As they started, so they sailed during four days—the Captain reckless, the mate hard and uncommunicative, the men cowed. And at mid-morning on the fourth day they arrived at Spencer.
The Hydrographic Office had at that time worked wonders in charting these Great Lakes of ours, but it had given no notice to the little harbor that was tucked snugly away behind False Middle Island, not a hundred miles from Mackinaw City on the Lake Huron side; merely a speck of an island with a nameless dent behind it. But old Spencer, a lank, hatchet-faced Yankee, had found that a small schooner could be worked in if she headed due west, “with the double sand dune against the three pines till you get the forked stump ranged with the ruined shanty; meet this range and hold it till clear of the bar at the north end of the island; circle around to port; when clear of the bar, hug the inner shore of the island until the mill can be seen behind the trees; then run up into the harbor. Plenty of water here.”
This discovery had resulted in such a curious little mill as can be found only in the back corners of the country,—a low shed with a flat roof; one side open to the day; within, an old-fashioned vertical saw; the whole supplied with power by a rotting, dripping, moss-covered sluiceway.
All about were blackened pine stumps—nothing else for a hundred miles. And all through the forest was the sand, drifting like snow over roads and fences, changing the shape of the land in every high wind, blowing into hair and clothes, and adding, with the tall, endless, gray-green mullein stalks, the final touch of desolation to a hopeless land. Here and there, in the clearings, sand-colored farmers and their sand-colored wives struggled to wring a livelihood from the thankless earth. Other farmers had drifted helplessly away, leaving houses and barns to blacken and rot and sink beneath the sand drifts, and leaving, too, rows of graves under the stumps.
Twenty miles down the coast, where a railroad touched, was a feeble little settlement that was known, on the maps, as Ramsey City.
This region had been “cut over” once; it had been burned over more than once; and yet old Spencer, with his handful of employees and his deliberate little mill, wore a prosperous look on his inscrutable Yankee face. There was no inhabited house within ten miles, but he was apparently contented.
McGlory, it seemed, knew the channel; so Dick surrendered the wheel when they were nearing the island, and stood at his elbow, watching the landmarks. The mate volunteered no information, but Dick needed none; he made out the ranges with the eye of a born sailor. But even he was surprised when the Merry Anne swung around into the landlocked harbor and glided up to a rude wharf that was piled with lumber. Behind it was the mill; behind that, at some distance, a comfortable house, nearly surrounded by other smaller dwellings.
“So this is Spencer, eh?” observed Dick.
“This is Spencer,” McGlory replied.
The owner himself was coming down to meet them, reading over a letter from his friend, Stenzenberger, as he walked. His wife came out of her kitchen and stood on her steps to see the schooner. Two or three men in woodman's flannels were lounging about the mill, and these sat up, renewed their quids from a common plug, and stared.