Now—he was in bed—he seemed to be standing, a specter before a man blaspheming Benjamin Corvet and the souls of men dead. "And the hole above the eye! ... The bullet got you! ... So it's you that got Ben! ... I'll get you! ... You can't save the Miwaka!"
The Miwaka! The stir of that name was stronger now even than before; it had been running through his consciousness almost constantly since he had heard it. He jumped up and turned on the light and found a pencil. He did not know how to spell the name and it was not necessary to write it down; the name had taken on that definiteness and ineffaceableness of a thing which, once heard, can never again be forgotten. But, in panic that he might forget, he wrote it, guessing at the spelling—"Miwaka."
It was a name, of course; but the name of what? It repeated and repeated itself to him, after he got back into bed, until its very iteration made him drowsy.
Outside the gale whistled and shrieked. The wind, passing its last resistance after its sweep across the prairies before it leaped upon the lake, battered and clamored in its assault about the house. But as Alan became sleepier, he heard it no longer as it rattled the windows and howled under the eaves and over the roof, but as out on the lake, above the roaring and ice-crunching waves, it whipped and circled with its chill the ice-shrouded sides of struggling ships. So, with the roar of surf and gale in his ears, he went to sleep with the sole conscious connection in his mind between himself and these people, among whom Benjamin Corvet's summons had brought him, the one name "Miwaka."
CHAPTER VI
CONSTANCE SHERRILL
In the morning a great change had come over the lake. The wind still blew freshly, but no longer fiercely, from the west; and now, from before the beach beyond the drive, and from the piers and breakwaters at the harbor mouth, and from all the western shore, the ice had departed. Far out, a nearly indiscernible white line marked the ice-floe where it was traveling eastward before the wind; nearer, and with only a gleaming crystal fringe of frozen snow clinging to the shore edge, the water sparkled, blue and dimpling, under the morning sun; multitudes of gulls, hungry after the storm, called to one another and circled over the breakwaters, the piers, and out over the water as far as the eye could see; and a half mile off shore, a little work boat—a shallop twenty feet long—was put-put-ing on some errand along a path where twelve hours before no horsepower creatable by man could have driven the hugest steamer.
Constance Sherrill, awakened by the sunlight reflected from the water upon her ceiling, found nothing odd or startling in this change; it roused her but did not surprise her. Except for the short periods of her visits away from Chicago, she had lived all her life on the shore of the lake: the water—wonderful, ever altering—was the first sight each morning. As it made wilder and more grim the desolation of a stormy day, so it made brighter and more smiling the splendor of the sunshine and, by that much more, influenced one's feelings.
Constance held by preference to the seagoing traditions of her family. Since she was a child, the lake and the life of the ships had delighted and fascinated her; very early she had discovered that, upon the lake, she was permitted privileges sternly denied upon land—an arbitrary distinction which led her to designate water, when she was a little girl, as her family's "respectable element." For while her father's investments were, in part, on the water, her mother's property all was on the land. Her mother, who was a Seaton, owned property somewhere in the city, in common with Constance's uncles; this property consisted, as Constance succeeded in ascertaining about the time she was nine, of large, wholesale grocery buildings. They and the "brand" had been in the possession of the Seaton family for many years; both Constance's uncles worked in the big buildings where the canning was done; and, when Constance was taken to visit them, she found the place most interesting—the berries and fruit coming up in great steaming cauldrons; the machines pushing the cans under the enormous faucets where the preserves ran out and then sealing the cans and pasting the bright Seaton "brand" about them. The people there were interesting—the girls with flying fingers sorting fruit, and the men pounding the big boxes together; and the great shaggy-hoofed horses which pulled the huge, groaning wagons were most fascinating. She wanted to ride on one of the wagons; but her request was promptly and completely squashed.