“Throw that log on the fire, Vic. It begins to look spooky back here. I've just had my ear to the ground and I heard an awful roaring somewhere.” Trench, who had been sprawling lazily in the shadows, now declared, “Say, I'd hate to be penned into this place so I couldn't get out. There's no skinning up that rock wall even if a fellow could swim the river, and I can't,” and the big guard stretched himself on the ground again.
“What's that old story about the Kickapoos here?” somebody asked. “Dennie Saxon knows it. Tell us about it, Dennie, AND THEN WE'LL ALL GO HOME.” The last words were half-sung.
“Be swift, Dennie, be quite swift. I heard that noise again. I'm afraid it's a stampede of wild horses.” Trench, who had had his ear to the ground, sat up suddenly. But nobody paid any attention to him.
“Come, Denmark Saxon, let's close the day in song and story. You tell the story and then I'll sing the song,” somebody declared.
“Aw-w-w!” a prolonged chorus. “Make your story long, Dennie; make it lengthy.”
“Don't you do it, Dennie. I tell you this ground is shaking. I feel it,” Trench insisted.
“Say, who's got the bromo-seltzer? The right guard's supper is n't treating him right. Go ahead, Dennie,” the crowd urged.
They were all in a circle about the fire. Its flickering glow lighted Vic Burleigh's rugged face, and gleamed in his auburn hair. Elinor sat between him and Vincent Burgess. Dennie was just beyond Vincent, who noted incidentally the play of light and shadow on the blowsy ripples of her hair that night and remembered it all on a day long afterward.
“Once upon a time,” Dennie began,
there was a beautiful Kickapoo Indian maiden—”