ons of purple and green. A beautiful girl stood, perhaps on this
very spot, with a savage who had rescued her from a sinking canoe and
brought her here, dripping but safe. Over there on the mainland her
father came running out of the woods in an agony of fear. He saw her
here, saw her signals, but the shriek of the storm and the roar of the
waters drowned out the words that she frantically screamed toward him.
He saw her point to the Indian, who was always feared, always counted
treacherous, and his dread of the hurricane changed to terror of the
savage. He raised his rifle and the girl's deliverer dropped dead at her
feet."

"Then fifty years went by, and this became a bower for the eating of
sandwiches," added Dick.

Norris was lying on his back and staring through the tangle of grape and
maple leaves at the flecks of blue beyond.

"That's a noble story," he said. "I didn't suppose this new land had any
legends. It all gives me the impression of being just old enough to be
big."

"Isn't that the conceit of the Anglo-Saxon? He calls this a new land
because he's lived here only about a half-century. Things did happen
before you were born, my dear boy," said Dick.

"Indeed! What things?" Norris asked placidly.

"Suppose you enlarge your mind by looking up the stories of the old
_coureurs du bois_ who used to stumble through these woods when they
were the border-land between Chippewa and Sioux." Dick threw a pebble at
Norris' face. "Suppose you go up to that inky stream in the north, which
twists mysteriously through the forests, black with the bodies of dead
men rotting in its mire. I don't wonder they thought the rough life more
fascinating than kings and courts. I'd like to have seen sun-dances and
maiden-tests; I'd like to have eaten food strange enough to be
picturesque, and to have found new streams and traced them to their
sources, and to have come unexpectedly on new lakes, like amethysts.
It's as much fun to discover as to invent. And then the Jesuit fathers,
half-tramp, half-martyr,--they were great old fellows."

"And the Frenchman--where is he?" said Madeline. "Gone, and left a few
names for the Swede and the American to mispronounce; but you may come
down later, Mr. Norris, and find how law and order, in our own people,
fought with savagery out here on the frontier. It's a thrilling story."

"You love it all and its legends, don't you?" Ellery looked from one to
the other.

"Don't you?" Madeline as