Then she thought of something else, and broke out afresh.

“Don’t you remember, when I was telling her fortune there in the train, I told her that the light-haired man had already come into her life, and she made fun of me and said it must have been the Swede brakeman?  Well, what I told her was true, because Lieutenant Allison had already seen her then! Now, will you say there isn’t any truth in fortunes?”

The Winnebagos could only gasp at the workings of fate!

“But what about the other man you said you saw in her fortune, the light-haired man who was going to turn dark after a while?” asked Migwan.

“I don’t know,” replied Hinpoha.  Then she added, “Give him time!  He hasn’t shown up yet, but he will, you see if he doesn’t.”

And in view of the success of her former prophecy the Winnebagos could not very well have any doubts.

“Wasn’t it a miracle that Sahwah happened to be in the woods when the plane came down?” said Agony in a hushed voice.

“Yes, but she wouldn’t have been there if we hadn’t lost the contest,” said Migwan musingly.  “Isn’t it queer the way things work out sometimes?  Here, we wanted to win that contest so badly, and were disappointed when we didn’t, and yet if we had won it Lieutenant Allison would have been killed!”

The rest looked at each other in silent awe at this marvelous working of fate!  In a dim, groping way they all felt the touch of an unseen, mighty hand in their affairs, guiding them this way or that as it chose, regardless of their own plans or intentions.

“It was really Oh-Pshaw that saved his life,” said Gladys, “because she made the mistake that made us lose.”

“And I was so hateful about it, and said such mean things!” said Agony contritely.  “I take it all back, Oh-Pshaw.  It was the luckiest thing you ever did to get rattled then.”

Oh-Pshaw smiled forgivingly and all was serene between the twins once more.

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.

So preoccupied was she that she had passed out of the gate of Carver House without even noticing Kaiser Bill, who had broken out of his confines and was pulling the honeysuckle vine off the fence.  The Kaiser stopped pulling for a moment as she came out and eyed her warily, on guard for a well-aimed stone, but she passed by unheeding.  It betokened deep abstraction indeed when Sahwah ignored the depredations of Kaiser Bill.  The Kaiser executed a defiant caper under her very nose and then returned blandly to his vine pulling, sending a suspicious look after her from time to time as she passed down the hill.