CHAPTER L
There was a certain birch-tree on the hill behind the old Winfield homestead.
The house itself sat well back in its ample green lawn, left fenceless after the manner of American village lawns. In the rear of the house there were many acres of gardens and pasture where cattle stood about, looking in the distance like toy cows out of a Noah’s Ark.
Beyond the pasture was the steep hill they flattered with the name of “the mountain.” To the children it furnished an unfailing supply of Indians, replenished as fast as they were slaughtered.
Every now and then Sheila had to be captured and tied to a tree and danced around by little Polly and young Bret and their friends, bedecked with feathers from dismantled dusters, brandishing “tommyhawks” and shooting with “bonarrers.”
Just as the terrified pale-face squaw was about to be given over to the torture the Indians would disappear, take off their feathers, rub the war mud off their noses, and lay aside their barbarous weapons; then arming themselves with wooden guns, they would charge to Sheila’s rescue, fearlessly annihilating the wraiths of their late selves.
One day when Sheila was bound to the tree she saw Bret stealing up to watch the game. He waved gaily to her and she nodded to him. Then the whim came to her to cease burlesquing the familiar rôle and play it for all it was worth. She imagined herself really one of those countless women whom the Indians captured and subjected to torment. Perhaps some woman, the wife of a pioneer, had once met her hideous doom in this same forest. She fancied she saw her house in flames and Bret shot dead as he fought toward her. She writhed and tugged at the imaginary and unyielding thongs. She pleaded for mercy in babbling hysteria, and for a climax sent forth one sincere scream of awful terror. If Dorothy’s mother had heard it she would have remembered the shriek of the little Ophelia.
Sheila noted that the redskins were silent. She looked about her through eyes streaming with fictional tears. She saw that Bret was plunging toward her, ashen with alarm. The neighbors’ children were aghast and her own boy and girl petrified. Then Polly and young Bret flung themselves on her in a frenzy of weeping sympathy.
Sheila began to laugh and Bret looked foolish. He explained:
“I thought a snake was coiled round you. Don’t do that again, in Heaven’s name.” That night he dreamed of her cry.