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332 not looking about now, Constance realized; she was listening. Constance arose and went to the door too. The Drum! Blood prickled in her face and forehead; it prickled in her finger tips. The Drum was heard only, it was said, in time of severest storm; for that reason it was heard most often in winter. It was very seldom heard by any one in summer; and she was of the summer people. Sounds were coming from the woods now. Were these reverberations the roll of the Drum which beat for the dead? Her voice was uncontrolled as she asked the woman:

"Is that the Drum?"

The woman shook her head. "That's the trees."

Constance's shoulders shook convulsively together. When she had thought about the Drum—and when she had spoken of it with others who, themselves, never had heard it—they always had said that, if there were such a sound, it was trees. She herself had heard those strange wood noises, terrifying sometimes until their source was known—wailings like the cry of some one in anguish, which were caused by two crossed saplings rubbing together; thunderings, which were only some smaller trees beating against a great hollow trunk when a strong wind veered from a certain direction. But this Indian woman must know all such sounds well; and to her the Drum was something distinct from them. The woman specified that now.

"You'll know the Drum when you hear it."

Constance grew suddenly cold. For twenty lives, the woman said, the Drum had beat; that meant to her, and to Constance too now, that seven were left. Indefinite, desperate denial that all from the ferry must be dead—that denial which had been strengthened by the