Otto shook his head. “My father says that there was another North Star once, and that maybe this one won’t last always. I wonder what would happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?”
Arthur chuckled. “I wouldn’t worry, Ott. Nothing’s apt to happen to it in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good dead Indians.”
We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world. The gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a mutinous, complaining note in it at night, quite different from its cheerful daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much deeper and more powerful stream. Our water had always these two moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate regret.
“Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams,” remarked Otto. “You could do most any proposition in geometry with ’em. They always look as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody’s fortune is all written out in the stars, don’t they?”
“They believe so in the old country,” Fritz affirmed.
But Arthur only laughed at him. “You’re thinking of Napoleon, Fritzey. He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles. I guess the stars don’t keep any close tally on Sandtown folks.”
We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred before the evening star went down behind the corn fields, when some one cried, “There comes the moon, and it’s as big as a cart wheel!”
We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us. It came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing, red as an angry heathen god.
“When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice their prisoners on the temple top,” Percy announced.
“Go on, Perce. You got that out of Golden Days. Do you believe that, Arthur?” I appealed.