The Indian Drum

by William MacHarg; Edwin Balmer

But for the living there had been no peace. Spearman had forced Corvet to make him his partner; Corvet had tried to take up his life again, but had not been able. His wife, aware that something was wrong with him, had learned enough so that she had left him. Luke had come and come and come again for blackmail, and Corvet had paid him. Corvet grew rich; those connected with him prospered; but with Corvet lived always the ghosts of those he had watched die with the Miwaka—of those who would have prospered with Stafford except for what had been done. Corvet had secretly sought and followed the fate of the kin of those people who had been murdered to benefit him; he found some of their families destroyed; he found almost all poor and struggling. And though Corvet paid Luke to keep the crime from disclosure, yet Corvet swore to himself to confess it all and make such restitution as he could. But each time that the day he had appointed with himself arrived, he put it off and off and paid Luke again and again. Spearman knew of his intention and sometimes kept him from it. But Corvet had made one close friend; and when that friend's daughter, for whom Corvet cared now most of all in the world, had been about to marry Spearman, Corvet defied the cost to himself, and he gained strength to oppose Spearman. So he had written to Stafford's son to come; he had prepared for confession and restitution; but, after he had done this and while he waited, something had seemed to break in his brain; too long preyed upon by terrible memories, and the ghosts of those who had gone, and by the echo of their voices crying to him from the water, Corvet had wandered away; he had come back, under the name of one of those whom he had wronged, to the lake life from which he had sprung. Only now and then, for a few hours, he had intervals when he remembered all; in one of these he had dug up the watch and the ring and other things which he had taken from Captain Stafford's pockets and written to himself directions of what to do with them, when his mind again failed.

And for Spearman, strong against all that assailed Corvet, there had been always the terror of the Indian Drum—the Drum which had beat short for the Miwaka, the Drum which had known that one was saved! That story came from some hint which Luke had spread, Corvet thought; but Spearman, born near by the Drum, believed that the Drum had known and that the Drum had tried to tell; all through the years Spearman had dreaded the Drum which had tried to betray him.

So it was by the Drum that, in the end, Spearman was broken.

The priest's voice had stopped, as Alan slowly realized; he heard Sherrill's voice speaking to him.

"It was a trust that he left you, Alan; I thought it must be that—a trust for those who suffered by the loss of your father's ship. I don't know yet how it can be fulfilled; and we must think of that."

"That's how I understand it," Alan said.

Fuller consciousness of what Father Perron's story meant to him was flowing through him now. Wrong, great wrong there had been, as he had known there must be; but it had not been as he had feared, for he and his had been among the wronged ones. The name—the new name that had come to him—he knew what that must be: Robert Alan Stafford; and there was no shadow on it. He was the son of an honest man and a good woman; he was clean and free; free to think as he was thinking now of the girl beside him; and to hope that she was thinking so of him.

Through the tumult in his soul he became aware of physical feelings again, and of Sherrill's hand put upon his shoulder in a cordial, friendly grasp. Then another hand, small and firm, touched his, and he felt its warm, tightening grasp upon his fingers; he looked up, and his eyes filled and hers, he saw, were brimming too.

They walked together, later in the day, up the hill to the small, white house which had been Caleb Stafford's. Alan had seen the house before but, not knowing then whether the man who had owned it had or had not been his father, he had merely looked at it from the outside. There had been a small garden filled with flowers before it then; now yard and roofs were buried deep in snow. The woman who came to the door was willing to show them through the house; it had only five rooms. One of those upon the second floor was so much larger and pleasanter than the rest that they became quite sure that it was the one in which Alan had been born, and where his young mother soon afterward had died.

They were very quiet as they stood looking about.