Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/257

Rh She halted an instant beside the door, with the box in her hands, before she went back to him, thinking how to prepare him against the significance of these relics of his father. She need not prepare him against the mere fact of his father's death; he had been beginning to believe that already; but these things must have far more meaning for him than merely that. They must frustrate one course of inquiry for him at the same time they opened another; they would close for him forever the possibility of ever learning anything about himself from his father; they would introduce into his problem some new, some unknown person—the sender of these things.

She went in and put the box down upon the card table.

"The muffler in the box was your father's," she told him. "He had it on the day he disappeared. The other things," her voice choked a little, "are the things he must have had in his pockets. They've been lying in water and sand—"

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? Or would he resent that death which thus left everything unexplained to him? He would be looking at the