Vic Burleigh sat looking straight at her and the light in his own eyes told nothing of the glitter that had flashed in them when he glared at Professor Burgess down in the Corral.
“I wasn't killing snakes. I was looking up at a girl on the rotunda stairs the first time,” he said, “and I don't want to tell about this scar, because I've wished a thousand times to forget it. See how much darker it is down there than it is up here.”
The shadows were lengthening in the Corral where the supper fires were gleaming. Across the low bluff the imprisoned sun was sending a dull red glow along the waters of the Walnut.
“Look at that still place in the river, Victor. The ripples are all on the farther side,” Elinor said, looking pensively downstream.
“Watch it a minute. Do you see that bit of drift coming upstream in the still water?” Vic asked.
“Why, the water does move; toward us, too, instead of down the river. I'd like to boat around in that quiet place.”
She was leaning forward, resting her chin in her hand. In outline against the misty background shot through with the crimson light from the storm-smothered sun, with the gray shadows of the old Kickapoo Corral below them, hemmed in by the silver gleaming waters of the Walnut, a picture grew up before Victor Burleigh's eyes that he was never to forget. Like the cleft of the lightning through the cloud, like the flash of the swallow's wing, the careless-hearted boy leaped to the stature of a man, into whose soul the love of a lifetime is born. Unconsciously, he drew away from her, and long afterward she recalled the sweetness of his deep voice when he spoke again.
“Elinor Wream, I'd rather see you helpless up here with the hungriest wild beast between us that ever tore a human form to pieces than to see you in that quiet water below the shallows.”
“Why?” Elinor looked up into his face.
“Because I could save your life here, maybe, even if I lost mine. Down there I could drown for you, but that would n't save you. Nobody ever swam that whirlpool and lived to tell about it. There's a ledge underneath that holds down what the infernal slow suction swallows. But it's dead sure.”