Connecticut western news., 1922-08-24
Copyright by Edwin BoIme
CHAPTER 1.


 carriers and the big, low-lying, wheat laden steel freighters from Lake Su- perior push out from the Straits of Mackinac and dispute the right of way, in the island-divided channel, with the jwhite-and-gold electric-light. ed, wireless-equipped passenger steam CTS bound for Detroit and Buffalo, there Is a copse of pine and hemlock back from the shingly beach. From this copse-dark, blue, primeval, silent at most times as when the Great Mani tou ruled his inland waters-there comes at time of storm sound like the booming of an old Indian drum. This drum beat, so the tradition says, whenever the lake took a life; and, as a sign perhaps that it is still the Manitou who rules the waters in spite of all the commerce of the cities, the drum still beats it's roll for every ship lost on the lake, one beat for every life -" So-men say-they heard and count ed the beatings of the drum to thirty five upon the hour when, as afterward they learned, the great steel steamer Wenota sank with twenty-four of It's crew and eleven passengers; so-men say-they heard the requiem of the nve who went down with the schooner Grant; and of the seventeen lost with the Susan Hart; and So of score of ships more. Once only, 1t Is told, has the drum counted wrong. ,t. Al fhn Aofopbf nP' tho nrraoA c%n December, 1895, the drum beat the roll of sinking ship. One, two, three-the hearers counted the drum beats, time and again, in their inter mittent booming, to twenty-four. They waited, therefore, for report of ship lost with twenty-four lives; no such news came. The new steel freighter Miwaka, on her maiden trip during the storm with twenty-five-no twen- ty-four-aboard never made her port; no news was ever heard from her; no wreckage ever was found. On this ac- count, throughout the families whose fathers, brothers and sons were the officers and crew of the Miwaka there stirred for a time desperate belief that one of the men on the Miwaka was saved; that somewhere, somehow, he was alive and might return. The day of the destruction of the Miwaka was fixed as December by the time at which she passed the government lookout at the straits; the hour was fixed as i've o'clock in the morning only by the sounding of the drum.
 
 storm--the stinging, frozen sleet slash of the February mortimer whis- ting down the oe-jammed length of the lake-was assaulting Chicago. So heavy was this frost on the panes of the Fort Dearborn club-one of the staidest of the downtown clubs for men-that the great log fires blazing on the open hearths added appreciable light as well as warmth to the rooms.
 The few members present at this hour of the afternoon showed by their lazy attitudes and the desultoriness of their conversation the dulling of vitality which warmth and shelter bring on a day of cold and storm. On one, however, the storm had had con- trary effect. With swift, uneven steps he paced now one room, now another ; from time to time he stopped ab- ruptly by a window, scraped from 1t with finger nail the frost, stared out for an instant through the little open ing he had made, then resumed as ab- ruptly his nervous pacing with man Ter so uneasy and distraught that since his. arrival at the club an houl before, none even among those who knew him best had ventured to speak to him.
 The man who was pacing reStlessl! and alone the rooms of the Fort Dear born club on this stormy afternoon was the man who, to most people, bod led forth the life underlying all othe commerce whereabouts but the leas known, the life of the lakes.
 The lakes, which mark unmistak . ably those who get their living iron them, had put their. marks on him Though he was slight In frame with , spare, almost ascetic leanness; he hat the wiry strength and endurance O the man whose youth had been passed upon the water. He was very clos to sixty now, but his thick, straigh hair was still jet black except for slash of pure white above one temple his brows were black above his deel blue eyes. His acquaintances, in ez blaming him to strangers, said he ha lived too much by himself of late; h and one man servant shared the grea house which had been unchanged-an in which nothing appeared to hay I needed replacing-since his wife lief him, suddenly and unaccountablJ about twenty years before. Peopl said he looked more French, referrin to his father who was known to hay been a skin-hunter north of Lake Su perior in the '50s but who later mar
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