A Master's Degree Part 4

"Poor old sinner! What a slave and a fool whisky can make of a man!" he thought. Then he remembered Dennie's anxiety of the morning. "There must be some cause for his prejudice against this strange hermit woman when he is drunk. Bond Saxon is not a man to hate anybody when he is sober."

"Is you Don Fonnybone?" Bug Buler's little piping voice from the doorstep haled the Dean. "I finked Vic would turn, and he don't turn, and I 's hungry for somebody. May I go wis you, Don Fonnybone?" The baby lips quivered.

Lloyd Fenneben held out his hand and Bug put his little fist into it.

"Where shall we go, Bug? I 'm hungry for somebody, too."

"Let's do find the bunny the bid dod ist scared away this morning. Turn on!"

Lloyd Fenneben was hardly conscious that Bug was choosing their path as the two strolled away together. Everywhere there was the pathos of a waning autumn day, and a soft haze creeping out of the west was making a blood-red carbuncle of the sun, set as a jewel on the amber-veiled bosom of the sky. The air was soft, wooing the spirit to a still, sweet peace.

The two were at the outskirts of Lagonda Ledge now. The last board walk was three blocks back, and the cinder-made way had dwindled to a bare hard path by the roadside. A bend in the river cutting close to the road shows a long vista of the Walnut bordered by vine-draped shrubbery and overhung with trees. A slab of limestone beside a huge elm tree had been placed at this bend to prevent the bank from breaking, or a chance misdriving into the water.

"I 's pitty tired," Bug said as the two reached the stone. "Will we tum to the bunny's house pitty soon?"

"We'll rest here a while and maybe the bunny will come out to meet us,"

Dr. Fenneben said, and they sat down on the broad stone.

"It was somewhere here the bunny runned." Little Bug studied the roadside with a quaint puzzled face. "Is you 'faid of snakes?"

"Not very much." The Dean's eyes were on the graceful flight of pigeons circling about the trees beyond the bend.

"Vic isn't 'faid. He killed bid one, two, five, free wattle, wattle snakes--" Bug caught his breath suddenly--"He told me not to tell that.

I fordot. I don't 'member. He didn't do it--he didn't killed no snakes fornever."

Dr. Fenneben gave little heed to this prattle. His eyes were on the pigeons cleaving the air with short, graceful flights. Presently he felt the soft touch of baby curls against his hand, and little Bug had fallen asleep with his drooping head on Fenneben's lap.

The Dean gently placed the tired little one in an easy position, and rested his shoulder against the tree.

"That must be Pigeon Place," he mused. "Every town has its odd characters. This is one of Lagonda Ledge's little mysteries. Dennie finds it a pathetic one. How graceful those pigeons are!" And his thoughts drifted to a far New England homestead where pigeons used to sweep about an old barn roof.

A fuzzy gray rabbit flashed across the road, followed by a Great Dane dog in hot chase.

"Bug's bunny! I hope the big murderer will miss it," Fenneben thought.

The roadside bushes half hid him. As the cras.h.i.+ng sound of the huge dog through the underbrush ceased he noticed a woman coming leisurely toward him. Her arms were full of bitter-sweet berries and flaming autumn leaves. She wore no hat and Fenneben saw that her gray hair was wound like a coronal about her head. Before he could catch sight of her face a heavy staggering step was beside him, and old Bond Saxon, muttering and shaking his clenched fists, pa.s.sed beyond him toward the woman. Lloyd Fenneben's own fists clenched, but he sat stone still. The woman seemed to melt into the bushes and obliterate herself entirely, while the drunken man stalked unsteadily on toward where she had been. Then shaking his fists vehemently at the pigeons, he skulked around the bend in the road.

As soon as he was out of sight the woman emerged from the bushes, with autumn leaves hiding her crown of hair. She hastened a few rods toward the man watching her, then disappeared through a vine-covered gateway into a wilderness of shrubbery, beyond which the pigeons were cooing about their cotes.

As she closed the gate, she caught sight of Lloyd Fenneben, leaning motionless against the gray bole of the elm tree. But she was looking through a tangle of purple oak leaves and twining bitter-sweet branches, and Fenneben was unconscious of being discovered.

"A woman never could whistle," he smiled, as he listened, "but that call seems to do for the dog, all right."

The Great Dane was tearing across lots in answer to the trill of a woman's voice.

"She is safe now. But what does it all mean? Is there a wayside tragedy here that calls for my unraveling?"

Attracted by some subtle force beyond his power to check, he turned toward the river and looked steadily at the still overhanging shrubbery.

Just below him, where the current turns, the quiet waters were lapping about a ledge of rock. Between that ledge and himself a tangle of bushes clutched the steep bank. He looked straight into the tangle, just plain twig and brown leaf, giving place as he stared, for two still black human eyes looking balefully at him as a snake at its prey. Lloyd Fenneben could not withdraw his gaze. The two eyes--no other human token visible--just two cruel human eyes full of human hate were fixed on him.

And the fascination of the thing was paralyzing, horrible. He could not move nor utter a sound. Bug Buler woke with a little cry. The bushes by the riverside just rippled--one quiver of motion--and the eyes were not there. Then Fenneben knew that his heart, which had been still for an age, had begun to beat again. Bug stared up into his face, dazed from sleep.

"Where's my Vic? Who's dot me?" he cried.

"We came to hunt the bunny. He's gone away again. Shall we go back home?" The gentle voice and strong hand soothed the little one.

"It's dettin' told. Let's wun home." Bug cuddled against Fenneben's side and hugged his hand. "I love you lots," he said, looking up with eyes of innocent trust.

"Yes, let's run home. There is a storm in the air and the sun is hidden from the valley." He stooped and kissed the little upturned face. "Thank heaven for children!" he murmured. "Amid skulking, drunken men and strange, lonely women, and cruel eyes of unknown beings, they lead us loving-wise back home again."

Behind the vine-covered gate a gray-haired, fair-faced woman watched the two as they disappeared down the road.

And the blood-red sun out on the west prairie sank swiftly into a blue cloudbank, presaging the coming of a storm.

CHAPTER IV. THE KICKAPOO CORRAL

_And even now, as the night comes, and the shadows gather round, And you tell the old-time story, I can almost hear the sound Of the horses' hoofs in the silence, and the voices of struggling men; For the night is the same forever, and the time comes back again_.

--JAMES W. STEELE

FROM the beginning of things in the Walnut Valley, the Kickapoo Corral had its uses. Nature built it to this end. The river course follows the pattern of the letter S faced westward instead of eastward. The upper half of the letter is properly shaped, but the sharpened curve at the middle leaves only a narrow distance across the lower s.p.a.ce. In this outline runs the Walnut, its upper curve almost surrounding a little wooded peninsula that slopes gently on its side to the water's edge. But the farther bank stands up in a straight limestone bluff forming a high wall of protection about the river-encircled ground. A less severe bluff crosses the open part of the peninsula, reaching the hither side of the river below the sharp bend. The s.p.a.ce inside, stone-walled and water-bound, made an ideal shelter for the wild life that should inhabit it. And Nature saw that it was good and went away and left it, not forgetting to lock the door upon it. For the enemy who would enter this protecting shelter must come through the gateway of the river. There was only one right place to do this. Deceivingly near to the shallow rock-based ford before the Corral, so near that only the wise ones knew how to miss it, Nature placed the cruelest whirlpool that ever swung an even surface up stream, its gentle motion telling nothing of the fatal suction underneath that level stretch of steady, slow moving, irresistible water.

What use the primitive tribes made of this spot the river has never told. But in the day of the Kickapoo supremacy it came to its christening. Here the tribe found a refuge and harbored its stolen plunder. From this wooded covert it sent its death-singing arrows through the heart of its enemy who dared to stand in relief on that stone bluff. Here it laughed at the drowning cries of those who were caught in the fatal whirlpool beyond the curve in the river wall, and here it endured siege and slaughter when foes were valiant enough, and numerous enough to storm into its stronghold over the dead bodies of their own vanguard.

Weird and tragical are the legends of the Kickapoo Corral, left for a stronger race to marvel over. For, with the swing of time, the white man cut a road down the steep bluff at the sharpest bend and made a ford in the shallow place between the whirlpool and the old Corral, and the Nature-built stockade became a peaceful spot, specially ordained by Providence, the Sunrise Freshmen claimed, as a picnic ground for their autumn holiday. At least the young folk for whom Professor Burgess was acting as chaperon took it so, and reveled in the right.

Interest in Greek had greatly increased in Sunrise with the advent of the handsome young Harvard man, and his desired seclusion for profound research had not yet been fully realized. Types for study were plentiful, however, especially the type of the presumptuous young fellow who dared to admire Elinor Wream. By divine right she was the most popular girl in Sunrise, which pleased Professor Burgess up to a certain point. That point was Victor Burleigh. The silent antagonism between these two daily grew stronger; why, neither one could have told up to this holiday.

The day had been perfect--the weather, the dinner, the company, the woodland--even the amber light in the sky softening the glow as the afternoon slipped down toward twilight in the sheltered old Corral.

"Come, Vic Burleigh, help me to start this fire for supper," Dennie Saxon called. "We won't get our coffee and ham and eggs ready before midnight."

"Here, Trench, or some of you fellows, get busy," Vic called back to the big right guard of the Sunrise football squad. "Elinor and I are going to climb the west bluff to see what's the matter with the sun. It looks sick. I've been hired man all day; carried nineteen girls across the shallows, packed all the lunch-baskets, toted all the wood, built all the fires, washed all the dishes--"

"Ate all the dinner, drank all the grape juice, stepped on all the custard pies, upset all the cream bottles. Oh, you piker, get out!"

Trench aimed an empty lunch-basket at Vic's head with the words.

Being a chaperon was a pleasant office to Professor Burgess today but for the task of throwing a barrier about Elinor every time Vic Burleigh came near. And Burleigh, lacking many other things more than insight, kept him busy at barrier building.

"Miss Wream, you can't think of climbing that rough place," Burgess protested, with a sharp glance of resentment at the big young fellow who dared to call her Elinor.

The tiger-light blazed in the eyes that flashed back at him, as Vic cried daringly.

"Oh, come on, Elinor; be a good Indian!"

"Don't do it, Miss Wream," Vincent Burgess pleaded.

Elinor looked from the one to the other, and the very magnetism of power called her.

"I mean to try, anyhow," she declared. "Will you pick me up if I fall, Victor?"