haste to stay beside her father. “A-ma-soo-kit,” and she achieved it at last, “is not. That’s foreign.” She was silent, catching her breath, and Clay slowed to a saunter.
No sense in wearing the child out, and the walk along this trail was too beautiful to hurry, anyway; the brush that fenced them in on either hand offered every fall tint that was richest and brightest—lemon, peach, orange, scarlet, royal purple. As for the trees of the wood, taller and more distant, they might have been a seafloor garden with their welters of warm red and gold clumped on their boughs.
“No, it isn’t foreign, Helen,” laughed Clay. “Why, the Indians were the first Americans—they lived here for ages before our people ever thought about the Mayflower.”
“Before George Washington?” That was Helen’s ultimate conception of antiquity.
“Ever so long before. They had a right to name these woods.”
“What does the name mean. Daddy?”
Clay drew on his pipe. It was a favorite of his, a big-bowled English briar. Quite a time would pass, he mused, before he’d be buying any more pipes in England, what with the war and all—Helen was tugging at his hand to hurry the answer. “Why, I’ve told you that, too,” he reminded. “A-ma-soo-kit—the Trees of Truth. Because the Indians believed that any words spoken here came true.”
“Oooo!” Helen was again intrigued. She liked outings of any kind, and had danced when her parents took the cabin on the edge of this forest reserve for fall weekends. Now, if the place had a story attached—“All words come true,” she repeated with relish. “You mean, like fairies and dwarfs?”
“Exactly,” nodded Clay with the utmost gravity. Imaginative himself, he encouraged when he could any romancing his little daughter might attempt. “Fairies and dwarfs.”
“Oooo!” squealed Helen again, and glanced around searchingly. “Daddy, there was a dwarf right there—with a long beard and a red cap—peeking out from under that bush.”
She pointed excitedly. Clay smiled down at her, and led the way around a bend of the trail. The shrubbery was thicker here, and its coloring even richer. Moss made the earth green under their boot-soles.
“It was something to see, then,” Clay remarked, still grave. He knew some parents, and despised them, who would call any child who claimed to see dwarfs a liar. But Clay remembered his own childhood, the vividness of his games and imaginings.
Helen put her hands in her jacket pockets, imitating her father. “Are there witches here too?” she pursued her inquiries.
"Mmmmm—no.” Her father would like to rule such thoughts out, ever since a night of awful dreams after Betty had heard some Hallowe’en tales. “Whatever witches there were in this country got driven away by Cotton Mather, you know.”
“Is Cotton Mather here?” she asked at once.
“Cotton Mather is in heaven,” said Clay. “Let’s stop while Daddy fills his pipe.”
Waiting, Helen glanced up at the half-hazy sky, as though she expected to see the old Puritan divine look out at her, dwarf fashion. “Well,” she said, “are there giants in these woods?”
Tamping down the tobacco in the bowl, Clay held a match to it. He shrugged in defeat—what can you do with kids? They simply throve on stories of excitement and danger and terror. He and Mrs. Clay had tried to hold Helen down to gentle fantasies like Peter Rabbit, but Helen’s taste ran stubbornly to Red Riding Hood’s wolf and even grimmer gentry. It came to Clay that in keeping the stories mild he might
