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
