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Nyoda knew how real this fear was and sympathized deeply with her, although she pretended to make light of it, as the others did. Nyoda and the Winnebagos loved to sit in the silence of the woods when the fire burned low and listen to the murmuring of the water, but for Oh-Pshaw's sake they must not do it to-night.
They were promptly rescued by a nearby launch, all unhurt, but the moaning, gurgling sound of the water had stamped itself indelibly on Oh-Pshaw's tiny brain and she would never again be able to hear that gurgling noise without a sensation of horror. During her infancy, even the sound of water gurgling out of a bottle was sufficient to throw her into spasms.
"Come, girls," Nyoda called cheerily, "'Fire's gwine out, time to sing 'Mammy Moon' and then go home." She poked the last embers of the fire into a little blaze, and the light and the lively measures of the song took Oh-Pshaw's mind off the gurgling water. "Cross my heart, Mammy Moon, Termorrer I'll be an angel coon, I'll be a chile dat'll make you smile, Good o-l-e Mam-my M-o-o-n!"
"Can I go with only one stocking on?" Oh-Pshaw persisted plaintively. "I haven't another pair here in the tent." "I can't find my middy," Jean Lawrence was lamenting, paying no heed to Oh-Pshaw's troubles in regard to hosiery.
While the Winnebago tongues were wagging busily in Oh-Pshaw's room and Lieutenant Allison was lying quite comfortable in bed in the big square bedroom of the Wing home, where he had been carried when brought in from the woods the night before with a ragged cut in his left temple and a fractured arm, Sahwah, breathless with wonder at the strange new thing that had come into her life, fled from the chattering girls and went wandering by herself in the silence of the woods, where she could think and dream undisturbed.
Sahwah jumped lightly from the tree and Oh-Pshaw followed her, but Oh-Pshaw's foot had gone to sleep from sitting on it so long and she jumped stiffly and came down on a jagged stump, skinning her shin from ankle to knee and giving the knee itself a bad bump. "Anything broken?" asked Sahwah, bending solicitously over the injured member and inspecting the damage.
She can't even stand it to hear the water running down the eave spouts during a heavy shower." The Winnebagos all laughed again at this queer "bête noir" of Oh-Pshaw's, all but Nyoda. She knew something which the girls did not, and which neither Agony nor Oh-Pshaw herself knew, something which had been told her by Grandmother Wing in one of her talks with Nyoda.
"I guess not," replied Oh-Pshaw, wincing with the pain, "though it hurts like fury. I guess it's just skinned." Sahwah bound up the two places that were bleeding the most with her handkerchief and Oh-Pshaw's and was gently replacing the stocking when her ears caught a sound a noise like the humming of a giant bee. "What's that noise?" asked Oh-Pshaw. "It's an aeroplane," said Sahwah.
"Doesn't he look pathetic, with his little paws held out that way?" continued Katherine, unmoved by Oh-Pshaw's expression of terrified disgust. "I don't doubt but what he was the father of a large family or maybe the mother and there will be great sorrow in the nest out in the field when he doesn't come home to supper." "Throw it away!" commanded Oh-Pshaw. "Let's have a funeral," suggested Jean.
Oh-Pshaw's woebegone look began to fade from her face and her heart was warmed clear to the bottom at the thought of Sahwah's leaving the celebration and coming all the way out here to find her. The world took on a cheerful hue again; she sat up and dried her eyes and began to smooth out her crumpled uniform.
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