The Indian Drum - William MacHarg (fastest ebook reader txt) 📗

you know the places?"

"Yes—the places. They are lake ports or little villages on the lakes. I have been in most of them, Alan. Emmet County, Alan, I came from there. Henry comes from there too."

"Henry Spearman?"

"Yes."

"Then that is where they hear the Drum."

"Yes, Alan."

"My father took newspapers from those places, did he not?"

Wassaquam looked over the addresses again. "Yes; from all. He took them for the shipping news, he said. And sometimes he cut pieces out of them—these pieces, I see now; and afterward I burned the papers; he would not let me only throw them away."

"That's all you know about them, Judah?"

"Yes, Alan; that is all."

Alan dismissed the Indian, who, stolidly methodical in the midst of these events, went down-stairs and commenced to prepare a dinner which Alan knew he could not eat. Alan got up and moved about the rooms; he went back and looked over the lists and clippings once more; then he moved about again. How strange a picture of his father did these things call up to him! When he had thought of Benjamin Corvet before, it had been as Sherrill had described him, pursued by some thought he could not conquer, seeking relief in study, in correspondence with scientific societies, in anything which could engross him and shut out memory. But now he must think of him, not merely as one trying to forget; what had thwarted Corvet's life was not only in the past; it was something still going on. It had amazed Sherrill to learn that Corvet, for twenty years, had kept trace of Alan; but Corvet had kept trace in the same way and with the same secrecy of many other people—of about a score of people. When Alan thought of Corvet, alone here in his silent house, he must think of him as solicitous about these people; as seeking for their names in the newspapers which he took for that purpose, and as recording the changes in their lives. The deaths, the births, the marriages among these people had been of the intensest interest to Corvet.

It was possible that none of these people knew about Corvet; Alan had not known about him in Kansas, but had known only that some unknown person had sent money for his support. But he appreciated that it did not matter whether they knew about him or not; for at some point common to all of them, the lives of these people must have touched Corvet's life. When Alan knew what had been that point of contact, he would know about Corvet; he would know about himself.

Alan had seen among Corvet's books a set of charts of the Great Lakes. He went and got that now and an atlas. Opening them upon the table, he looked up the addresses given on Corvet's list. They were most of them, he found, towns about the northern end of the lake; a very few were upon other lakes—Superior and Huron—but most were upon or very close to Lake Michigan. These people lived by means of the lake; they got their sustenance from it, as Corvet had lived, and as Corvet had got his wealth. Alan was feeling like one who, bound, has been suddenly unloosed. From the time when, coming to see Corvet, he had found Corvet gone until now, he had felt the impossibility of explaining from anything he knew or seemed likely to learn the mystery which had surrounded himself and which had surrounded Corvet. But these names and addresses! They indeed offered something to go upon, though Luke now was forever still, and his pockets had told Alan nothing.

He found Emmet County on the map and put his finger on it. Spearman, Wassaquam had said came from there. "The Land of the Drum!" he said aloud. Deep and sudden feeling stirred in him as he traced out this land on the chart—the little towns and villages, the islands and headlands, their lights and their uneven shores. A feeling of "home" had come to him, a feeling he had not had on coming to Chicago. There were Indian names and French up there about the meetings of the great waters. Beaver Island! He thought of Michabou and the raft. The sense that he was of these lakes, that surge of feeling which he had felt first in conversation with Constance Sherrill was strengthened an hundredfold; he found himself humming a tune. He did not know where he had heard it; indeed, it was not the sort of tune which one knows from having heard; it was the sort which one just knows. A rhyme fitted itself to the hum,

"Seagull, seagull sit on the sand,
It's never fair weather when you're on the land."

He gazed down at the lists of names which Benjamin Corvet had kept so carefully and so secretly; these were his father's people too; these ragged shores and the islands studding the channels were the lands where his father had spent the most active part of his life. There, then—these lists now made it certain—that event had happened by which that life had been blighted. Chicago and this house here had been for his father only the abode of memory and retribution. North, there by the meeting of the waters, was the region of the wrong which was done.

"That's where I must go!" he said aloud. "That's where I must go!"

Constance Sherrill, on the following afternoon, received a telephone call from her father; he was coming home earlier than usual, he said; if she had planned to go out, would she wait until after he got there? She had, indeed, just come in and had been intending to go out again at once; but she took off her wraps and waited for him. The afternoon's mail was upon a stand in the hall. She turned it over, looking through it—invitations, social notes. She picked from among them an envelope addressed to herself in a firm, clear hand, which, unfamiliar to her, still queerly startled her, and tore it open.

Dear Miss Sherrill, she read,

I am closing for the time being, the house which, for default of other ownership, I must call mine. The possibility that what has occurred here would cause you and your father anxiety about me in case I went away without telling you of my intention is the reason for this note. But it is not the only reason. I could not go away without telling you how deeply I appreciate the generosity and delicacy you and your father have shown to me in spite of my position here and of the fact that I had no claim at all upon you. I shall not forget those even though what happened here last night makes it impossible for me to try to see you again or even to write to you.

ALAN CONRAD.

She heard her father's motor enter the drive and ran to him with the letter in her hand.

"He's written to you then," he said, at sight of it.

"Yes."

"I had a note from him this afternoon at the office, asking me to hold in abeyance for the time being the trust that Ben had left me and returning the key of the house to me for safekeeping."

"Has he already gone?"

"I suppose so; I don't know."

"We must find out." She caught up her wraps and began to put them on. Sherrill hesitated, then assented; and they went round the block together to the Corvet house. The shades, Constance saw as they approached, were drawn; their rings at the doorbell brought no response. Sherrill, after a few instants' hesitation, took the key from his pocket and unlocked the door and they went in. The rooms, she saw, were all in perfect order; summer covers had been put upon the furniture; protecting cloths had been spread over the beds up-stairs. Her father tried the water and the gas, and found they had been turned off. After their inspection, they came out again at the front door, and her father closed it with a snapping of the spring lock.

Constance, as they walked away, turned and looked back at the old house, gloomy and dark among its newer, fresher-looking neighbors; and suddenly she choked, and her eyes grew wet. That feeling was not for Uncle Benny; the drain of days past had exhausted such a surge of feeling for him. That which she could not wink away was for the boy who had come to that house a few weeks ago and for the man who just now had gone.

CHAPTER XIII THE THINGS FROM CORVET'S POCKETS

"Miss Constance Sherrill,
    Harbor Springs, Michigan."

The address, in large scrawling letters, was written across the brown paper of the package which had been brought from the post office in the little resort village only a few moments before. The paper covered a shoe box, crushed and old, bearing the name of S. Klug, Dealer in Fine Shoes, Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The box, like the outside wrapping, was carefully tied with string.

Constance, knowing no one in Manitowoc and surprised at the nature of the package, glanced at the postmark on the brown paper which she had removed; it too was stamped Manitowoc. She cut the strings about the box and took off the cover. A black and brown dotted silk cloth filled the box; and, seeing it, Constance caught her breath. It was—at least it was very like—the muffler which Uncle Benny used to wear in winter. Remembering him most vividly as she had seen him last, that stormy afternoon when he had wandered beside the lake, carrying his coat until she made him put it on, she recalled this silk cloth, or one just like it, in his coat pocket; she had taken it from his pocket and put it around his neck.

She started with trembling fingers to take it from the box; then, realizing from the weight of the package that the cloth was only a wrapping or, at least, that other things were in the box, she hesitated and looked around for her mother. But her mother had gone out; her father and Henry both were in Chicago; she was alone in the big summer "cottage," except for servants. Constance picked up box and wrapping and ran up to her room. She locked the door and put the box upon the bed; now she lifted out the cloth. It was a wrapping, for the heavier things came with it; and now, also, it revealed itself plainly as the scarf—Uncle Benny's scarf! A paper fluttered out as she began to unroll it—a little cross-lined leaf evidently torn from a pocket memorandum book. It had been folded and rolled up. She spread it out; writing was upon it, the small irregular letters of Uncle Benny's hand.

"Send to Alan Conrad," she read; there followed a Chicago address—the number of Uncle Benny's house on Astor Street. Below this was another line:

"Better care of Constance Sherrill (Miss)." There followed the Sherrills' address upon the Drive. And to this was another correction:

"Not after June 12th; then to Harbor Springs, Mich. Ask some one of that; be sure the date; after June 12th."

Constance, trembling, unrolled the scarf; now coins showed from a fold, next a pocket knife, ruined and rusty, next a watch—a man's large gold watch with the case queerly pitted and worn completely through in places, and last a plain little band of gold of the size for a woman's finger—a wedding ring. Constance, gasping and with fingers shaking so from excitement that she could scarcely hold these objects, picked them up and examined them—the ring first.

It very evidently was, as she had immediately thought, a wedding ring once fitted for a finger only a trifle less slender than her own. One side of the gold band was very much worn, not with the sort of wear which a ring gets on a hand, but by some different sort of abrasion. The other side of the band was roughened