And the moon played brightly on curious folk, on spangles and jewels and masked and laughing eyes.
A gray mendicant monk with sombre, thin-lipped face beneath a grayish mask slipped furtively by with a curious air of listening intently to the careless chatter about him; a fat and plaintive Queen Elizabeth followed, talking to a stout courtier who was over-trusting the seams of his satin breeches.
"I doubt if you'll believe me," puffed Queen Elizabeth dolorously, "but every day since that time she deliberately went out and lost herself all day in the flat-woods and stopped to look at that ridiculous cart with the wheel of flame when I was sure a buzzard had bitten her--No! No! I don't know, Jethro; I'm sure I don't.

How should I know why it was burning?
But it was.

She said plainly that it was a cart wheel of fire and if it was a wheel it must certainly have been on something and what on earth would a wheel be on but a cart?
Certainly one wouldn't buy a bale of cart wheels to make fires in the flat-woods.

Well, it's the strangest thing, Jethro, but nearly every day since, she's visited the flat-woods and wandered about with that terrible Indian girl who isn't an Indian girl.

Seems that she's a most extraordinary girl with a foster-father and she sells sand mounds--no, that's not it--the things they find in them besides the sand--and she has a queer, wild sort of culture and her father was white.