Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/352

 pavements. The last vestige of ice long ago had dissolved into the lake which lay this afternoon almost motionless, rippling light green and deep blue in wide, shifting bands as the white clouds high in the sky let through or obscured the brightness of the declining sun. Several great steamers were in sight, thrusting southward, deep laden with ore from Duluth for Gary or South Chicago; there were passenger vessels, inward and outward bound; a package freighter or two, and ore boats and grain carriers in ballast, bound back to the Straits and the Soo which now had been ice-free for many weeks.

Barney's thoughts followed them; and he pictured the northern shores which he had known in boyhood. The season by the Straits would be a little less advanced, but the trees and brush would be breaking into the hundred-hued yellows and greens of the forest where even the pines would be bright and renewed; warbling and whistling birds would be darting all about at mating and nest building, and the little forest animals, in pairs, stealing like shadows over the silent, wet, humus-heaped ground. Yet there might be patches of snow holding to shaded hollows and trickling little rills down to the roaring brooks.

Up by Resurrection Rock, the day undoubtedly was very like that which the medium Davol had described when she had related to Barney and Ethel and Bennet Cullen the coming of the girl, big with child, to the shore of the lake; for it was again the Moon of the Breaking Snowshoes, a fitting anniversary for something of great significance to occur. As Barney made his way along the lake, he endeavored to keep his expectations within bounds; nevertheless his inward turbulence betrayed that to-day he looked for nothing less