The Indian Drum

by William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer

  CHAPTER XIII

  THE THINGS FROM CORVET'S POCKETS

  "Miss Constance Sherrill, Harbor Springs, Michigan."

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

  Constance, knowing no one in Manitowoc and surprised at the nature ofthe package, glanced at the postmark on the brown paper which she hadremoved; it too was stamped Manitowoc. She cut the strings about thebox and took off the cover. A black and brown dotted silk cloth filledthe box; and, seeing it, Constance caught her breath. It was--at leastit was very like--the muffler which Uncle Benny used to wear in winter.Remembering him most vividly as she had seen him last, that stormyafternoon when he had wandered beside the lake, carrying his coat untilshe made him put it on, she recalled this silk cloth, or one just likeit, in his coat pocket; she had taken it from his pocket and put itaround 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 awrapping or, at least, that other things were in the box, she hesitatedand looked around for her mother. But her mother had gone out; herfather and Henry both were in Chicago; she was alone in the big summer"cottage," except for servants. Constance picked up box and wrappingand ran up to her room. She locked the door and put the box upon thebed; now she lifted out the cloth. It was a wrapping, for the heavierthings came with it; and now, also, it revealed itself plainly as thescarf--Uncle Benny's scarf! A paper fluttered out as she began tounroll it--a little cross-lined leaf evidently torn from a pocketmemorandum 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--thenumber of Uncle Benny's house on Astor Street. Below this was anotherline:

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

  "Not after June 12th; then to Harbor Springs, Mich. Ask some one ofthat; 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 goldwatch with the case queerly pitted and worn completely through inplaces, and last a plain little band of gold of the size for a woman'sfinger--a wedding ring. Constance, gasping and with fingers shaking sofrom excitement that she could scarcely hold these objects, picked themup and examined them--the ring first.

  It very evidently was, as she had immediately thought, a wedding ringonce fitted for a finger only a trifle less slender than her own. Oneside of the gold band was very much worn, not with the sort of wearwhich a ring gets on a hand, but by some different sort of abrasion.The other side of the band was roughened and pitted but not so muchworn; the inside still bore the traces of an inscription. "As long aswe bo ... all live," Constance could read, and the date "June 2, 1891."

  It was in January, 1896, Constance remembered, that Alan Conrad hadbeen brought to the people in Kansas; he then was "about three yearsold." If this wedding ring was his mother's, the date would be aboutright; it was a date probably something more than a year before Alanwas born. Constance put down the ring and picked up the watch.Wherever it had lain, it had been less protected than the ring; thecovers of the case had been almost eroded away, and whatever initialingor other marks there might have been upon the outside were gone. Butit was like Uncle Benny's watch--or like one of his watches. He hadseveral, she knew, presented to him at various times--watches almostalways were the testimonials given to seamen for acts of sacrifice andbravery. She remembered finding some of those testimonials in a drawerat his house once where she was rummaging, when she was a child. Oneof them had been a watch just like this, large and heavy. The springwhich operated the cover would not work, but Constance forced the coveropen.

  There, inside the cover as she had thought it would be, was engravedwriting. Sand had seeped into the case; the inscription wasobliterated in part.

  "For his courage and skill in seam ... master of ... which he broughtto the rescue of the passengers and crew of the steamer _Winnebago_foundering ... Point, Lake Erie, November 26th, 1890, this watch isdonated by the Buffalo Merchants' Exchange."

  Uncle Benny's name, evidently, had been engraved upon the outside.Constance could not particularly remember the rescue of the people ofthe _Winnebago_; 1890 was years before she was born, and Uncle Bennydid not tell her that sort of thing about himself.

  The watch, she saw now, must have lain in water, for the hands underthe crystal were rusted away and the face was all streaked and cracked.She opened the back of the watch and exposed the works; they too wererusted and filled with sand. Constance left the watch open and,shivering a little, she gently laid it down upon her bed. The pocketknife had no distinguishing mark of any sort; it was just a man'sordinary knife with the steel turned to rust and with sand in it too.The coins were abraded and pitted discs--a silver dollar, a half dollarand three quarters, not so much abraded, three nickels, and two pennies.

  Constance choked, and her eyes filled with tears. Thesethings--plainly they were the things found in Uncle Benny'spockets--corroborated only too fully what Wassaquam believed and whather father had been coming to believe.--that Uncle Benny was dead. Themuffler and the scrap of paper had not been in water or in sand. Thepaper was written in pencil; it had not even been moistened or it wouldhave blurred. There was nothing upon it to tell how long ago it hadbeen written; but it had been written certainly before June twelfth."After June 12th," it said.

  That day was August the eighteenth.

  It was seven months since Uncle Benny had gone away. After his strangeinterview with her that day and his going home, had Uncle Benny goneout directly to his death? There was nothing to show that he had not;the watch and coins must have lain for many weeks, for months, in waterand in sand to become eroded in this way. But, aside from this, therewas nothing that could be inferred regarding the time or place of UncleBenny's death. That the package had been mailed from Manitowoc meantnothing definite. Some one--Constance could not know whom--had had themuffler and the scrawled leaf of directions; later, after lying inwater and in sand, the things which were to be "sent" had come to thatsome one's hand. Most probably this some one had been one who wasgoing about on ships; when his ship had touched at Manitowoc, he hadexecuted his charge.

  Constance left the articles upon the bed and threw the window morewidely open. She trembled and felt stirred and faint, as she leanedagainst the window, breathing deeply the warm air, full of life andwith the scent of the evergreen trees about the house.

  The "cottage" of some twenty rooms stood among the pines and hemlocksinterspersed with hardwood on "the Point," where were the great finesummer homes of the wealthier "resorters." White, narrow roads, justwide enough for two automobiles to pass abreast, wound like a labyrinthamong the tree trunks; and the sound of the wind among the pine needleswas mingled with the soft lapping of water. To south and east from herstretched Little Traverse--one of the most beautiful bits of water ofthe lakes; across from her, beyond the wrinkling water of the bay, thelarger town--Petoskey--with its hilly streets pitching down steeply tothe water's edge and the docks, and with its great resort hotels, wasplainly visible. To westward, from the white life-saving station andthe lighthouse, the point ran out in shingle, bone white, outcroppingabove the water; then for miles away the shallow water was treacherousgreen and white to where at the north, around the bend of the shore, itdeepened and grew blue again, and a single white tower--Ile-aux-GaletsLight--kept watch above it.

  This was Uncle Benny's country. Here, twenty-five years before, he hadfirst met Henry, whos
e birthplace--a farm, deserted now--was only a fewmiles back among the hills. Here, before that, Uncle Benny had been ayoung man, active, vigorous, ambitious. He had loved this country foritself and for its traditions, its Indian legends and fantasticstories. Half her own love for it--and, since her childhood, it hadbeen to her a region of delight--was due to him and to the things hehad told her about it. Distinct and definite memories of thatcompanionship came to her. This little bay, which had become now forthe most part only a summer playground for such as she, had been once aplace where he and other men had struggled to grow rich swiftly; he hadoutlined for her the ruined lumber docks and pointed out to her thelocations of the dismantled sawmills. It was he who had told her thenames of the freighters passing far out, and the names of thelighthouses, and something about each. He had told her too about theIndians. She remembered one starry night when he had pointed out toher in the sky the Indian "Way of Ghosts," the Milky Way, along which,by ancient Indian belief, the souls of Indians traveled up to heaven;and how, later, lying on the recessed seat beside the fireplace whereshe could touch the dogs upon the hearth, he had pointed out to herthrough the window the Indian "Way of Dogs" among the constellations,by which the dogs too could make that journey. It was he who had toldher about Michabou and the animals; and he had been the first to tellher of the Drum.

  The disgrace, unhappiness, the threat of something worse, which musthave made death a relief to Uncle Benny, she had seen passed on now toAlan. What more had come to Alan since she had last heard of him?Some terrible substance to his fancies which would assail him again asshe had seen him assailed after Luke had come? Might another attackhave been made upon him similar to that which he had met in Chicago?

  Word had reached her father through shipping circles in May and againin July which told of inquiries regarding Uncle Benny which made herand her father believe that Alan was searching for his father upon thelakes. Now these articles which had arrived made plain to her that hewould never find Uncle Benny; he would learn, through others or throughthemselves, that Uncle Benny was dead. Would he believe then thatthere was no longer any chance of learning what his father had done?Would he remain away because of that, not letting her see or hear fromhim again?

  She went back and picked up the wedding ring.

  The thought which had come to her that this was Alan's mother's weddingring, had fastened itself upon her with a sense of certainty. Itdefended that unknown mother; it freed her, at least, from the stigmawhich Constance's own mother had been so ready to cast. Constancecould not yet begin to place Uncle Benny in relation to that ring; butshe was beginning to be able to think of Alan and his mother. She heldthe little band of gold very tenderly in her hand; she was glad that,as the accusation against his mother had come through her people, shecould tell him soon of this. She could not send the ring to him, notknowing where he was; that was too much risk. But she could ask him tocome to her; this gave that right.

  She sat thoughtful for several minutes, the ring clasped warmly in herhand; then she went to her desk and wrote:

  Mr. John Welton, Blue Rapids, Kansas.

  Dear Mr. Welton:

  It is possible that Alan Conrad has mentioned me--or at least told youof my father--in connection with his stay in Chicago. After Alan leftChicago, my father wrote, twice to his Blue Rapids address, butevidently he had instructed the postmaster there to forward his mailand had not made any change in those instructions, for the letters werereturned to Alan's address and in that way came back to us. We did notlike to press inquiries further than that, as of course he could havecommunicated with us if he had not felt that there was some reason fornot doing so. Now, however, something of such supreme importance tohim has come to us that it is necessary for us to get word to him atonce. If you can tell me any address at which he can be reached bytelegraph or mail--or where a messenger can find him--it will oblige usvery much and will be to his interest.

  She hesitated, about to sign it; then, impulsively, she added:

  I trust you know that we have Alan's interest at heart and that you cansafely tell us anything you may know as to where he is or what he maybe doing. We all liked him here so very much....

  She signed her name. There were still two other letters to write.Only the handwriting of the address upon the package, the Manitowocpostmark and the shoe box furnished clue to the sender of the ring andthe watch and the other things. Constance herself could not tracethose clues, but Henry or her father could. She wrote to both of them,therefore, describing the articles which had come and relating what shehad done. Then she rang for a servant and sent the letters to thepost. They were in time to catch the "dummy" train around the bay and,at Petoskey, would get into the afternoon mail. The two for Chicagowould be delivered early the next morning, so she could expect repliesfrom Henry and her father on the second day; the letter to Kansas, ofcourse, would take much longer than that.

  But the next noon she received a wire from Henry that he was "comingup." It did not surprise her, as she had expected him the end of theweek.

  Late that evening, she sat with her mother on the wide, screenedveranda. The breeze among the pines had died away; the lake was calm.A half moon hung midway in the sky, making plain the hills about thebay and casting a broadening way of silver on the mirror surface of thewater. The lights of some boat turning in between the points andmoving swiftly caught her attention. As it entered the path of themoonlight, its look was so like that of Henry's power yacht that shearose. She had not expected him until morning; but now the boat was sonear that she could no longer doubt that it was his. He must havestarted within an hour of the receipt of her letter and had beenforcing his engines to their fastest all the way up.

  He had done that partly, perhaps, for the sheer sport of speed; butpartly also for the sake of being sooner with her. It was his way, assoon as he had decided to leave business again and go to her, to arriveas soon as possible; that had been his way recently, particularly. Sothe sight of the yacht stirred her warmly and she watched while it ranin close, stopped and instantly dropped a dingey from the davits. Shesaw Henry in the stern of the little boat; it disappeared in the shadowof a pier ... she heard, presently, the gravel of the walk crunch underhis quick steps, and then she saw him in the moonlight among the trees.The impetuousness, almost the violence of his hurry to reach her, sentits thrill through her. She went down on the path to meet him.

  "How quickly you came!"

  "You let yourself think you needed me, Connie!"

  "I did..."

  He had caught her hand in his and he held it while he brought her tothe porch and exchanged greetings with her mother. Then he led her onpast and into the house.

  When she saw his face, in the light, there were signs of strain in it;she could feel strain now in his fingers which held hers strongly buttensely too.

  "You're tired, Henry!"

  He shook his head. "It's been rotten hot in Chicago; then I guess Iwas mentally stoking all the way up here, Connie. When I got started,I wanted to see you to-night ... but first, where are the things youwanted me to see?"

  She ran up-stairs and brought them down to him. Her hands were shakingnow as she gave them to him; she could not exactly understand why; buther tremor increased as she saw his big hands fumbling as he unwrappedthe muffler and shook out the things it enclosed. He took them up oneby one and looked at them, as she had done. His fingers were steadynow but only by mastering of control, the effort for which amazed her.

  He had the watch in his hands.

  "The inscription is inside the front," she said.

  She pried the cover open again and read, with him, the words engravedwithin.

  "'As master of...' What ship was he master of then, Henry, and how didhe rescue the _Winnebago's_ people?"

  "He never talked to me about things like that, Connie. This is all?"

  "Yes."

  "And nothing since to show who sent them?"

  "No."

&
nbsp; "Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman will send some one to Manitowoc to makeinquiries." Henry put the things back in the box. "But of course,this is the end of Benjamin Corvet."

  "Of course," Constance said. She was shaking again and, withoutwilling it, she withdrew a little from Henry. He caught her hand againand drew her back toward him. His hand was quite steady.

  "You know why I came to you as quick as I could? You know why I--whymy mind was behind every thrust of the engines?"

  "No."

  "You don't? Oh, you know; you must know now!"

  "Yes, Henry," she said.

  "I've been patient, Connie. Till I got your letter telling me thisabout Ben, I'd waited for your sake--for our sakes--though it seemed attimes it was impossible. You haven't known quite what's been thematter between us these last months, little girl; but I've known.We've been engaged; but that's about all there's been to it. Don'tthink I make little of that; you know what I mean. You've been mine;but--but you haven't let me realize it, you see. And I've beenpatient, for I knew the reason. It was Ben poisoning your mind againstme."

  "No! No, Henry!"

  "You've denied it; I've recognized that you've denied it, not only tome and to your people but to yourself. I, of course, knew, as I knowthat I am here with your hand in mine, and as we will stand before thealtar together, that he had no cause to speak against me. I've waited,Connie, to give him a chance to say to you what he had to say; I wantedyou to hear it before making you wholly mine. But now there's no needto wait any longer, you and I. Ben's gone, never to come back. I wassure of that by what you wrote me, so this time when I started to you Ibrought with me--this."

  He felt in his pocket and brought out a ring of plain gold; he held itbefore her so that she could see within it her own initials and his anda blank left for the date. Her gaze went from it for an instant to thebox where he had put back the other ring--Alan's mother's. Feeling forher long ago gazing thus, as she must have, at that ring, held her fora moment. Was it because of that that Constance found herself cold now?

  "You mean you want me to marry you--at once, Henry?"

  He drew her to him powerfully; she felt him warm, almost rough withpassions. Since that day when, in Alan Conrad's presence, he hadgrasped and kissed her, she had not let him "realize" their engagement,as he had put it.

  "Why not?" he turned her face up to his now. "Your mother's here; yourfather will follow soon; or, if you will, we'll run away--Constance!You've kept me off so long! You don't believe there's anything againstme, dear? Do you? Do you?

  "No; no! Of course not!"

  "Then we're going to be married.... We're going to be married, aren'twe? Aren't we, Constance?"

  "Yes; yes, of course."

  "Right away, we'll have it then; up here; now!"

  "No; not now, Henry. Not up here!"

  "Not here? Why not?"

  She could give no answer. He held her and commanded her again; onlywhen he frightened her, he ceased.

  "Why _must_ it be at once, Henry? I don't understand!"

  "It's not must, dear," he denied. "It's just that I want you so!"

  When would it be, he demanded then; before spring, she promised atlast. But that was all he could make her say. And so he let her go.

  The next evening, in the moonlight, she drove him to Petoskey. He hadmessages to send and preferred to trust the telegraph office in thelarger town. Returning they swung out along the country roads. Thenight was cool here on the hills, under the stars; the fan-shaped glarefrom their headlights, blurring the radiance of the moon, sent dancingbefore them swiftly-changing, distorted shadows of the dusty bushesbeside the road. Topping a rise, they came suddenly upon hisbirthplace. She had not designed coming to that place, but she hadtaken a turn at his direction, and now he asked her to stop the car.He got out and paced about, calling to her and pointing out thedesirableness of the spot as the site for their country home. She satin the motor, watching him and calling back to him.

  The house was small, log built, the chinks between the logs stoppedwith clay. Across the road from it, the silver bark of the birch treesgleamed white among the black-barked timber. Smells of rank vegetationcame to her from these woods and from the weed-grown fields about andbeyond the house. There had been a small garden beside the house once;now neglected strawberry vines ran riot among the weed stems, and aclump of sunflowers stood with hanging, full-blown heads under theAugust moon.

  She gazed proudly at Henry's strong, well proportioned figure movingabout in the moonlight, and she was glad to think that a boy from thishouse had become the man that he was. But when she tried to think ofhim as a child here, her mind somehow showed her Alan playing about thesunflowers; and the place was not here; it was the brown, Kansasprairie of which he had told her.

  "Sunflower houses," she murmured to herself. "Sunflower houses. Theyused to cut the stalks and build shacks with them."

  "What's that?" Henry said; he had come back near her.

  The warm blood rushed to her face. "Nothing," she said, a littleashamed. She opened the door beside her. "Come; we'll go back homenow."

  Coming from that poor little place, and having made of himself what hehad, Henry was such a man as she would be ever proud to have for ahusband; there was no man whom she had known who had proved himself asmuch a man as he. Yet now, as she returned to the point, she wasthinking of this lake country not only as Henry's land but as AlanConrad's too. In some such place he also had been born--born by themother whose ring waited him in the box in her room.

  Alan, upon the morning of the second of these days, was drivingnorthward along the long, sandy peninsula which separates the bluewaters of Grand Traverse from Lake Michigan; and, thinking of her, heknew that she was near. He not only had remembered that she would benorth at Harbor Point this month; he had seen in one of the Petoskeypapers that she and her mother were at the Sherrill summer home. Hisbusiness now was taking him nearer them than he had been at any timebefore; and, if he wished to weaken, he might convince himself that hemight learn from her circumstances which would aid him in his task.But he was not going to her for help; that was following in hisfather's footsteps. When he knew everything, then--not till then--hecould go to her; for then he would know exactly what was upon him andwhat he should do.

  His visits to the people named on those sheets written by his fatherhad been confusing at first; he had had great difficulty in tracingsome of them at all; and, afterwards, he could uncover no certainconnection either between them and Benjamin Corvet or betweenthemselves. But recently, he had been succeeding better in this latter.

  He had seen--he reckoned them over again--fourteen of the twenty-onenamed originally on Benjamin Corvet's lists; that is, he had seeneither the individual originally named, or the surviving relativewritten in below the name crossed off. He had found that the crossingout of the name meant that the person was dead, except in the case oftwo who had left the country and whose whereabouts were as unknown totheir present relatives as they had been to Benjamin Corvet, and thecase of one other, who was in an insane asylum.

  He had found that no one of the persons whom he saw had known BenjaminCorvet personally; many of them did not know him at all, the othersknew him only as a name. But, when Alan proceeded, always there wasone connotation with each of the original names; always onecircumstance bound all together. When he had established thatcircumstance as influencing the fortunes of the first two on his lists,he had said to himself, as the blood pricked queerly under the skin,that the fact might be a mere coincidence. When he established it alsoas affecting the fate of the third and of the fourth and of the fifth,such explanation no longer sufficed; and he found it in common to allfourteen, sometimes as the deciding factor of their fate, sometimes asonly slightly affecting them, but always it was there.

  In how many different ways, in what strange, diverse manifestationsthat single circumstance had spread to those people whom Alan hadinterviewed! No two of them ha
d been affected alike, he reckoned, ashe went over his notes of them. Now he was going to trace thoseconsequences to another. To what sort of place would it bring himto-day and what would he find there? He knew only that it would bequite distinct from the rest.

  The driver beside whom he sat on the front seat of the littleautomobile was an Indian; an Indian woman and two round-faced silentchildren occupied the seat behind. He had met these people in theearly morning on the road, bound, he discovered, to the annual campmeeting of the Methodist Indians at Northport. They were going hisway, and they knew the man of whom he was in search; so he had hired aride of them. The region through which they were traveling now was offarms, but interspersed with desolate, waste fields where blackenedstumps and rotting windfalls remained after the work of the lumberers.The hills and many of the hollows were wooded; there were even placeswhere lumbering was still going on. To his left across the water, thetwin Manitous broke the horizon, high and round and blue with haze. Tohis right, from the higher hilltops, he caught glimpses of GrandTraverse and of the shores to the north, rising higher, dimmer, andmore blue, where they broke for Little Traverse and where ConstanceSherrill was, two hours away across the water; but he had shut his mindto that thought.

  The driver turned now into a rougher road, bearing more to the east.

  They passed people more frequently now--groups in farm wagons, orgroups or single individuals, walking beside the road. All were goingin the same direction as themselves, and nearly all were Indians, drabdressed figures attired obviously in their best clothes. Some walkedbarefoot, carrying new shoes in their hands, evidently to preserve themfrom the dust. They saluted gravely Alan's driver, who returned theirsalutes--"B'jou!" "B'jou!"

  Traveling eastward, they had lost sight of Lake Michigan; and suddenlythe wrinkled blueness of Grand Traverse appeared quite close to them.The driver turned aside from the road across a cleared field where rutsshowed the passing of many previous vehicles; crossing this, theyentered the woods. Little fires for cooking burned all about them, andnearer were parked an immense number of farm wagons and buggies, withhorses unharnessed and munching grain. Alan's guide found a placeamong these for his automobile, and they got out and went forward onfoot. All about them, seated upon the moss or walking about, wereIndians, family groups among which children played. A platform hadbeen built under the trees; on it some thirty Indians, all men, sat instraight-backed chairs; in front of and to the sides of the platform,an audience of several hundred occupied benches, and around the bordersof the meeting others were gathered, merely observing. A very oldIndian, with inordinately wrinkled skin and dressed in a frock coat,was addressing these people from the platform in the Indian tongue.

  Alan halted beside his guide. He saw among the drab-clad figureslooking on, the brighter dresses and sport coats of summer visitors whohad come to watch. The figure of a girl among these caught hisattention, and he started; then swiftly he told himself that it wasonly his thinking of Constance Sherrill that made him believe this wasshe. But now she had seen him; she paled, then as quickly flushed, andleaving the group she had been with, came toward him.

  He had no choice now whether he would avoid her or not; and hishappiness at seeing her held him stupid, watching her. Her eyes werevery bright and with something more than friendly greeting; there washappiness in them too. His throat shut together as he recognized this,and his hand closed warmly over the small, trembling hand which she putout to him. All his conscious thought was lost for the moment in themere realization of her presence; he stood, holding her hand, obliviousthat there were people looking; she too seemed careless of that. Thenshe whitened again and withdrew her hand; she seemed slightly confused.He was confused as well; it was not like this that he had meant togreet her; he caught himself together.

  Cap in hand, he stood beside her, trying to look and to feel as anyordinary acquaintance of hers would have looked.