"It is up there, isn't it," he asked, pointing, "that they hear the Drum?"
"Yes; how did you know the place?"
"I don't know it exactly; I want you to show me."
She pointed out to him the copse, dark, primeval, blue in its contrast with the lighter green of the trees about it and the glistening white of the shingle and of the more distant sand bluffs. He leaned forward, staring at it, until the changed course of the yacht, as it swung about toward the entrance to the bay, obscured it. They were meeting other power boats now of their yacht's own size and many smaller; they passed white-sailed sloops and cat-boats, almost becalmed, with girls and boys diving from their sides and swimming about. As they neared the Point, a panorama of play such as, she knew, he scarcely could have seen before, was spread in front of them. The sun gleamed back from the white sides and varnished decks and shining brasswork of a score or more of cruising yachts and many smaller vessels lying in the anchorage.
"The Chicago to Mackinac yacht race starts this week, and the cruiser fleet is working north to be in at the finish," she offered. Then she saw he was not looking at these things; he was studying with a strange expression the dark, uneven hills which shut in the two towns and the bay.
"You remember how the ship rhymes you told me and that about Michabou and seeing the ships made me feel that I belonged here on the lakes," he reminded her. "I have felt something—not recognition exactly, but something that was like the beginning of recognition—many times this summer when I saw certain places. It's like one of those dreams, you know, in which you are conscious of having had the same dream before. I feel that I ought to know this place."
They landed only a few hundred yards from the cottage. After bidding good-by to her friends, they went up to it together through the trees. There was a small sun room, rather shut off from the rest of the house, to which she led him. Leaving him there, she ran upstairs to get the things.
She halted an instant beside the door, with the box in her hands, before she went back to him, thinking how to prepare him against the significance of these relics of his father. She need not prepare him against the mere fact of his father's death; he had been beginning to believe that already; but these things must have far more meaning for him than merely that. They must frustrate one course of inquiry for him at the same time they opened another; they would close for him forever the possibility of ever learning anything about himself from his father; they would introduce into his problem some new, some unknown person—the sender of these things.
She went in and put the box down upon the card table.
"The muffler in the box was your father's," she told him. "He had it on the day he disappeared. The other things," her voice choked a little, "are the things he must have had in his pockets. They've been lying in water and sand—"