As long as men remain to tell the story of the Inland Seas the great autumn storm of 1900 will not be forgotten. It has been set down as a matter of history, and a hundred tales could be told of the ships that went down and the men who died in those days when the Five Lakes were like five mighty churns, whipping and tossing their waters in maelstroms of destruction.
It was not cold. A part of the time the sun shone brightly, and back in the woods from the Superior shore birds sang, and flowers still bloomed. To Pierre and his people this was of strange and mysterious portent, for though they had seen many storms at Five Fingers there had never been one like this, with that terrific roar of enraged waters against rock walls and birds preening themselves and chirping in the sunshine of the forest.
On the second day Pierre took Josette and Marie Antoinette down to the tip of the wooded peninsula that lay between the Second and Middle Finger that they might see the lake as they had never seen it before. It was fun for the women. The wind choked them at times, and they had to scream to be heard, and it whipped their long hair loose until they were like panting naiads, clinging to Pierre's hands, their eyes shining and their hearts thrilled with the excitement of the adventure. Pierre, laughing, told Josette she was as lovely as a girl with her shining hair all about her in a windblown tangle and her cheeks as pink and soft as Marie Antoinette's. But he was only half heard, for the seas were roaring among the rocks below them like the steady thunder of countless guns.
When they came out of the last rim of sheltering spruce and looked beyond the black and dripping rampart of rock that held back the raging waters Josette clung to him in sudden fear, and Marie Antoinette gave a cry that cut like a knife above the wind.
Pierre's heart went dead and still as he stared gray-faced out to sea. There was a twist on his lips where laughter suddenly died.
Out from the shore lay an entanglement of reef and rock, jutting up like great heads of sea-monsters in the quiet and calm of summer, a resting-place for gulls, and strangely quiet and beautiful at times when the water rippled between them in wide paths of green silver. Through this network of waiting traps ran the channel in which the tug made her way to and from the Middle Finger. But there was no channel today. It was lost in a fury of thundering flood, lashing itself into ribbons, and among the rocks, half a mile from where Pierre and his women stood, a ship was beating herself to pieces.
In his first moment of horror Pierre knew they had come just in time to see the end. She was a schooner of possibly three hundred tons, and had plunged broadside upon the long, low reef which Josette herself had named the Dragon because of the jagged teeth of rock which rose from it like the spines of a huge fin. Her tall masts were gone. A mass of wreckage tangled her deck, and Pierre fancied that even above the roar of the surf he could hear the crash of her rending timbers as she rose and fell in mighty sledge-hammer blows upon the reef. As he waited, struck dumb with horror, the vessel was raised half out of the sea, and when she fell back her stern split asunder and the foaming water engulfed her until only her bow was held up by the projecting spines of the Dragon.
Marie Antoinette cried out again, and her face was waxlike in its fear and horror, for very clearly in that moment they saw a moving figure in the bow of the ship. In an instant the figure was inundated and gone.
Life leaped back into Pierre.