The Indian Drum, William MacHarg [e reader pdf best .TXT] 📗

way of silver on the mirror surface of the water. The lights of some boat turning in between the points and moving swiftly caught her attention. As it entered the path of the moonlight, its look was so like that of Henry's power yacht that she arose. She had not expected him until morning; but now the boat was so near that she could no longer doubt that it was his. He must have started within an hour of the receipt of her letter and had been forcing his engines to their fastest all the way up.

He had done that partly, perhaps, for the sheer sport of speed; but partly also for the sake of being sooner with her. It was his way, as soon as he had decided to leave business again and go to her, to arrive as soon as possible; that had been his way recently, particularly. So the sight of the yacht stirred her warmly and she watched while it ran in close, stopped and instantly dropped a dingey from the davits. She saw Henry in the stern of the little boat; it disappeared in the shadow of a pier ... she heard, presently, the gravel of the walk crunch under his quick steps, and then she saw him in the moonlight among the trees. The impetuousness, almost the violence of his hurry to reach her, sent its thrill through her. She went down on the path to meet him.

"How quickly you came!"

"You let yourself think you needed me, Connie!"

"I did..."

He had caught her hand in his and he held it while he brought her to the porch and exchanged greetings with her mother. Then he led her on past and into the house.

When she saw his face, in the light, there were signs of strain in it; she could feel strain now in his fingers which held hers strongly but tensely too.

"You're tired, Henry!"

He shook his head. "It's been rotten hot in Chicago; then I guess I was mentally stoking all the way up here, Connie. When I got started, I wanted to see you to-night ... but first, where are the things you wanted me to see?"

She ran up-stairs and brought them down to him. Her hands were shaking now as she gave them to him; she could not exactly understand why; but her tremor increased as she saw his big hands fumbling as he unwrapped the muffler and shook out the things it enclosed. He took them up one by one and looked at them, as she had done. His fingers were steady now but only by mastering of control, the effort for which amazed her.

He had the watch in his hands.

"The inscription is inside the front," she said.

She pried the cover open again and read, with him, the words engraved within.

"'As master of...' What ship was he master of then, Henry, and how did he rescue the Winnebago's people?"

"He never talked to me about things like that, Connie. This is all?"

"Yes."

"And nothing since to show who sent them?"

"No."

"Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman will send some one to Manitowoc to make inquiries." Henry put the things back in the box. "But of course, this is the end of Benjamin Corvet."

"Of course," Constance said. She was shaking again and, without willing it, she withdrew a little from Henry. He caught her hand again and drew her back toward him. His hand was quite steady.

"You know why I came to you as quick as I could? You know why I—why my mind was behind every thrust of the engines?"

"No."

"You don't? Oh, you know; you must know now!"

"Yes, Henry," she said.

"I've been patient, Connie. Till I got your letter telling me this about Ben, I'd waited for your sake—for our sakes—though it seemed at times it was impossible. You haven't known quite what's been the matter between us these last months, little girl; but I've known. We've been engaged; but that's about all there's been to it. Don't think I make little of that; you know what I mean. You've been mine; but—but you haven't let me realize it, you see. And I've been patient, for I knew the reason. It was Ben poisoning your mind against me."

"No! No, Henry!"

"You've denied it; I've recognized that you've denied it, not only to me and to your people but to yourself. I, of course, knew, as I know that I am here with your hand in mine, and as we will stand before the altar together, that he had no cause to speak against me. I've waited, Connie, to give him a chance to say to you what he had to say; I wanted you to hear it before making you wholly mine. But now there's no need to wait any longer, you and I. Ben's gone, never to come back. I was sure of that by what you wrote me, so this time when I started to you I brought with me—this."

He felt in his pocket and brought out a ring of plain gold; he held it before her so that she could see within it her own initials and his and a blank left for the date. Her gaze went from it for an instant to the box where he had put back the other ring—Alan's mother's. Feeling for her long ago gazing thus, as she must have, at that ring, held her for a moment. Was it because of that that Constance found herself cold now?

"You mean you want me to marry you—at once, Henry?"

He drew her to him powerfully; she felt him warm, almost rough with passions. Since that day when, in Alan Conrad's presence, he had grasped and kissed her, she had not let him "realize" their engagement, as he had put it.

"Why not?" he turned her face up to his now. "Your mother's here; your father will follow soon; or, if you will, we'll run away—Constance! You've kept me off so long! You don't believe there's anything against me, dear? Do you? Do you?

"No; no! Of course not!"

"Then we're going to be married.... We're going to be married, aren't we? Aren't we, Constance?"

"Yes; yes, of course."

"Right away, we'll have it then; up here; now!"

"No; not now, Henry. Not up here!"

"Not here? Why not?"

She could give no answer. He held her and commanded her again; only when he frightened her, he ceased.

"Why must it be at once, Henry? I don't understand!"

"It's not must, dear," he denied. "It's just that I want you so!"

When would it be, he demanded then; before spring, she promised at last. But that was all he could make her say. And so he let her go.

The next evening, in the moonlight, she drove him to Petoskey. He had messages to send and preferred to trust the telegraph office in the larger town. Returning they swung out along the country roads. The night was cool here on the hills, under the stars; the fan-shaped glare from their headlights, blurring the radiance of the moon, sent dancing before them swiftly-changing, distorted shadows of the dusty bushes beside the road. Topping a rise, they came suddenly upon his birthplace. She had not designed coming to that place, but she had taken a turn at his direction, and now he asked her to stop the car. He got out and paced about, calling to her and pointing out the desirableness of the spot as the site for their country home. She sat in the motor, watching him and calling back to him.

The house was small, log built, the chinks between the logs stopped with clay. Across the road from it, the silver bark of the birch trees gleamed white among the black-barked timber. Smells of rank vegetation came to her from these woods and from the weed-grown fields about and beyond the house. There had been a small garden beside the house once; now neglected strawberry vines ran riot among the weed stems, and a clump of sunflowers stood with hanging, full-blown heads under the August moon.

She gazed proudly at Henry's strong, well proportioned figure moving about in the moonlight, and she was glad to think that a boy from this house had become the man that he was. But when she tried to think of him as a child here, her mind somehow showed her Alan playing about the sunflowers; and the place was not here; it was the brown, Kansas prairie of which he had told her.

"Sunflower houses," she murmured to herself. "Sunflower houses. They used to cut the stalks and build shacks with them."

"What's that?" Henry said; he had come back near her.

The warm blood rushed to her face. "Nothing," she said, a little ashamed. She opened the door beside her. "Come; we'll go back home now."

Coming from that poor little place, and having made of himself what he had, Henry was such a man as she would be ever proud to have for a husband; there was no man whom she had known who had proved himself as much a man as he. Yet now, as she returned to the point, she was thinking of this lake country not only as Henry's land but as Alan Conrad's too. In some such place he also had been born—born by the mother whose ring waited him in the box in her room.

Alan, upon the morning of the second of these days, was driving northward along the long, sandy peninsula which separates the blue waters of Grand Traverse from Lake Michigan; and, thinking of her, he knew that she was near. He not only had remembered that she would be north at Harbor Point this month; he had seen in one of the Petoskey papers that she and her mother were at the Sherrill summer home. His business now was taking him nearer them than he had been at any time before; and, if he wished to weaken, he might convince himself that he might learn from her circumstances which would aid him in his task. But he was not going to her for help; that was following in his father's footsteps. When he knew everything, then—not till then—he could go to her; for then he would know exactly what was upon him and what he should do.

His visits to the people named on those sheets written by his father had been confusing at first; he had had great difficulty in tracing some of them at all; and, afterwards, he could uncover no certain connection either between them and Benjamin Corvet or between themselves. But recently, he had been succeeding better in this latter.

He had seen—he reckoned them over again—fourteen of the twenty-one named originally on Benjamin Corvet's lists; that is, he had seen either the individual originally named, or the surviving relative written in below the name crossed off. He had found that the crossing out of the name meant that the person was dead, except in the case of two who had left the country and whose whereabouts were as unknown to their present relatives as they had been to Benjamin Corvet, and the case of one other, who was in an insane asylum.

He had found that no one of the persons whom he saw had known Benjamin Corvet personally; many of them did not know him at all, the others knew him only as a name. But, when Alan proceeded, always there was one connotation with each of the original names; always one circumstance bound all together. When he had established that circumstance as influencing the fortunes of the first two on his lists, he had said to himself, as the blood pricked queerly under the skin, that the fact might be a mere coincidence. When he established it also as affecting the fate of the third and of the fourth and of the fifth, such explanation no longer sufficed; and he found it in common to all fourteen, sometimes as the deciding factor of their fate, sometimes as only slightly affecting them, but always it was there.

In how many