The Indian Drum Part 40

"Come with me then!" he commanded; and he went to the door and laid his snowshoes on the snow and stepped into them, stooping and tightening the straps; he stood by while she put on hers. He did not attempt again to put hands upon her as they moved away from the little cabin toward the woods back of the clearing; but went ahead, breaking the trail for her with his snowshoes. He moved forward slowly; he could travel, if he had wished, three feet to every two that she could cover, but he seemed not wis.h.i.+ng for speed but rather for delay. They reached the trees; the hemlock and pine, black and swaying, s.h.i.+fted their shadows on the moonlit snow; bare maples and beeches, bent by the gale, creaked and cracked; now the hemlock was heavier. The wind, which wailed among the branches of the maples, hissed loudly in the needles of the hemlocks; snow swept from the slopes and whirled and drove about them, and she sucked it in with her breath. All through the wood were noises; a moaning came from a dark copse of pine and hemlock to their right, rose and died away; a wail followed--a whining, whimpering wail--so like the crying of a child that it startled her. Shadows seemed to detach themselves, as the trees swayed, to tumble from the boughs and scurry over the snow; they hid, as one looked at them, then darted on and hid behind the tree trunks.

Henry was barely moving; now he slowed still more. A deep, dull resonance was booming above the wood; it boomed again and ran into a rhythm. No longer was it above; at least it was not only above; it was all about them--here, there, to right and to left, before, behind--the booming of the Drum. Doom was the substance of that sound of the Drum beating the roll of the dead. Could there be abiding in the wood a consciousness which counted that roll? Constance fought the mad feeling that it brought. The sound must have some natural cause, she repeated to herself--waves was.h.i.+ng in some strange conformation of the ice caves on the sh.o.r.e, wind reverberating within some great hollow tree trunk as within the pipe of an organ. But Henry was not denying the Drum!

He had stopped in front of her, half turned her way; his body swayed and bent to the booming of the Drum, as his swollen lips counted its soundings. She could see him plainly in the moonlight, yet she drew nearer to him as she followed his count. "Twenty-one," he counted--"Twenty-two!" The Drum was still going on.

"Twenty-four--twenty-five--twenty-six!" Would he count another?

He did not; and her pulses, which had halted, leaped with relief; and through her comprehension rushed. It was thus she had seen him counting in the cabin, but so vaguely that she had not been certain of it, but only able to suspect. Then the Drum had stopped short of twenty-six, but he had not stopped counting because of that; he had made the sounds twenty-six, when she and the woman had made them, twenty-two; now he had reckoned them twenty-six, though the Drum, as she separated the sound from other noises, still went on!

He moved on again, descending the steep side of a little ravine, and she followed. One of his snowshoes caught in a protruding root and, instead of slowing to free it with care, he pulled it violently out, and she heard the dry, seasoned wood crack. He looked down, swore; saw that the wood was not broken through and went on; but as he reached the bottom of the slope, she leaped downward from a little height behind him and crashed down upon his trailing snowshoe just behind the heel.

The rending snap of the wood came beneath her feet. Had she broken through his shoe or snapped her own? She sprang back, as he cried out and swung in an attempt to grasp her; he lunged to follow her, and she ran a few steps away and stopped. At his next step, his foot entangled in the mesh of the broken snowshoe, and he stooped, cursing, to strip it off and hurl it from him; then he tore off the one from the other foot, and threw it away, and lurched after her again; but now he sank above his knees and floundered in the snow. She stood for a moment while the half-mad, half-drunken figure struggled toward her along the side of the ravine; then she ran to where the tree trunks hid her from him, but where she could look out from the shadow and see him. He gained the top of the slope and turned in the direction she had gone; a.s.sured then, apparently, that she had fled in fear of him, he started back more swiftly toward the beach. She followed, keeping out of his sight among the trees.

To twenty-six, he had counted--to twenty-six, each time! That told that he knew one was living among those who had been upon the ferry!

The Drum--it was not easy to count with exactness those wild, irregularly leaping sounds; one might make of them almost what one wished--or feared! And if, in his terror here, Henry made the count twenty-six, it was because he knew--he knew that one was living! What one? It could only be one of two to dismay him so; there had been only two on the ferry whose rescue he had feared; only two who, living, he would have let lie upon this beach which he had chosen and set aside for his patrol, while he waited for him to die!

She forced herself on, unsparingly, as she saw Henry gain the sh.o.r.e and as, believing himself alone, he hurried northward. She went with him, paralleling his course among the trees. On the wind-swept ridges of the ice, where there was little snow, he could travel for long stretches faster than she; she struggled to keep even with him, her lungs seared by the cold air as she gasped for breath. But she could not rest; she could not let herself be exhausted. Merciless minute after minute she raced him thus-- A dark shape--a figure lay stretched upon the ice ahead! Beyond and still farther out, something which seemed the fragments of a lifeboat tossed up and down where the waves thundered and gleamed at the edge of the floe.

Henry's pace quickened; hers quickened desperately too. She left the shelter of the trees and scrambled down the steep pitch of the bluff, shouting, crying aloud. Henry turned about and saw her; he halted, and she pa.s.sed him with a rush and got between him and the form upon the ice, before she turned and faced him.

Defeat--defeat of whatever frightful purpose he had had--was his now that she was there to witness what he might do; and in his realization of that, he burst out in oaths against her-- He advanced; she stood, confronting--he swayed slightly in his walk and swung past her and away; he went past those things on the beach and kept on along the ice hummocks toward the north.

She ran to the huddled figure of the man in mackinaw and cap; his face was hidden partly by the position in which he lay and partly by the drifting snow; but, before she swept the snow away and turned him to her, she knew that he was Alan.

She cried to him and, when he did not answer, she shook him to get him awake; but she could not rouse him. Praying in wild whispers to herself, she opened his jacket and felt within his clothes; he was warm--at least he was not frozen within! No; and there seemed some stir of his heart! She tried to lift him, to carry him; then to drag him. But she could not; he fell from her arms into the snow again, and she sat down, pulling him upon her lap and clasping him to her. She must have aid, she must get him to some house, she must take him out of the terrible cold; but dared she leave him? Might Henry return, if she went away? She arose and looked about. Far up the sh.o.r.e she saw his figure rising and falling with his flight over the rough ice. A sound came to her too, the low, deep reverberation of the Drum beating once more along the sh.o.r.e and in the woods and out upon the lake; and it seemed to her that Henry's figure, in the stumbling steps of its flight, was keeping time to the wild rhythm of that sound. And she stooped to Alan and covered him with her coat, before leaving him; for she feared no longer Henry's return.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FATE OF THE "MIWAKA"

"So this isn't your house, Judah?"

"No, Alan; this is an Indian's house, but it is not mine. It is Adam Enos' house. He and his wife went somewhere else when you needed this."

"He helped to bring me here then?"

"No, Alan. They were alone here--she and Adam's wife. When she found you, they brought you here--more than a mile along the beach. Two women!"

Alan choked as he put down the little porcupine quill box which had started this line of inquiry. Whatever questions he had asked of Judah or of Sherrill these last few days had brought him very quickly back to her. Moved by some intuitive certainty regarding Spearman, she had come north; she had not thought of peril to herself; she had struggled alone across dangerous ice in storm--a girl brought up as she had been!

She had found him--Alan--with life almost extinct upon the beach; she and the Indian woman, Wa.s.saquam had just said, had brought him along the sh.o.r.e. How had they managed that, he wondered; they had somehow got him to this house which, in his ignorance of exactly where he was upon the mainland, he had thought must be Wa.s.saquam's; she had gone to get help-- His throat closed up, and his eyes filled as he thought of this.

In the week during which he had been cared for here, Alan had not seen Constance; but there had been a peculiar and exciting alteration in Sherrill's manner toward him, he had felt; it was something more than merely liking for him that Sherrill had showed, and Sherrill had spoken of her to him as Constance, not, as he had called her always before, "Miss Sherrill" or "my daughter." Alan had had dreams which had seemed impossible of fulfilment, of dedicating his life and all that he could make of it to her; now Sherrill's manner had brought to him something like awe, as of something quite incredible.

When he had believed that disgrace was his--disgrace because he was Benjamin Corvet's son--he had hidden, or tried to hide, his feeling toward her; he knew now that he was not Corvet's son; Spearman had shot his father, Corvet had said. But he could not be certain yet who his father was or what revelation regarding himself might now be given.

Could he dare to betray that he was thinking of Constance as--as he could not keep from thinking? He dared not without daring to dream that Sherrill's manner meant that she could care for him; and that he could not presume. What she had undergone for him--her venture alone up the beach and that dreadful contest which had taken place between her and Spearman--must remain circ.u.mstances which he had learned but from which he could not yet take conclusions.

He turned to the Indian.

"Has anything more been heard of Spearman, Judah?"

"Only this, Alan; he crossed the Straits the next day upon the ferry there. In Mackinaw City he bought liquor at a bar and took it with him; he asked there about trains into the northwest. He has gone, leaving all he had. What else could he do?"

Alan crossed the little cabin and looked out the window over the snow-covered slope, where the bright sun was s.h.i.+ning. It was very still without; there was no motion at all in the pines toward the ice-bound sh.o.r.e; and the shadow of the wood smoke rising from the cabin chimney made almost a straight line across the snow. Snow had covered any tracks that there had been upon the beach where those who had been in the boat with him had been found dead. He had known that this must be; he had believed them beyond aid when he had tried for the sh.o.r.e to summon help for them and for himself. The other boat, which had carried survivors of the wreck, blown farther to the south, had been able to gain the sh.o.r.e of North Fox Island; and as these men had not been so long exposed before they were brought to shelter, four men lived. Sherrill had told him their names; they were the mate, the a.s.sistant engineer, a deckhand and Father Perron, the priest who had been a pa.s.senger but who had stayed with the crew till the last.

Benjamin Corvet had perished in the wreckage of the cars.

As Alan went back to his chair, the Indian watched him and seemed not displeased.

"You feel good now, Alan?" Wa.s.saquam asked.

"Almost like myself, Judah."

"That is right then. It was thought you would be like that to-day."

He looked at the long shadows and at the height of the early morning sun, estimating the time of day. "A sled is coming soon now."

"We're going to leave here, Judah?"

"Yes, Alan."

Was he going to see her then? Excitement stirred him, and he turned to Wa.s.saquam to ask that; but suddenly he hesitated and did not inquire.

Wa.s.saquam brought the mackinaw and cap which Alan had worn on Number 25; he took from the bed the new blankets which had been furnished by Sherrill. They waited until a farmer appeared driving a team hitched to a low, wide-runnered sled. The Indian settled Alan on the sled, and they drove off.

The farmer looked frequently at Alan with curious interest; the sun shone down, dazzling, and felt almost warm in the still air.

Wa.s.saquam, with regard for the frostbite from which Alan had been suffering, bundled up the blankets around him; but Alan put them down rea.s.suringly. They traveled south along the sh.o.r.e, rounded into Little Traverse Bay, and the houses of Harbor Point appeared among their pines. Alan could see plainly that these were snow-weighted and boarded up without sign of occupation; but he saw that the Sherrill house was open; smoke rose from the chimney, and the windows winked with the reflection of a red blaze within. He was so sure that this was their destination that he started to throw off the robes.

"n.o.body there now," Wa.s.saquam indicated the house. "At Petoskey; we go on there."

The sled proceeded across the edge of the bay to the little city; even before leaving the bay ice, Alan saw Constance and her father; they were walking at the water front near to the railway station, and they came out on the ice as they recognized the occupants of the sled.

Alan felt himself alternately weak and roused to strength as he saw her. The sled halted and, as she approached, he stepped down. Their eyes encountered, and hers looked away; a sudden shyness, which sent his heart leaping, had come over her. He wanted to speak to her, to make some recognition to her of what she had done, but he did not dare to trust his voice; and she seemed to understand that. He turned to Sherrill instead. An engine and tender coupled to a single car stood at the railway station.

"We're going to Chicago?" he inquired of Sherrill.

"Not yet, Alan--to St. Ignace. Father Perron--the priest, you know--went to St. Ignace as soon as he recovered from his exposure. He sent word to me that he wished to see me at my convenience; I told him that we would go to him as soon as you were able."

"He sent no other word than that?"

"Only that he had a very grave communication to make to us."

Alan did not ask more; at mention of Father Perron he had seemed to feel himself once more among the cras.h.i.+ng, charging freight cars on the ferry and to see Benjamin Corvet, pinned amid the wreckage and speaking into the ear of the priest.

Father Perron, walking up and down upon the docks close to the railway station at St. Ignace, where the tracks end without b.u.mper or blocking of any kind above the waters of the lake, was watching south directly across the Straits. It was mid-afternoon and the ice-crusher _Ste.

Marie_, which had been expected at St. Ignace about this time, was still some four miles out. During the storm of the week before, the floes had jammed into that narrow neck between the great lakes of Michigan and Huron until, men said, the Straits were ice-filled to the bottom; but the _Ste. Marie_ and the _St. Ignace_ had plied steadily back and forth.

Through a stretch where the ice-crusher now was the floes had changed position, or new ice was blocking the channel; for the _Ste. Marie_, having stopped, was backing; now her funnels shot forth fresh smoke, and she charged ahead. The priest clenched his hands as the steamer met the shock and her third propeller--the one beneath her bow--sucked the water out from under the floe and left it without support; she met the ice barrier, crashed some of it aside; she broke through, recoiled, halted, charged, climbed up the ice and broke through again. As she drew nearer now in her approach, the priest walked back toward the railway station.