Hó dji ge hyá!”
The fringed and beaded maidens were on their feet now, circling, shuffling, Indian fashion, round the fire, the leader shaking a child’s hand-rattle aloft between the fingers of her right hand whose arm waved mystically toward the fire.
“I do believe she’s the one that dared me to sing the last verse of that old fagot-song about a woman, a dog and an old walnut-tree bein’ improved by whacking!” rumbled the captain, rubbing his hands. “Gee whiz! it’s a good entertainment. And it ought to be, to keep a man o’ my age sitting for an hour an’ a half on a cold stone!” ruefully feeling his boulder-bench.
“Yes, she’s the very one: her Camp Fire name is Wĕltaak, meaning music, and she has the G clef, together with a bar of music, woven as a symbol into her head-band,” said Sybil.
“She’s ‘some singer,’ too. I wonder if the ghosts on old Wigwam Hill are waking up to listen to this?”
Captain Andy glanced behind him, swaying with a half-superstitious shudder as the sweet, eerie notes of the dance-music fell upon his ear:
Old Wigwam Hill did, indeed, seem, in an interlude of the dance, to ruffle every leaf upon its sides as if, Rip-Van-Winkle-like, it had fallen asleep a couple of hundred years ago, was now rubbing its eyes and waking up to be saluted by sounds much like those which had set it dozing, when braves in bonnets of feathers danced with their painted squaws upon the lake shore.
“That’s an Indian dance, the Leaf Dance, in honor of the leaves—idiwissi, or ‘tree hair’—thanking them for their grateful shade,” explained Olive, watching the winding, gesturing figures of the Camp Fire Girls, whose ceremonial dresses the Council Fire lit up with wonderfully dramatic effect as they circled round and round it.
“Morning-Glory taught it to them; she learned it from a friend who picked it up in the camps of the Creek Indians,” supplemented the artist.