Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/262

244 "No; you can tell me more now, Alan. Surely you can. I must know. I have the right to know. Yesterday, even before you found out about this, you knew things you weren't telling me—things about the people you'd been seeing. They'd all lost people on the lakes, you said; but you found out more than that."

"They'd all lost people on the Miwaka!" he said. "All who could tell me where their people were lost; a few were like Jo Papo we saw yesterday, who knew only the year his father was lost; but the time always was the time that the Miwaka disappeared!"

"Disappeared!" she repeated. Her veins were pricking cold. What did he know, what could any one know of the Miwaka, the ship of which nothing ever was heard except the beating of the Indian Drum? She tried to make him say more; but he looked away now down to the lake.

"The Chippewa must have come in early this morning," he said. "She's lying in the harbor; I saw her on my way to the telegraph office. If Mr. Spearman has come back with her, tell him I'm sorry I can't wait to see him."

"When are you going?"

"Now."

She offered to drive him to Petoskey, but he already had arranged for a man to take him to the train.

She went to her room after he was gone and spread out again on her bed the watch—now the watch of Captain Stafford of the Miwaka—with the knife and coins of more than twenty years ago which came with it. The meaning of them now was all changed; she felt that; but what the new meaning might be could not yet come to her. Something of it had come to Alan; that,