"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.