nd the device would take on color, red-bronze like
the sumach in the autumn and streaks of vermilion, and two glowing coals
that were eyes, and above them eagles' feathers, and the cracks became
bramble bushes. I was behind the log, and at times I started and knew
that it was a hideous dream, and again Polly Ann was clutching me and
praying me to hold back, and I broke from her and splashed over the
slippery limestone bed of the creek to fight single-handed. Through all
the fearful struggle I heard her calling me piteously to come back to
her. When the brute got me under water I could not hear her, but her
voice came back suddenly (as when a door opens) and it was like the wind
singing in the poplars. Was it Polly Ann's voice?

Again, I sat with Nick under the trees on the lawn at Temple Bow, and
the world was dark with the coming storm. I knew and he knew that the
storm was brewing that I might be thrust out into it. And then in the
blackness, when the air was filled with all the fair things of the earth
torn asunder, a beautiful woman came through the noise and the fury, and
we ran to her and clung to her skirts, thinking we had found safety. But
she thrust us forth into the blackness with a smile, as though she were
flinging papers out of the window. She, too, grew out of the design in
the cracks of the ceiling, and a greater fear seized me at sight of her
features than when the red face came out of the brambles.

My constant torment was thirst. I was in the prairie, and it was
scorched and brown to the horizon. I searched and prayed pitifully for
water,--for only a sip of the brown water with the specks in it that
was in the swamp. There were no swamps. I was on the bed in the cabin
looking at the shifts and hunting shirts on the pegs, and Polly Ann
would bring a gourdful of clear water from the spring as far as the
door. Nay, once I got it to my lips, and it was gone. Sometimes a young
man in a hunting shirt, square-shouldered, clear-eyed, his face tanned
and his fair hair bleached by the sun, would bring the water. He was the
hero of my boyhood, and part of him indeed was in me. And I would have
followed him again to Vincennes despite the tortures of the damned. But
when I spoke his name he grew stouter before me, and his eyes lost their
lustre and his hair turned gray; and his hand shook as he held out the
gourd and spilled its contents ere I could reach them.

Sometimes another brought the water, and at sight o