“How does it feel to keep slaves? I’ve often wondered,” Ellery said as he jumped ashore and Dick began tossing him rugs and cushions.
“Very comfy, thank you, and not at all un-Christian,” she answered saucily. “Dick, don’t throw the supper basket, under penalty of liquidating the sandwiches. I think there’s a freezer of ice-cream under the deck, if you’ll pull it out. Now, are you ready for me?”
She stepped lightly forward under Dick’s guidance, took Ellery’s outstretched hands and sprang to the shore, where a kind of throne was built for her against a prostrate log,—all this help not because it was necessary, but as the appropriate pomp of royalty.
“I suspect,” said Dick, looking about him with great satisfaction, “that this was a favorite picnic place for Gitche Manito and Hiawatha, in the morning of days.”
“That shows how nature can forget,” Madeline retorted. “Surely you know the real story, Dick.”
“I don’t,” said Ellery. “Tell it to me.”
She snuggled comfortably down into her rugs.
“In early days, which is the western equivalent for ‘once upon a time,’ a furious storm raged down the lake and tore the water into long ribbons of purple and green. A beautiful girl stood, perhaps on this very spot, with a savage who had rescued her from a sinking canoe and brought her here, dripping but safe. Over there on the mainland her father came running out of the woods in an agony of fear. He saw her here, saw her signals, but the shriek of the storm and the roar of the waters drowned out the words that she frantically screamed toward him. He saw her point to the Indian, who was always feared, always counted treacherous, and his dread of the hurricane changed to terror of the savage. He raised his rifle and the girl’s deliverer dropped dead at her feet.”
“Then fifty years went by, and this became a bower for the eating of sandwiches,” added Dick.
Norris was lying on his back and staring through the tangle of grape and maple leaves at the flecks of blue beyond.