it in common to all
fourteen, sometimes as the deciding factor of their fate, sometimes as
only slightly affecting them, but always it was there.

In how many different ways, in what strange, diverse manifestations
that single circumstance had spread to those people whom Alan had
interviewed! No two of them had been affected alike, he reckoned, as
he went over his notes of them. Now he was going to trace those
consequences to another. To what sort of place would it bring him
to-day and what would he find there? He knew only that it would be
quite distinct from the rest.

The driver beside whom he sat on the front seat of the little
automobile was an Indian; an Indian woman and two round-faced silent
children occupied the seat behind. He had met these people in the
early morning on the road, bound, he discovered, to the annual camp
meeting of the Methodist Indians at Northport. They were going his
way, and they knew the man of whom he was in search; so he had hired a
ride of them. The region through which they were traveling now was of
farms, but interspersed with desolate, waste fields where blackened
stumps and rotting windfalls remained after the work of the lumberers.
The hills and many of the hollows were wooded; there were even places
where lumbering was still going on. To his left across the water, the
twin Manitous broke the horizon, high and round and blue with haze. To
his right, from the higher hilltops, he caught glimpses of Grand
Traverse and of the shores to the north, rising higher, dimmer, and
more blue, where they broke for Little Traverse and where Constance
Sherrill was, two hours away across the water; but he had shut his mind
to that thought.

The driver turned now into a rougher road, bearing more to the east.

They passed people more frequently now--groups in farm wagons, or
groups or single individuals, walking beside the road. All were going
in the same direction as themselves, and nearly all were Indians, drab
dressed figures attired obviously in their best clothes. Some walked
barefoot, carrying new shoes in their hands, evidently to preserve them
from the dust. They saluted gravely Alan's driver, who returned their
salutes--"B'jou!" "B'jou!"

Traveling eastward, they had lost sight of Lake Michigan; and suddenly
the wrinkled blueness of Grand Traverse appeared quite close to them.
The driver turned aside from the road across a cleared field where ruts
showed the passing of m