Mackinac; to southward, where other hills frown down upon Little Traverse Bay, the black-robed priests in their chapel chant the same masses their predecessors chanted to the Indians of that time. So, whatever may be the origin of that drum, its meaning is not questioned by the forlorn descendants of those Indians, who now make beadwork and sweet-grass baskets for their summer trade, or by the more credulous of the white fishermen and farmers; men whose word on any other subject would receive unquestioning credence will tell you they have heard the drum.
But at bottom, of course, this is only the absurdest of superstitions, which can affect in no way men who to-day ship ore in steel bottoms to the mills of Gary and carry gasoline-engine reaped and threshed wheat to the elevators of Chicago. It is recorded, therefore, only as a superstition which for twenty-years has been connected with the loss of a great ship.
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Storm—the stinging, frozen sleet-slash of the February norther whistling down the floe-jammed length of the lake—was assaulting Chicago. Over the lake it was a white, whirling maelstrom, obscuring at midafternoon even the lighthouses at the harbor entrance; beyond that, the winter boats trying for the harbor mouth were bellowing blindly at bay before the jammed ice, and foghorns and sirens echoed loudly in the city in the lulls of the storm.
Battering against the fronts of the row of club buildings, fashionable hotels, and shops which face across the narrow strip of park to the lake front in downtown Chicago, the gale swirled and eddied the sleet till all the wide windows, warm within, were frosted. So heavy
