"Will you tell me about it, and them, please?"
"I"ve told you almost all I can about Stafford and Ramsdell, I"m afraid; I"ve just heard father say that they were men who could have amounted to a great deal on the lakes, if they had lived--especially Mr. Stafford, who was very young. The _Miwaka_ was a great new steel ship--built the year after I was born; it was the first of nearly a dozen that Stafford and Ramsdell had planned to build. There was some doubt among lake men about steel boats at that time; they had begun to be built very largely quite a few years before, but recently there had been some serious losses with them. Whether it was because they were built on models not fitted for the lakes, no one knew; but several of them had broken in two and sunk, and a good many men were talking about going back to wood. But Stafford and Ramsdell believed in steel and had finished this first one of their new boats.
"She left Duluth for Chicago, loaded with ore, on the first day of December, with both owners and part of their families on board. She pa.s.sed the Soo on the third and went through the Straits of Mackinac on the fourth into Lake Michigan. After that, nothing was ever heard of her."
"So probably she broke in two like the others?"
"Mr. Spearman and your father both thought so; but n.o.body ever knew--no wreckage came ash.o.r.e--no message of any sort from any one on board. A very sudden winter storm had come up and was at its worst on the morning of the fifth. Uncle Benny--your father--told me once, when I asked him about it, that it was as severe for a time as any he had ever experienced. He very nearly lost his life in it. He had just finished laying up one of his boats--the _Martha Corvet_--at Manistee for the winter; and he and Mr. Spearman, who then was mate of the _Martha Corvet_, were crossing the lake in a tug with a crew of four men to Manitowoc, where they were going to lay up more ships. The captain and one of the deck hands of the tug were washed overboard, and the engineer was lost trying to save them. Uncle Benny and Mr. Spearman and the stoker brought the tug in. The storm was worst about five in the morning, when the _Miwaka_ sunk."
"How do you know that the _Miwaka_ sunk at five," Alan asked, "if no one ever heard from the ship?"
"Oh; that was told by the Drum!"
"The Drum?"
"Yes; the Indian Drum! I forgot; of course you didn"t know. It"s a superst.i.tion that some of the lake men have, particularly those who come from people at the other end of the lake. The Indian Drum is in the woods there, they say. No one has seen it; but many people believe that they have heard it. It"s a spirit drum which beats, they say, for every ship lost on the lake. There"s a particular superst.i.tion about it in regard to the _Miwaka_; for the drum beat wrong for the _Miwaka_.
You see, the people about there swear that about five o"clock in the morning of the fifth, while the storm was blowing terribly, they heard the drum beating and knew that a ship was going down. They counted the sounds as it beat the roll of the dead. It beat twenty-four before it stopped and then began to beat again and beat twenty-four; so, later, everybody knew it had been beating for the _Miwaka_; for every other ship on the lake got to port; but there were twenty-five altogether on the _Miwaka_, so either the drum beat wrong or--" she hesitated.
"Or what?"
"Or the drum was right, and some one was saved. Many people believed that. It was years before the families of the men on board gave up hope, because of the Drum; maybe some haven"t given up hope yet."
Alan made no comment for a moment. Constance had seen the blood flush to his face and then leave it, and her own pulse had beat as swiftly as she rehea.r.s.ed the superst.i.tion. As he gazed at her and then away, it was plain that he had heard something additional about the _Miwaka_--something which he was trying to fit into what she told him.
"That"s all anybody knows?" His gaze came back to her at last.
"Yes; why did you ask about it--the _Miwaka_? I mean, how did you hear about it so you wanted to know?"
He considered an instant before replying. "I encountered a reference to the _Miwaka_--I supposed it must be a ship--in my father"s house last night."
His manner, as he looked down at his coffee cup, toying with it, prevented her then from asking more; he seemed to know that she wished to press it, and he looked up quickly.
"I met my servant--my father"s servant--this morning," he said.
"Yes; he got back this morning. He came here early to report to father that he had no news of Uncle Benny; and father told him you were at the house and sent him over."
Alan was studying the coffee cup again, a queer expression on his face which she could not read.
"He was there when I woke up this morning, Miss Sherrill. I hadn"t heard anybody in the house, but I saw a little table on wheels standing in the hall outside my door and a spirit lamp and a little coffee pot on it, and a man bending over it, warming the cup. His back was toward me, and he had straight black hair, so that at first I thought he was a j.a.p; but when he turned around, I saw he was an American Indian."
"Yes; that was Wa.s.saquam."
"Is that his name? He told me it was Judah."
"Yes--Judah Wa.s.saquam. He"s a Chippewa from the north end of the lake.
They"re very religious there, most of the Indians at the foot of the lake; and many of them have a Biblical name which they use for a first name and use their Indian name for a last one."
"He called me "Alan" and my father "Ben.""
"The Indians almost always call people by their first names."
"He said that he had always served "Ben" his coffee that way before he got up, and so he had supposed he was to do the same by me; and also that, long ago, he used to be a deck hand on one of my father"s ships."
"Yes; when Uncle Benny began to operate ships of his own, many of the ships on the lakes had Indians among the deck hands; some had all Indians for crews and white men only for officers. Wa.s.saquam was on the first freighter Uncle Benny ever owned a share in; afterwards he came here to Chicago with Uncle Benny. He"s been looking after Uncle Benny all alone now for more than ten years--and he"s very much devoted to him, and fully trustworthy; and besides that, he"s a wonderful cook; but I"ve wondered sometimes whether Uncle Benny wasn"t the only city man in the world who had an Indian body servant."
"You know a good deal about Indians."
"A little about the lake Indians, the Chippewas and Pottawatomies in northern Michigan."
"Recollection"s a funny thing," Alan said, after considering a moment.
"This morning, after seeing Judah and talking to him--or rather hearing him talk--somehow a story got running in my head. I can"t make out exactly what it was--about a lot of animals on a raft; and there was some one with them--I don"t know who; I can"t fit any name to him; but he had a name."
Constance bent forward quickly. "Was the name Michabou?" she asked.
He returned her look, surprised. "That"s it; how did you know?"
"I think I know the story; and Wa.s.saquam would have known it too, I think, if you"d ask him; but probably he would have thought it impious to tell it, because he and his people are great Christians now.
Michabou is one of the Indian names for Manitou. What else do you remember of the story?"
"Not much, I"m afraid--just sort of scenes here and there; but I can remember the beginning now that you have given me the name: "In the beginning of all things there was only water and Michabou was floating on the raft with all the animals." Michabou, it seemed, wanted the land brought up so that men and animals could live on it, and he asked one of the animals to go down and bring it up--"
"The beaver," Constance supplied.
"Was the beaver the first one? The beaver dived and stayed down a long time, so long that when he came up he was breathless and completely exhausted, but he had not been able to reach the bottom. Then Michabou sent down--"
"The otter."
"And he stayed down much longer than the beaver, and when he came up at last, they dragged him on to the raft quite senseless; but he hadn"t been able to reach the bottom either. So the animals and Michabou himself were ready to give it up; but then the little muskrat spoke up--am I right? Was this the muskrat?"
"Yes."
"Then you can finish it for me?"
"He dived and he stayed down, the little muskrat," Constance continued, "longer than the beaver and the otter both together. Michabou and the animals waited all day for him to come up, and they watched all through the night; so then they knew he must be dead. And, sure enough, they came after a while across the body floating on the water and apparently lifeless. They dragged him onto the raft and found that his little paws were all tight shut. They forced open three of the paws and found nothing in them, but when they opened the last one, they found one grain of sand tightly clutched in it. The little muskrat had done it; he"d reached the bottom! And out of that one grain of sand, Michabou made the world."
"That"s it," he said. "Now what is it?"
"The Indian story of creation--or one of them."
"Not a story of the plain Indians surely."
"No; of the Indians who live about the lakes and so got the idea that everything was water in the first place--the Indians who live on the islands and peninsulas. That"s how I came to know it."
"I thought that must be it," Alan said. His hand trembled a little as he lifted his coffee cup to his lips.
Constance too flushed a little with excitement; it was a surprisingly close and intimate thing to have explored with another back into the concealments of his first child consciousness, to have aided another in the sensitive task of revealing himself to himself. This which she had helped to bring back to him must have been one of the first stories told him; he had been a very little boy, when he had been taken to Kansas, away from where he must have heard this story--the lakes. She was a little nervous also from watching the time as told by the tiny watch on her wrist. Henry"s train from Duluth must be in now; and he had not yet called her, as had been his custom recently, as soon as he returned to town after a trip. But, in a minute, a servant entered to inform her that Mr. Spearman wished to speak to her. She excused herself to Alan and hurried out. Henry was calling her from the railroad station and, he said, from a most particularly stuffy booth and, besides having a poor connection, there was any amount of noise about him; but he was very anxious to see Constance as soon as possible. Could she be in town that morning and have luncheon with him? Yes; she was going down-town very soon and, after luncheon, he could come home with her if he wished. He certainly did wish, but he couldn"t tell yet what he might have to do in the afternoon, but please would she save the evening for him. She promised and started to tell him about Alan, then recollected that Henry was going to see her father immediately at the office.
Alan was standing, waiting for her, when she returned to the breakfast room.