Near the great pyramid of clam-shells, where the Indians had held an historic feast and got their fire with primitive rubbing of sticks, she knelt upon her right knee, her left foot pressed down hard upon the flat fire-board whose scooped pit, or hollow, had a notch resting upon a wooden tray placed beneath it.
Her left hand--its arm escaping from the white middy-blouse, bared to the shoulder to allow free scope--grasped the handle or socket of her upright drill.
The right pink arm, each muscle strenuously “on the job” under the rounded flesh, worked steadily to and fro the fire-maker’s bow, hand-painted with flame, drawn taut by its leather thong, resting upon the socket at the top of the drill, thus grinding the lower point of that drill into the soft, punky wood of the fire-board, which presently, as the powdered wood-dust fell into the tray beneath, turned black--smoked.
Her hand-painted bag of tinder lay on the sands beside her--that inflammable tinder to foster the spark when it came!
Steadily she drove the bow at first! Anxiously, now, with a horrid little fear beginning to get a hand-hold on her heart, that, after all, the ordeal by fire might not work out as she had expected--the vindication come off--and prove her triumphant mistress of this situation, at least, a perfect fire-witch, even if she had behaved like a simpleton in the shipyard!
Faster, faster--with more and more force--desperately, at last, slipped backward and forward the bow! Harder--harder--ground the drill; the fire-witch, her drooping face aflame, her pretty eyelashes twinkling in a paroxysm, working for dear life now--for vindication--honor--as it seemed to her whose moods were generally highly colored, touched with the extravagance of flame.
Smoke and more smoke in little dun-gray billows! And never a spark of red!
“Rest a while, dear,” said the Guardian. “Then try again--and perhaps you’ll get it.”
She did rest, Sesooā, the fire-witch, in the shadow of the historic shell-heap over which the last flame of sunset most tantalizingly rioted. She curled down upon her left side on the sands, easing her aching right arm.
Then a second fierce trial! A breathing spell! And another wild paroxysm of effort, the decorated bow almost demented now!