Edwin Balmer

“ She delayed a moment to ask Alan to let down the windows; the sky was still clear, and the sunshine had become almost warm, though the breeze was sharp and cold. As the car rolled down the drive, and he turned for a long look past her toward the lake, she watched his expression.
"It's like a great shuttle, the ice there," she commented, "a monster shuttle nearly three hundred miles long. All winter it moves back and forth across the lake, from east to west and from west to east as the winds change, blocking each shore half the time and forcing the winter boats to fight it always." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Alan Conrad had come to Chicago, not by their direction, but by Benjamin Corvet's; but Uncle Benny being gone, they had been the ones who met him, they had received him into their own house; but they had not thought to warn him of the dangers of the city and, afterward, they had let him go to live alone in the house in Astor Street with no better adviser than Wassaquam. Now, and perhaps because they had not warned him, he had met injury and, it might be, more than mere injury; he might be dying. ”

“ Alan had not noticed, when he stepped into the hall in the morning, whether the house then had been heated; now he appreciated that it was quite cold and, probably, had been cold for the three days since his father had gone, and his servant had left to look for him. Coming from the street, it was not the chilliness of the house he felt but the stillness of the dead air; when a house is heated, there is always some motion of the air, but this air was stagnant. Alan had dropped his hat on a chair in the hall; he unbuttoned his overcoat but kept it on, and stuffed his gloves into his pocket. ”

“ Twelve have been saved now; so until the Drum raises the beats to twenty-seven there is still a chance that some one will be saved."
Henry made no answer; his hands fumbled purposelessly with the lapels of his coat, and his bloodshot eyes wandered uncertainly. Constance watched him with wonder at the effect of what she had told. When she had asked him once about the Drum, he had professed the same scepticism which she had; but he had not held it; at least he was not holding it now. The news of the Drum had shaken him from his triumph over Alan and Uncle Benny and over her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From this copse—dark, blue, primeval, silent at most times as when the Great Manitou ruled his inland waters—there comes at time of storm a sound like the booming of an old Indian drum. This drum beat, so the tradition says, whenever the lake took a life; and, as a sign perhaps that it is still the Manitou who rules the waters in spite of all the commerce of the cities, the drum still beats its roll for every ship lost on the lake, one beat for every life. ”

“ He waited many minutes, his hand upon the key in his pocket; yet he could not go in, but instead walked on down the street, his thoughts and feelings in a turmoil.
He could not call up any sense that the house was his, any more than he had been able to when Sherrill had told him of it. He own a house on that street! Yet was that in itself any more remarkable than that he should be the guest, the friend of such people as the Sherrills? No one as yet, since Sherrill had told him he was Corvet's son, had called him by name; when they did, what would they call him? Alan Conrad still? ”

“ The hour was barely four o'clock, but so dark was it with the storm that the shop windows were lit; motorcars, slipping and skidding up the broad boulevard, with headlights burning; kept their signals clattering constantly to warn other drivers blinded by the snow. The sleet-swept sidewalks were almost deserted; here or there, before a hotel or one of the shops, a limousine came to the curb, and the passengers dashed swiftly across the walk to shelter.
Corvet, still carrying his coat upon his arm, turned northward along Michigan Avenue, facing into the gale. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Now that the noise of pounding did not interfere, Alan could make out what the man was saying: "Ben Corvet!"—the name was almost unintelligible—"Ben Corvet! Ben!" Then the shouts stopped too.
Alan sped to the door and turned back the latch. The door bore back upon him, not from a push, but from a weight without which had fallen against it. A big, heavy man, with a rough cap and mackinaw coat, would have fallen upon the floor, if Alan had not caught him. His weight in Alan's arms was so dull, so inert that, if violence had been his intention, there was nothing to be feared from him now. ”

“ Coming from that poor little place, and having made of himself what he had, Henry was such a man as she would be ever proud to have for a husband; there was no man whom she had known who had proved himself as much a man as he. Yet now, as she returned to the point, she was thinking of this lake country not only as Henry's land but as Alan Conrad's too. ”

“ That second crash threw all who had nothing to hold by, flat upon the deck; then Number 25 moved by; astern her now the silent steamer vanished in the snow.
Gongs boomed below; through the new confusion and the cries of men, orders began to become audible. Alan, scrambling to his knees, put an arm under old Burr, half raising him; the form encircled by his arm struggled up. The skipper, who had knocked Burr away from the wheel, ignored him now. The old man, dragging himself up and holding to Alan, was staring with terror at the snow screen behind which the vessel had disappeared. ”

“ Alan cried to him. "And you're Benjamin Corvet! You know me; you sent for me! Why did you do that?"
Corvet made no reply to this. Alan, peering at him underneath the truck, could see that his hands were pressed against his face and that his body shook. Whether this was from some new physical pain from the movement of the wreckage, Alan did not know till he lowered his hands after a moment; and now he did not heed Alan or seem even to be aware of him.
"Dear little Connie!" he said aloud. "Dear little Connie! She mustn't marry him—not him! That must be seen to. ”

“ The cars tipped farther, turned over; others balanced back; it was upon their wheels that they charged forward, half riding one another, crashing and demolishing, as the ferry pitched; it was upon their trucks that they tottered and battered from side to side as the deck swayed. Now the stern again descended; a line of cars swept for the fantail. Corvet's cry came to Alan through the screaming of steel and the clangor of destruction. Corvet's cry sent men with bars beside the cars as the fantail dipped into the water ”

“ 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. ”

“ If every movement of Spearman's great, handsome body had not recalled to him their struggle of the night before—if, as Spearman's hand rested cordially on Sherrill's shoulder, Alan had not seemed to feel again that big hand at his throat—he would almost have been ready to believe that this was not the man whom he had fought. ”

“ He gazed at her. "I understand," he said after an instant. "You mean that they prove his death."
She assented gently, without speaking. As he approached the box, she drew back from it and slipped away into the next room. She walked up and down there, pressing her hands together. He must be looking at the things now, unrolling the muffler.... What would he be feeling as he saw them? Would he be glad, with that same gladness which had mingled with her own sorrow over Uncle Benny, that his father was gone—gone from his guilt and his fear and his disgrace? ”

“ The points of Grand Traverse Bay were frozen across; frozen across too was Torch Lake; to north of that, ice, snow-covered, through which frozen rushes protruded, marked the long chain of little lakes known as the "Intermediates." The little towns and villages, and the rolling fields with their leafless trees or blackened stumps, lay under drifts. It had stopped snowing, however, and she found relief in that; searchers upon the lake could see small boats now—if there were still small boats to be seen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Cut stone and motor parts, chasses and castings, furniture and beams, swept back and forth, while the cars, burst and splintered, became monstrous missiles hurtling forward, sidewise, aslant, recoiling. Yet men, though scattered singly, tried to stay them by ropes and chains while the water washed higher and higher. Dimly, far away, deafened out by the clangor, the steam whistle of Number 25 was blowing the four long blasts of distress; Alan heard the sound now and then with indifferent wonder. All destruction had come for him to be contained within this car deck ”

“ They were as oblivious to the lake in front of their windows, to the ship struggling for life in the storm, as though the snow were a screen which shut them into a distant world.
To Corvet, a lake man for forty years, there was nothing strange in this. Twenty miles, from north to south, the city—its business blocks, its hotels and restaurants, its homes—faced the water and, except where the piers formed the harbor, all unprotected water, an open sea where in times of storm ships sank and grounded, men fought for their lives against the elements and, losing, drowned and died ”

“ She gazed proudly at Henry's strong, well proportioned figure moving about in the moonlight, and she was glad to think that a boy from this house had become the man that he was. But when she tried to think of him as a child here, her mind somehow showed her Alan playing about the sunflowers; and the place was not here; it was the brown, Kansas prairie of which he had told her. ”

“ As Constance recently had drawn closer to Henry Spearman in her thought, and particularly since she had been seriously considering marrying him, she had clung deliberately to this unplanned appearance about their meetings. She found something thrilling in this casualness too. Spearman's bigness, which attracted eyes to him always in a crowd, was merely the first and most obvious of the things which kept attention on him; there were few women who, having caught sight of the big, handsome, decisive, carefully groomed man, could look away at once. ”

“ Near the northern end of Lake Michigan, where the bluff-bowed ore-carriers and the big, low-lying, wheat-laden steel freighters from Lake Superior push out from the Straits of Mackinac and dispute the right of way, in the island divided channel, with the white-and-gold, electric lighted, wireless equipped passenger steamers bound for Detroit and Buffalo, there is a copse of pine and hemlock back from the shingly beach. ”