第13章 THE KICKAPOO CORRAL(2)

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 Igo back home."

Vic hadn't thought of this.Of course,she would leave Sunrise some time.