Williams news., 1922-06-30
CHAPTER l.

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 The Man Whom the Storm Haunted.
 Near the northern end of Lake Michigan, where the bluff-bowed ore carriers and the big. low-lying, wheat laden steel freighters from Lake Su- perfor push out from the Straits of Mackinac and dispute the right of way. in the island-divided channel, with the white-and-gold, electric-light- ed, wfreless-equipped passenger steaIn- CTS bound for Detroit and Buffalo, there is copse of pine and hemlock back from the shingly beach. From this copse-tiark. 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 life; and, as a sign perhaps that 1t 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 sd the beatings of the drum to thirty i've 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 Ave 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, it is told, has the drum counted wrong.
 At the height of the great storm of 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- mtttent booming, to twenty-four. They waited, therefore, for report of a ship lost with twenty-four lives; no such news came. The new steel freighter Miwaka, on her maiden trip during the storm with twenty-f1ve-not twen- ty-four-aboard never made her port ao 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 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 five o'clock in the morning only by the sounding of the drum. ''
 Storm-the stfnging, frozen sleet slash of the February mortimer whis- ting down the f1oe-jammed length of the Iake-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 cnen-that the great log fires blazing on the open hearths added appreciable | tight as well as warmth to the rooms.
 The few members present at this hour Of the afternoon showed by their sazy attitudes and the desultoriness Of their conversation the dulling of vitality which warmth and shelter bring on day of cold and storm. On one, however, the storm had had a con- rary effect. With swift, uneven steps he paced now one room, now another; crom time to time he stopped ab- tuptly by window, scraped from it with finger nail the frost, stared out tor an instant through the little open ing he had made, then resumed as ab- fuptIy his nervous pacing with a man. ner so uneasy and distraught that, since his arrival at the club an hour before. none even among those who knew him best had ventured to speak Go him.