but the piers and breakwaters had white ice caps frozen from spray—harbingers of the closing of navigation. The summer boats, those of Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman with the rest, were being tied up. The birds were gone; only the gulls remained—gray, clamorous shapes circling and calling to one another across the water. Early in December the newspapers announced the closing of the locks at the "Soo" by the ice.
That she had not heard from Alan was beginning to recur to Constance with strange insistence. He must have left the boats by now, unless he had found work on one of those few which ran through the winter.
He and his occupation, instead of slipping from her thoughts with time, absorbed her more and more. Soon after he had gone to Manitowoc and he had written that he had discovered nothing, she had gone to the office of the Petoskey paper and, looking back over the twenty-year-old files, she had read the account of the loss of the Miwaka, with all on board. That fate was modified only by the Indian Drum beating short. So one man from the Miwaka had been saved somehow, many believed. If that could have been, there was, or there had been, some one alive after the ship "disappeared"—Alan's word went through her with a chill—who knew what had happened to the ship and who knew of the fate of his shipmates.
She had gone over the names again; if there was meaning in the Drum, who was the man who had been saved and visited that fate on Benjamin Corvet? Was it Luke? There was no Luke named among the crew; but such men often went by many names. If Luke had been among the crew of the Miwaka and had
