"It is queer," said Agony, "because water doesn't affect me a bit like that. I love to hear it, day or night. But it's been that way with Oh-Pshaw ever since she was little. I can remember once when we were about five years old she had spasms because our nurse left us alone in the bathtub when the water was running in. She can't even stand it to hear the water running down the eave spouts during a heavy shower."
The Winnebagos all laughed again at this queer "bête noir" of Oh-Pshaw's, all but Nyoda. She knew something which the girls did not, and which neither Agony nor Oh-Pshaw herself knew, something which had been told her by Grandmother Wing in one of her talks with Nyoda. That was that when Oh-Pshaw was a baby only three months old she had been taken out in a sailboat by her father and mother on the river which ran through Oakwood. A squall came up and the boat capsized and all three were thrown into the wildly rolling river. They were promptly rescued by a nearby launch, all unhurt, but the moaning, gurgling sound of the water had stamped itself indelibly on Oh-Pshaw's tiny brain and she would never again be able to hear that gurgling noise without a sensation of horror. During her infancy, even the sound of water gurgling out of a bottle was sufficient to throw her into spasms. She had never been told about the accident, in the hope that she would outgrow the shock and get over the fear, but she had never outgrown it. She no longer had spasms when she heard water gurgling, but the sound chilled her to the very marrow of her bones, and she never went alone, even in daylight, past the river.
Nyoda knew how real this fear was and sympathized deeply with her, although she pretended to make light of it, as the others did. Nyoda and the Winnebagos loved to sit in the silence of the woods when the fire burned low and listen to the murmuring of the water, but for Oh-Pshaw's sake they must not do it to-night.
"Come, girls," Nyoda called cheerily, "'Fire's gwine out,' time to sing 'Mammy Moon' and then go home."
She poked the last embers of the fire into a little blaze, and the light and the lively measures of the song took Oh-Pshaw's mind off the gurgling water.
"Cross my heart, Mammy Moon,
Termorrer I'll be an angel coon,
I'll be a chile dat'll make you smile,
Good—o-l-e Mam-my M-o-o-n!"
The circle all lay down with their heads on each other's shoulders in the drowsy attitude with which the song closes, and then Gladys's clear voice rose in the melody of the Camp Fire Girls' own lullaby, sung to the music of an Ojibway love song: