Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/340

322 and had given Alan the key to the house so that he could find it. Alan had gone to the house—

In the house Alan had found some one who had mistaken him for a ghost, a man who had cried out at sight of him something about a ship—about the Miwaka, the ship of whose loss no one had known anything except by the sounding of the Drum. What had the man been doing in the house? Had he too been looking for the explanation—the explanation that Henry feared? Alan had described the man to her; that description had not had meaning for her before; but now remembering that description she could think of Henry as the only one who could have been in that house! Henry had fought with Alan there! Afterwards, when Alan had been attacked upon the street, had Henry anything to do with that?

Henry had lied to her about being in Duluth the night he had fought with Alan; he had not told her the true cause of his quarrels with Uncle Benny; he had wished her to believe that Uncle Benny was dead when the wedding ring and watch came to her—the watch which had been Captain Stafford's of the Miwaka! Henry had urged her to marry him at once. Was that because he wished the security that her father—and she—must give her husband when they learned the revelation which Alan or Uncle Benny might bring?

If so, then that revelation had to do with the Miwaka. it was of the Miwaka that Henry had cried out to Alan in the house; they were the names of the next of kin of those on the Miwaka that Uncle Benny had kept. That was beginning to explain to her something of the effect on Henry of the report that the