s needed a diagram for
that." Although Dennie spoke lightly, she shuddered a little at the
thought, and the whole company grew graver.

"An Indian doesn't forget. So, Red Fox, who had sworn to have The
Fawn, came down here with hundreds of Sioux who wanted the ponies the
Kickapoos had stolen, as Red Fox wanted Swift Elk's girl. The Kickapoos
wouldn't give up the ponies and Swift Elk wouldn't give up The Fawn. So
the siege began. Right where we are so safe and peaceful tonight those
Kickapoos fought, and starved, and died, while the Sioux kept cruel
watch on the top of that old stone ledge, never letting one escape. At
last, after hours and hours of siege, The Fawn and Swift Elk decided to
escape by the river in the night. A storm had come on suddenly, and
a cloudburst up the Walnut was sending a perfect surge of water down
around the bend. The two lovers were caught in its sweep and carried
beyond the shallows when a flash of lightning showed them to Red Fox
watching on the bluff up there. At the next flash he sent an arrow
straight through Swift Elk's body and into The Fawn's shoulder, pinning
the two together. The Sioux leaped into the stream to save the girl he
loved, but the heavy current swept them toward the whirlpool, and before
they could prevent the dying and wounded and rescuing were all caught
by the fatal suction. Then the Sioux warriors rushed in from all sides,
upstream, down the bluff from west prairie, and over the Corral, and
slaughtered every Kickapoo here. Their fierce yells and the shrieks of
the squaws and pappooses, the pounding of horses' hoofs in the stampede
of hundreds of ponies, the roar of the river, the wrath of the storm
made a scene this old Corral will never see again." Dennie paused.

"I think I hear something like it, right now," came Trench's
irrepressible voice from the shadows in the edge of the circle. But
nobody heeded it.

And all the while from far across the west prairie the stormcloud was
rolling in, black and angry, blowing its hot breath before it, while
from a cloudburst upstream an hour before a great surge of water was
rushing down the Walnut, turning the quiet river to a murderous flood.
But the high walls hid all this from the valley and the heedless young
folk took the full time limit of their holiday in the sheltering gloom
of the old Kickapoo Corral.

CHAPTER V. THE STORM

_Rock and moan, and roar alone,
And the dread of some nameless thing unknown_.