Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/109

Rh he would have learned only a name which he could not place yet in any connection with her or with Benjamin Corvet. Whoever he was, it was plain that Constance Sherrill "thought of him"; lucky man, Alan said to himself. Yet Corvet had warned her not to think of him. . ..

Alan turned back his bed. It had been for him a tremendous day. Barely twelve hours before he had come to that house, Alan Conrad from Blue Rapids, Kansas; now. . . phrases from what Lawrence Sherrill had told him of his father were running through his mind as he opened the door of the room to be able to hear any noise in Benjamin Corvet's house, of which he was sole protector. The emotion roused by his first sight of the lake went through him again as he opened the window to the east.

Now—he was in bed—he seemed to be standing, a specter before a man blaspheming Benjamin Corvet and the souls of men dead. "And the hole above the eye! . . . The bullet got you! . . . So it's you that got Ben! . . . I'll get you! . . . You can't save the Miwaka!"

The Miwaka! The stir of that name was stronger now even than before; it had been running through his consciousness almost constantly since he had heard it. He jumped up and turned on the light and found a pencil. He did not know how to spell the name and it was not necessary to write it down; the name had taken on that definiteness and ineffaceableness of a thing which, once heard, can never again be forgotten. But, in panic that he might forget, he wrote it, guessing at the spelling—"Miwaka."

It was a name, of course; but the name of what? It