The Indian Drum Part 39

He was fully aware, she now understood, that he had in a measure betrayed himself to her in Chicago; and he had hoped to cover up and to dissemble that betrayal with her. For that reason she was the last person in the world whom he wished to find here now.

"The point is," he said heavily, "why are you here?"

"I decided to come up last night."

"Obviously." He uttered the word slowly and with care. "Unless you came in a flying machine. Who came with you?"

"No one; I came alone. I expected to find father at Petoskey; he hadn't been there, so I came on here."

"After him?"

"No; after you, Henry."

"After me?" She had increased the apprehension in him, and he considered and scrutinized her before he ventured to go on. "Because you wanted to be up here with me, eh, Connie?"

"Of course not!"

"What's that?"

"Of course not!"

"I knew it!" he moved menacingly. She watched him quite without fear; fear was for him, she felt, not her. Often she had wished that she might have known him when he was a young man; now, she was aware that, in a way, she was having that wish. Under the surface of the man whose strength and determination she had admired, all the time had been this terror--this guilt. If Uncle Benny had carried it for a score of years, Henry had had it within him too. This had been within him all the time!

"You came up here about Ben Corvet?" he challenged.

"Yes--no!"

"Which do you mean?"

"No."

"I know then. For him, then--eh. For him!"

"For Alan Conrad? Yes," she said.

"I knew it!" he repeated. "He's been the trouble between you and me all the time!"

She made no denial of that; she had begun to know during the last two days that it was so.

"So you came to find him?" Henry went on.

"Yes, Henry. Have you any news?"

"News?"

"News of the boats?"

"News!" he iterated. "News to-night! No one'll have more'n one news to-night!"

From his slow, heavy utterance, a timbre of terrible satisfaction betrayed itself; his eyes widened a little as he saw it strike Constance, then his lids narrowed again. He had not meant to say it that way; yet, for an instant, satisfaction to him had become inseparable from the saying, before that was followed by fright--the fright of examination of just what he had said or of what she had made of it.

"He'll be found!" she defied him.

"Be found?"

"Some are dead," she admitted, "but not all. Twenty are dead; but seven are not!"

She looked for confirmation to the Indian woman, who nodded: "Yes." He moved his head to face the woman, but his eyes, unmoving, remained fixed on Constance.

"Seven?" he echoed. "You say seven are not! How do you know?"

"The Drum has been beating for twenty, but not for more!" Constance said. Thirty hours before, when she had told Henry of the Drum, she had done it without belief herself, without looking for belief in him.

But now, whether or not she yet believed or simply clung to the superst.i.tion for its shred of hope, it gave her a weapon to terrify him; for he believed--believed with all the unreasoning horror of his superst.i.tion and the terror of long-borne and hidden guilt.

"The Drum, Henry!" she repeated. "The Drum you've been listening to all day upon the beach--the Indian Drum that sounded for the dead of the _Miwaka_; sounded, one by one, for all who died! But it didn't sound for him! It's been sounding again, you know; but, again, it doesn't sound for him, Henry, not for him!"

"The _Miwaka_! What do you mean by that? What's that got to do with this?" His swollen face was thrust forward at her; there was threat against her in his tense muscles and his bloodshot eyes.

She did not shrink back from him, or move; and now he was not waiting for her answer. Something--a sound--had caught him about. Once it echoed, low in its reverberation but penetrating and quite distinct.

It came, so far as direction could be a.s.signed to it, from the trees toward the sh.o.r.e; but it was like no forest sound. Distinct too was it from any noise of the lake. It was like a Drum! Yet, when the echo had gone, it was a sensation easy to deny--a hallucination, that was all. But now, low and distinct it came again; and, as before, Constance saw it catch Henry and hold him. His lips moved, but he did not speak; he was counting. "Two," she saw his lips form.

The Indian woman pa.s.sed them and opened the door, and now the sound, louder and more distinct, came again.

"The Drum!" she whispered, without looking about. "You hear? Three, I've heard. Now four! It will beat twenty; then we will know if more are dead!"

The door blew from the woman's hand, and snow, swept up from the drifts of the slope, swirled into the room; the draft blew the flame of the lamp in a smoky streak up the gla.s.s chimney and snuffed it out. The moonlight painted a rectangle on the floor; the moonlight gave a green, shimmering world without. Hurried spots of cloud shuttered away the moon for moments, casting shadows which swept raggedly up the slope from the sh.o.r.e. The woman seized the door and, tugging it about against the gale, she slammed it shut. She did not try at once to relight the lamp.

The sound of the Drum was continuing, the beats a few seconds apart.

The opening of the door outside had seemed to Constance to make the beats come louder and more distinct; but the closing of the door did not m.u.f.fle them again. "Twelve," Constance counted to herself. The beats had seemed to be quite measured and regular at first; but now Constance knew that this was only roughly true; they beat rather in rhythm than at regular intervals. Two came close together and there was a longer wait before the next; then three sounded before the measure--a wild, leaping rhythm. She recalled having heard that the strangeness of Indian music to civilized ears was its time; the drums beat and rattles sounded in a different time from the song which they accompanied; there were even, in some dances, three different times contending for supremacy. Now this seemed reproduced in the strange, irregular sounding of the Drum; she could not count with certainty those beats. "Twenty--twenty-one--twenty-two!" Constance caught breath and waited for the next beat; the time of the interval between the measures of the rhythm pa.s.sed, and still only the whistle of the wind and the undertone of water sounded. The Drum had beaten its roll and, for the moment, was done.

"Now it begins again," the woman whispered. "Always it waits and then it begins over."

Constance let go her breath; the next beat then would not mean another death. Twenty-two, had been her count, as nearly as she could count at all; the reckoning agreed with what the woman had heard. Two had died, then, since the Drum last had beat, when its roll was twenty. Two more than before; that meant five were left! Yet Constance, while she was appreciating this, strained forward, staring at Henry; she could not be certain, in the flickering shadows of the cabin, of what she was seeing in him; still less, in the sudden stoppage of heart and breathing that it brought, could she find coherent answer to its meaning. But still it turned her weak, then spurred her with a vague and terrible impulse.

The Indian woman lifted the lamp chimney waveringly and scratched a match and, with unsteady hands, lighted the wick; Constance caught up her woolen hood from the table and put it on. Her action seemed to call Henry to himself.

"What are you going to do?" he demanded.

"I'm going out."

He moved between her and the door. "Not alone, you're not!" His heavy voice had a deep tone of menace in it; he seemed to consider and decide something about her. "There's a farmhouse about a mile back; I'm going to take you over there and leave you with those people."

"I will not go there!"

He swore. "I'll carry you then!"

She shrank back from him as he lurched toward her with hands outstretched to seize her; he followed her, and she avoided him again; if his guilt and terror had given her mental ascendency over him, his physical strength could still force her to his will and, realizing the impossibility of evading him or overcoming him, she stopped.

"Not that!" she cried. "Don't touch me!"