“But—I don’t want to go.” Perversity’s last stand!
“Ah, but hearken a minute; do you know what I’m going to do when I get back to the Sugarloaf this afternoon? I’m going to prowl about the white sand-dunes until I find a nice hard chunk o’ birch-wood—there’s all sorts o’ driftage among those dunes, even to planks and great big logs washed down from Maine lumber camps an’ trundled ashore there—what d’you suppose I want that birch-chunk for?”
Kitty’s eyes widened.
“I’m going to make a top of it—a guessing-top, to spin on a flat stone—about a foot long that top’s to be, nine inches in circumference near the point, thirty at the head-end; ’twill be painted with symbols an’ it’s called by an Indian name ‘Kullibígan.’ It’s a magic top; it tells fortunes.”
“Non-sense!”
“You wait and see! ’Twas the Morning-Glory who thought of that game; she’s the prettiest little dancer and her name is Jessica, the sort of girl”—Captain Andy looked at some old-farm buildings beyond the orchard and drew his comparison, now, from the farm, not the foam—“the sort of girl who if she was run through a milk separator would come out all cream! From what I gather she’s pretty much alone in the world, too, has her own way to make; that don’t down her; she’s a Morning-Glory in spite of it—that’s her Camp Fire name.”
“An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears, once you join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire.”
“How did she learn about the Indian top?”
“Why! she learned of it from a professor who watched the Indian maidens play the Kullibígan spinner game in their own camps or on their reservations. They ask it a question about who’s going to marry first or that sort of thing, sitting round in a scattered ring, and the one toward whom the big painted top falls after it has spun itself dizzy, why, it has pitched on her for the answer to the question.”