Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/204

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192
RESURRECTION ROCK

danger but its discoverer. Indignantly he assailed Ethel, his dearest cousin. She was a wild, crazy idiot to go poking into "things." He worked himself into such a fever about it that, long after opening his windows and getting into bed, he lay tossing and wide awake.

His father's family had moved, a few years before, to one of those new apartments occupying an entire floor of a great residence building erected upon the recently made land famous locally as "Cap Streeter's deestrick of Lake Michigan." Not many years ago, the land was only a sand bar off the fashionable north shore of the city, when the picturesque argosy of the peppery captain grounded upon the bar, and Cap Streeter claimed it his own by right of discovery and fortified and defended it. But his defense—both by rifle and by law—failed; the city filled out to the bar and beyond it, extending the land like a cape into the lake; the Shore Drive now runs about the cape, and it is as fashionable to live upon it as anywhere in Chicago.

Bennet's room had a window to the north, looking up the lake, and through the window now was blowing the cold, clean air from the water and ice and the snow-clad shores of northern Michigan. It made Bennet think, when he did not want to, of his grandfather living far up the water past the other end of the lake in his lonely house on the shore opposite that always strange—and now dangerous—Resurrection Rock. It made him think of the Michigan woodland, cleared now of the old, tall trees from which the family wealth had come. His grandfather—Ethel believed—had "done" something in the time of the felling of the tall white pines. Of course their grandfather had done something; Bennet did not deny the probability of that.