"Well, I wouldn"t hardly go away and leave you to perish miserably," Vic a.s.sured her, and they were off together.
The Wream men were slender, and all of them, except Lloyd Fenneben, the stepbrother, wore nose gla.s.ses 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 rea.s.sured 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 a.s.serted 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 n.o.ble," 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 b.u.t.tons 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. n.o.body 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.