All summer long the Dewdrop remained a quiet sleepy place and, far away, over the water, smoke from factory chimneys in the growing industrial city of Sandusky, at the foot of the bay, could be seen—a cloud of smoke that drifted slowly across the horizon and was torn and tossed by a wind. On summer days, on the long beaches a few fishermen launched their boats and went to visit the nets while their children played in the sand at the water’s edge. Inland the farming country—black land, partially covered at certain seasons of the year with stagnant water—was not very prosperous and the road leading down to the Dewdrop from the towns of Fremont, Bellevue, Clyde, Tiffin, and Bidwell was often impassable.
On June days, however, in May Edgley’s time, parties came down along the road to the beach and there was the screaming of town children, the laughter of women and the gruff voices of men. They stayed for a day and an evening and went, leaving upon the beach many empty tin cans, rusty cooking utensils and bits of paper that lay rotting at the base of trees and among the bushes back from the shore.
The hot months of July and August came and brought a little life. The summer crew came to take the ice out of the ice houses and load it into cars. They came in the morning and departed in the evening, and, as they were quiet workmen with families of their own, did nothing to disturb the quiet of the place. At the noon hour they sat in the shade of one of the ice houses and ate their luncheons while they discussed such problems as whether it was better for a workman to pay rent or to own his own house, going into debt and paying on the installment plan.
Night came and an adventurous girl, daughter of one of the fishermen, went to walk on the beach. Thanks to wind and rain the beach kept itself always quite clean. Great tree stumps and logs had been carried up on to the sand by winter storms but the wind and water had mellowed these and touched them with delightful color. On moonlight nights the old roots, clinging to the tree trunks, were like gaunt arms reached up to the sky, and on stormy nights these moved back and forth in the wind and sent a thrill of terror through the breast of the girl. She pressed her body against the wall of one of the ice houses and listened. Far away, over the water, were the massed lights of the great town of Sandusky and over her shoulder the few feeble lights of her own fishing town. A group of tramps had dropped off a freight train that afternoon and were making a night of it about the empty workingmen’s lodging houses. They had jerked doors off their hinges and were throwing them down from the balconies above and soon a great fire would be lit and all night the fishing families would be disturbed by oaths and shouts. The adventurous girl ran swiftly along the beach but was seen by one of the road adventurers. The fire had been lighted and he took a burning stick in his hand and hurled it over her head. “Run little rabbit,” he called as the burning stick, after making a long arch through the air, fell with a hiss into the water.
That was a prelude to the coming of winter and the time of terror. In the hard month of January, when the whole bay was covered with thick ice, a fat man in a heavy fur overcoat, got off a train, that stopped beside the ice houses, and from a car at the front of the train a great multitude of boxes, kegs and crates were pitched into the deep snow at the track side. The world of the cities was coming to break the winter silence of the Dewdrop and the fur coated man and his helpers had come to set the stage for the drama. Hundreds of thousands of tons of ice were to be cut and stored in sawdust in the great ice houses and for weeks, the quiet secluded spot would be astir with life. The silence would be torn by cries, oaths, bits of drunken song—fights would be started and blood would flow.
The fat man waded through the snow to the four empty houses and began to look about. From the little cluster of native houses thin columns of smoke went up into the winter sky. He spoke to one of his helpers. “Who lives in those shacks?” he asked. He himself had much money invested at the Dewdrop but visited the place but once each year and then stayed but a few days. He walked through the big dining room and along the upper galleries where the ice cutters slept, swearing softly. During the year much of his property had been destroyed. Windows had been broken and doors torn from their hinges and he took pencil and paper from his pocket and began to figure. “We’ll have to spend all of three hundred dollars this year,” he meditated. The thoughts of the money, thus thrown away, brought a flush to his cheeks and he looked again along the shore towards the tiny houses. Almost every year he decided he would go to the houses and do what he called “raising the devil.” If doors were torn from hinges and windows smashed these people must have done it. No one else lived at the Dewdrop. “Well I suppose they are a rough gang and I’d better let them alone,” he concluded, “I’ll send a couple of carpenters down tomorrow and have them do just what has to be done. It’s better to keep the ice cutters filled up with beer than to waste money giving them luxurious quarters.”
The fat man went away and other men came. Fires were lighted in the kitchens of the great boarding houses, carpenters nailed doors back on hinges and replaced broken windows and the Dewdrop was ready again for its season of feverish activity.
The fisher folk hid themselves completely away. On the day when the first of the ice cutters arrived one of them spoke to his assembled family. He looked at his daughter, a somewhat comely girl of fifteen, who could sail a boat through the roughest storm that ever swept down the bay. “I want you to keep out of sight,” he said. One winter night a fire had broken out in the dining room of the smallest of the houses where the ice cutters boarded and the fishermen with their wives had gone to help put it out. That was an event they could never forget. As the men worked, carrying buckets of water from a hole cut in the ice of the bay, a group of young roughs, from Cleveland, tried to drag their wives into another of the houses. Screams and cries arose on the winter air and the men ran to the defense of their women. A battle began, some of the ice cutters fighting on the side of the fishermen, some on the side of the young roughs, but the fishermen never knew they had helpers in the struggle. Out of a mass of swearing, laughing men they had managed to drag their women and escape to their own houses and the thoughts of what might have happened, had they been unsuccessful, had brought the fear of man upon them. “I want you to keep out of sight,” the fisherman said to his assembled family, but as he said it he looked at his daughter. He imagined her dragged into the upper galleries of the boarding houses and handed about among the city men—something like that had come near happening to her mother. He stared hard at his daughter and she was frightened by the look in his eyes. “You,” he began again, “now you—well you keep yourself out of sight. Those men are looking for just such girls as you.” The fisherman went out of the room and his daughter stood by a window. Sometimes, on Sundays, during the ice-cutting time, the men who had not gone to spend the day in the city walked in the afternoon along the beach past the houses of the fishermen and, more than once, she had peeked out at them from behind a curtain. Sometimes they stopped before one of the houses and shouted and a wit among them exercised his powers. “Hey, the house,” he shouted, “is there any woman in there wants a louse for a lover.” The wit leaped upon the shoulders of one of his companions and with his teeth snatched the cap off his head. Turning towards the house he made an elaborate bow. “I’m only a little louse but I’m cold. Let me crawl into your nest,” he shouted.
There were six young men from Bidwell who went to the dance given at the Dewdrop on the June evening when May went there with Maud and the two widowed grocers, homeward bound from the K. of P. convention at Cleveland. The dance was held in one of the large rooms, on the first floor of one of the boarding houses, one of the rooms used as a dining and drinking place by the ice cutters in the months of January and February. A group of farmers’ sons gave the dance and Rat Gould, a one-eyed fiddler from Clyde, came with two other fiddlers, to furnish the music. The dance was open to all who paid fifty cents at the door, and women paid nothing. Rat Gould had announced it at other dances given at Clyde, Bellevue, Castalia and on the floors of newly build barns. There was an idea. At all dances, where Rat had officiated, for several weeks previously, the announcement had been made. “There will be a dance at the Dewdrop two weeks from next Friday night,” he had cried out in a shrill voice. “A prize will be given. The best dressed lady gets a new calico dress.”