All-Story Weekly, Vol. 112, No. 1 — page 45: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ONE GIFT. “You are a hero. You shall always be a hero in my life.” There was a deal of panic in this. There was none the less something final about it —as if she and he had been a new Adam and Eve, and it had been revealed to them what would befall were they cast from the Garden of the Spirit. Without a word Blue Otter brought back the canoe to the bank where there was a dry knoll, and there he set about the work of making camp—while the jungle whis- pered and watched. & CHAPTER XX. “7 AM HERE—” Y race and training, Blue Otter was a communicator with spirits. Within his experience there were two sorts of fairies—the sort that lived in the thick tops of certain pine-trees, and another sort that lived in the grass. He believed that he had spoken to both of these. And per- haps he had. Who shall say, positively, that there are no such things? While Muriel Sangree, that complex and yet primitive thing commonly referred to as a society girl, watched him, Blue Otter cut a hundred fans of the low-growing pal- metto and cast these down on the ground at the foot of a live-oak tree, thus forming a thick and elastic mattress impervious to the moisture of the ground. “Here you are safe,” he told her. “Stay here while I am gone.” He under- stood the fear in Her face. He handed her his gun. ‘You come back?” she asked. He pointed with his hand at an opening in the trees. ‘‘ When the sun is there,” he said. He smiled at her gravely. She turned for a moment to the palmetto couch he had prepared for her. When she turned again he had disappeared. /Blue Otter himself did not turn to look back. He passed through the thickets of pop-ash and pond-apple,. fern and fig, bay. and gum, as easily and apparently with as little thought as a white man would have passed along the footpath of a village. He 35 kept on until he came to a grassy glade where only a few pines and tall cabbage- trees were growing. He cast his eyes about this and saw that it was unspoiled of man. In the center of this glade he knelt, sitting on his heels, and raised his face to the sun. “QO Father-Back-of-the-Sun,” he said, ‘““T am come to seek wisdom. I am Your child. I listen. I shall hear Your voice.” There was a long pause—while his lips con- tinued to move, while there came a look in his face as if he could see something through his closed eyes. Presently he said softly, but aloud: ‘‘ Your messengers are as many as the needles of all Your pine- trees, as the leaves of grass in all Your prairies.” Even if there had been any one there to watch and listen, there would have been no sign, perhaps, that this petition of Blue Otter’s was either heard or answered. Here and there a lark sang. On an ad- jacent bit of prairie the swallows darted. Overhead there reeled a pair of swallow- tailed kites. On a bush just back of Blue Otter a mocking-bird fluttered into view, preened itself, began to sing. A _ rabbit hopped from a palmetto thicket and went about its feeding. Farther away, two slen- der, agile serpents of the sort known as blue racers chased each other and played like a pair of transmuted kittens. But Blue Otter, patient and earnest, while the sun covered degree after degree of its wide and leisurely arc, felt at last that his faith and patience had been re- warded. Through the gossamer weave of other sounds he heard a ghostly voice—a voice that was both large and soft, like the voice of a breeze. And this voice called him by name, in Seminole: “ Osinnee-okholattee! Osinnee-okholattee!”’” Which is to say: “Blue Otter! Blue Otter!” Blue Otter answered:~ “I am here!” . He waited, rapt, face up, eyes closed. One would have said that old Blind Her- on, the chief medicine-man, himself had had a vision of this praying-place of Blue Otter—had had his vision in the night, while he sat there cross-legged in his chuko and the rest of the camp was asleep. For, cCoOmiclbooks C©