"I've told you almost all I can about Stafford and Ramsdell, I'm afraid; I've just heard father say that they were men who could have amounted to a great deal on the lakes, if they had lived—especially Mr. Stafford, who was very young. The Miwaka was a great new steel ship—built the year after I was born; it was the first of nearly a dozen that Stafford and Ramsdell had planned to build. There was some doubt among lake men about steel boats at that time; they had begun to be built very largely quite a few years before, but recently there had been some serious losses with them. Whether it was because they were built on models not fitted for the lakes, no one knew; but several of them had broken in two and sunk, and a good many men were talking about going back to wood. But Stafford and Ramsdell believed in steel and had finished this first one of their new boats.
"She left Duluth for Chicago, loaded with ore, on the first day of December, with both owners and part of their families on board. She passed the Soo on the third and went through the Straits of Mackinac on the fourth into Lake Michigan. After that, nothing was ever heard of her."
"So probably she broke in two like the others?"
"Mr. Spearman and your father both thought so; but nobody ever knew—no wreckage came ashore—no message of any sort from any one on board. A very sudden winter storm had come up and was at its worst on the morning of the fifth. Uncle Benny—your father—told me once, when I asked him about it, that it was as severe for a time as any he had ever experienced. He very nearly lost his life in it. He had just finished laying up one of his boats—the Martha Corvet—at Manistee for the winter; and he and Mr. Spearman, who then was mate of the Martha Corvet, were crossing the lake in a tug with a crew of four men to Manitowoc, where they were going to lay up more ships. The captain and one of the deck hands of the tug were washed overboard, and the engineer was lost trying to save them. Uncle Benny and Mr. Spearman and the stoker brought the tug in. The storm was worst about five in the morning, when the Miwaka sunk."
"How do you know that the Miwaka sunk at five," Alan asked, "if no one ever heard from the ship?"
"Oh; that was told by the Drum!"
"The Drum?"
"Yes; the Indian Drum! I forgot; of course you didn't know. It's a superstition that some of the lake men have, particularly those who come from people at the other end of the lake. The Indian Drum is in the woods there, they say. No one has seen it; but many people believe that they have heard it. It's a spirit drum which beats, they say, for every ship lost on the lake. There's a particular superstition about it in regard to the Miwaka; for the drum beat wrong for the Miwaka. You see, the people about there swear that about five o'clock in the morning of the fifth, while the storm was blowing terribly, they heard the drum beating and knew that a ship was going down. They counted the sounds as it beat the roll of the dead. It beat twenty-four before it stopped and then began to beat again and beat twenty-four; so, later, everybody knew it had been beating for the Miwaka; for every other ship on the lake got to port; but there were twenty-five altogether on the Miwaka, so either the drum beat wrong or—" she hesitated.
"Or what?"
"Or the drum was right, and some one was saved. Many people believed that. It was years before the families of the men on board gave up hope, because of the Drum; maybe some haven't given up hope yet."