comes back again_.
--JAMES W. STEELE

FROM the beginning of things in the Walnut Valley, the Kickapoo Corral
had its uses. Nature built it to this end. The river course follows
the pattern of the letter S faced westward instead of eastward.
The upper half of the letter is properly shaped, but the sharpened curve
at the middle leaves only a narrow distance across the lower space.
In this outline runs the Walnut, its upper curve almost surrounding a little
wooded peninsula that slopes gently on its side to the water's edge.
But the farther bank stands up in a straight limestone bluff forming
a high wall of protection about the river-encircled ground.
A less severe bluff crosses the open part of the peninsula,
reaching the hither side of the river below the sharp bend.
The space inside, stone-walled and water-bound, made an ideal shelter
for the wild life that should inhabit it. And Nature saw that it was
good and went away and left it, not forgetting to lock the door upon it.
For the enemy who would enter this protecting shelter must come through
the gateway of the river. There was only one right place to do this.
Deceivingly near to the shallow rock-based ford before the Corral,
so near that only the wise ones knew how to miss it, Nature placed
the cruelest whirlpool that ever swung an even surface up stream,
its gentle motion telling nothing of the fatal suction underneath
that level stretch of steady, slow moving, irresistible water.

What use the primitive tribes made of this spot the river has never told.
But in the day of the Kickapoo supremacy it came to its christening.
Here the tribe found a refuge and harbored its stolen plunder.
From this wooded covert it sent its death-singing arrows through
the heart of its enemy who dared to stand in relief on that stone bluff.