afterward.
“Once upon a time,” Dennie began,
there was a beautiful Kickapoo Indian maiden—”
“Yep, any Kickapoo's a beaut. Hurry up, Dennie. I hear something coming.” It was the big lazy guard again.
“Oh! Vic Burleigh, sit on his prostrate form. Go on, Dennie,” the company insisted, and she continued.
“Her name was The Fawn of the Morning Light, her best lover was Swift Elk.”
“You be Mrs. Swift Elk—” but Vic Burleigh's arm about Trench's throat choked his words.
“And there was a wily Sioux, named Red Fox, who loved the Fawn and wanted her to marry him. She wouldn't do it. The Kickapoos were heap-big grafters, and they had this old Corral full of ponies and junk they had relieved other tribes of caring for. And the only way to get in here, besides falling over the bluff and becoming a pin-cushion for poisoned arrows, was to come in by the shallows in the river where the ford is now above old Lagonda's pool, and most Indians needed a diagram for that.” Although Dennie spoke lightly, she shuddered a little at the thought, and the whole company grew graver.
“An Indian doesn't forget. So, Red Fox, who had sworn to have The Fawn, came down here with hundreds of Sioux who wanted the ponies the Kickapoos had stolen, as Red Fox wanted Swift Elk's girl. The Kickapoos wouldn't give up the ponies and Swift Elk wouldn't give up The Fawn. So the siege began. Right where we are so safe and peaceful tonight those Kickapoos fought, and starved, and died, while the Sioux kept cruel watch on the top of that old stone ledge, never letting one escape. At last, after hours and hours of siege, The Fawn and Swift Elk decided to escape by the river in the night. A storm had come on suddenly, and a cloudburst up the Walnut was sending a perfect surge of water down around the bend. The two lovers were caught in its sweep and carried beyond the shallows when a flash of lightning showed them to Red Fox watching on the bluff up there. At the next flash he sent an arrow straight through Swift Elk's body and into The Fawn's shoulder, pinning the two together. The Sioux leaped into the stream to save the girl he loved, but the heavy current swept them toward the whirlpool, and before they could prevent the dying and wounded and rescuing were all caught by the fatal suction. Then the Sioux warriors rushed in from all sides, upstream, down the bluff from west prairie, and over the Corral, and slaughtered every Kickapoo here. Their fierce yells and the shrieks of the squaws and pappooses, the pounding of horses' hoofs in the stampede of hundreds of ponies, the roar of the river, the wrath of the storm made a scene this old Corral will never see again.” Dennie paused.
“I think I hear something like it, right now,” came Trench's irrepressible voice from the shadows in the edge of the circle. But nobody heeded it.
And all the while from far across the west prairie the stormcloud was rolling in, black and angry, blowing its hot breath before it, while from a cloudburst upstream an hour before a great surge of water was rushing down the Walnut, turning the quiet river to a murderous flood. But the high walls hid all this from the valley and the heedless young folk took the full time limit of their holiday in the sheltering gloom of the old Kickapoo Corral.
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