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

instructions to himself? Had there been a moment when he had been so much himself that he had realized that he might not be himself again and so had written the order which later, mechanically, he had obeyed? This certainly would account for the package having been mailed at Manitowoc and for Alan's failure to find out by whom it had been mailed. It would account too for the unknown handwriting upon the wrapper, if some one on the ferry had addressed the package for the old man. He must inquire whether any one among the crew had done that.

What could have brought back that moment of recollection to Corvet, Alan wondered; the finding of the things which he had sent? What might bring another such moment? Would his seeing the Sherrills again—or Spearman—act to restore him?

For half an hour Alan paced steadily at the bow. The storm was increasing noticeably in fierceness; the wind-driven snowflakes had changed to hard pellets which, like little bullets, cut and stung the face; and it was growing colder. From a cabin window came the blue flash of the wireless, which had been silent after notifying the shore stations of their departure. It had commenced again; this was unusual. Something still more unusual followed at once; the direction of the gale seemed slowly to shift, and with it the wash of the water; instead of the wind and the waves coming from dead ahead now, they moved to the port beam, and Number 25, still pitching with the thrust through the seas, also began to roll. This meant, of course, that the steamer had changed its course and was making almost due north. It seemed to Alan to force its engines faster; the deck vibrated more. Alan had not heard the orders for this change and could only speculate as to what it might mean.

His relief came after a few minutes more.

"Where are we heading?" Alan asked.

"Radio," the relief announced. "The H. C. Richardson calling; she's up by the Manitous."

"What sort of trouble?"

"She's not in trouble; it's another ship."

"What ship?"

"No word as to that."

Alan, not delaying to question further, went back to the cabins.

These stretched aft, behind the bridge, along the upper deck, some score on each side of the ship; they had accommodations for almost a hundred passengers; but on this crossing only a few were occupied. Alan had noticed some half dozen men—business men, no doubt, forced to make the crossing and, one of them, a Catholic priest, returning probably to some mission in the north; he had seen no women among them. A little group of passengers were gathered now in the door of or just outside the wireless cabin, which was one of the row on the starboard side. Stewards stood with them and the cabin maid; within, and bending over the table with the radio instrument, was the operator with the second officer beside him. The violet spark was rasping, and the operator, his receivers strapped over his ears, strained to listen. He got no reply, evidently, and he struck his key again; now, as he listened, he wrote slowly on a pad.

"You got 'em?" some one cried. "You got 'em now?"

The operator continued to write; the second mate, reading, shook his head, "It's only the Richardson again."

"What is it?" Alan asked the officer.

"The Richardson heard four blasts of a steam whistle about an hour ago when she was opposite the Manitous. She answered with the whistle and turned toward the blasts. She couldn't find any ship." The officer's reply was interrupted by some of the others. "Then ... that was a few minutes ago ... they heard the four long again.... They'd tried to pick up the other ship with radio before.... Yes; we got that here.... Tried again and got no answer.... But they heard the blasts for half an hour.... They said they seemed to be almost beside the ship once.... But they didn't see anything. Then the blasts stopped ... sudden, cut off short in the middle as though something happened.... She was blowing distress all right.... The Richardson's searching again now.... Yes, she's searching for boats."

"Any one else answered?" Alan asked.

"Shore stations on both sides."

"Do they know what ship it is?"

"No."

"What ship might be there now?"

The officer could not answer that. He had known where the Richardson must be; he knew of no other likely to be there at this season. The spray from the waves had frozen upon Alan; ice gleamed and glinted from the rail and from the deck. Alan's shoulders drew up in a spasm. The Richardson, they said, was looking for boats; how long could men live in little boats exposed to that gale and cold?

He turned back to the others about the radio cabin; the glow from within showed him faces as gray as his; it lighted a face on the opposite side of the door—a face haggard with dreadful fright. Old Burr jerked about as Alan spoke to him and moved away alone; Alan followed him and seized his arm.

"What's the matter?" Alan demanded, holding to him.

"The four blasts!" the wheelsman repeated. "They heard the four blasts!" He iterated it once more.

"Yes," Alan urged. "Why not?"

"But where no ship ought to be; so they couldn't find the ship—they couldn't find the ship!" Terror, of awful abjectness, came over the old man. He freed himself from Alan and went forward.

Alan followed him to the quarters of the crew, where night lunch for the men relieved from watch had been set out, and took a seat at the table opposite him. The louder echoing of the steel hull and the roll and pitching of the vessel, which set the table with its dishes swaying, showed that the sea was still increasing, and also that they were now meeting heavier ice. At the table men computed that Number 25 had now made some twenty miles north off its course, and must therefore be approaching the neighborhood where the distress signals had been heard; they speculated uselessly as to what ship could have been in that part of the lake and made the signals. Old Burr took no part in this conversation, but listened to it with frightened eyes, and presently got up and went away, leaving his coffee unfinished.

Number 25 was blowing its steam whistle again at the end of every minute.

Alan, after taking a second cup of coffee, went aft to the car deck. The roar and echoing tumult of the ice against the hull here drowned all other sounds. The thirty-two freight cars, in their four long lines, stood wedged and chained and blocked in place; they tipped and tilted, rolled and swayed like the stanchions and sides of the ship, fixed and secure. Jacks on the steel deck under the edges of the cars, kept them from rocking on their trucks. Men paced watchfully between the tracks, observing the movement of the cars. The cars creaked and groaned, as they worked a little this way and that; the men sprang with sledges and drove the blocks tight again or took an additional turn upon the jacks.

As Alan ascended and went forward to his duty, the increase in the severity of the gale was very evident; the thermometer, the wheelsman said, had dropped below zero. Ice was making rapidly on the hull of the ferry, where the spray, flying thicker through the snow, was freezing as it struck. The deck was all ice now underfoot, and the rails were swollen to great gleaming slabs which joined and grew together; a parapet of ice had appeared on the bow; and all about the swirling snow screen shut off everything. A searchlight which had flared from the bridge while Alan was below, pierced that screen not a ship's length ahead, or on the beam, before the glare dimmed to a glow which served to show no more than the fine, flying pellets of the storm. Except for the noise of the wind and the water, there had been no echo from beyond that screen since the shore signals were lost; now a low, far-away sound came down the wind; it maintained itself for a few seconds, ceased, and then came again, and continued at uneven intervals longer than the timed blasts of Number 25's whistle. It might be the horn of some struggling sailing vessel, which in spite of the storm and the closed season was braving the seas; at the end of each interval of silence, the horn blew twice now; the echo came abeam, passed astern, and was no longer to be heard. How far away its origin had been, Alan could only guess; probably the sailing vessel, away to windward, had not heard the whistle of Number 25 at all.

Alan saw old Burr who, on his way to the wheelhouse, had halted to listen too. For several minutes the old man stood motionless; he came on again and stopped to listen. There had been no sound for quite five minutes now.

"You hear 'em?" Burr's voice quavered in Alan's ear. "You hear 'em?"

"What?" Alan asked.

"The four blasts! You hear 'em now? The four blasts!"

Burr was straining as he listened, and Alan stood still too; no sound came to him but the noise of the storm. "No," he replied. "I don't hear anything. Do you hear them now?"

Burr stood beside him without making reply; the searchlight, which had been pointed abeam, shot its glare forward, and Alan could see Burr's face in the dancing reflection of the flare. The man had never more plainly resembled the picture of Benjamin Corvet; that which had been in the picture, that strange sensation of something haunting him, was upon this man's face, a thousand times intensified; but instead of distorting the features away from all likeness to the picture, it made it grotesquely identical.

And Burr was hearing something—something distinct and terrifying; but he seemed not surprised, but rather satisfied that Alan had not heard. He nodded his head at Alan's denial, and, without reply to Alan's demand, he stood listening. Something bent him forward; he straightened; again the something came; again he straightened. Four times Alan counted the motions. Burr was hearing again the four long blasts of distress! But there was no noise but the gale. "The four blasts!" He recalled old Burr's terror outside the radio cabin. The old man was hearing blasts which were not blown!

He moved on and took the wheel. He was a good wheelsman; the vessel seemed to be steadier on her course and, somehow, to steam easier when the old man steered. His illusions of hearing could do no harm, Alan considered; they were of concern only to Burr and to him.

Alan, relieving the lookout at the bow, stood on watch again. The ferry thrust on alone; in the wireless cabin the flame played steadily. They had been able to get the shore stations again on both sides of the lake and also the Richardson. As the ferry had worked northward, the Richardson had been working north too, evidently under the impression that the vessel in distress, if it had headway, was moving in that direction. By its position, which the Richardson gave, the steamers were about twenty miles apart.

Alan fought to keep his thought all to his duty; they must be now very nearly at the position where the Richardson last had heard the four long blasts; searching for a ship or for boats, in that snow, was almost hopeless. With sight even along the searchlight's beam shortened to a few hundred yards, only accident could bring Number 25 up for rescue, only chance could carry the ship where the shouts—or the blasts of distress if the wreck still floated and had steam—would be heard.

Half numbed by the cold, Alan stamped and beat his arms about his body; the swing of the searchlight in the circle about the ship had become long ago monotonous, purely mechanical, like the blowing of the whistle; Alan stared patiently