Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/361

Rh on the shore, wind reverberating within some great hollow tree trunk as within the pipe of an organ. But Henry was not denying the Drum!

He had stopped in front of her, half turned her way; his body swayed and bent to the booming of the Drum, as his swollen lips counted its soundings. She could see him plainly in the moonlight, yet she drew nearer to him as she followed his count. "Twenty-one," he counted—"Twenty-two!" The Drum was still going on. "Twenty-four—twenty-five—twenty-six!" Would he count another?

He did not; and her pulses, which had halted, leaped with relief; and through her comprehension rushed. It was thus she had seen him counting in the cabin, but so vaguely that she had not been certain of it, but only able to suspect. Then the Drum had stopped short of twenty-six, but he had not stopped counting because of that; he had made the sounds twenty-six, when she and the woman had made them, twenty-two; now he had reckoned them twenty-six, though the Drum, as she separated the sound from other noises, still went on!

He moved on again, descending the steep side of a little ravine, and she followed. One of his snowshoes caught in a protruding root and, instead of slowing to free it with care, he pulled it violently out, and she heard the dry, seasoned wood crack. He looked down, swore; saw that the wood was not broken through and went on; but as he reached the bottom of the slope, she leaped downward from a little height behind him and crashed down upon his trailing snowshoe just behind the heel. The rending snap of the wood came beneath her feet. Had she broken through his shoe or snapped her own? She sprang back, as he cried out and swung