Through Keeweenaw By Keith Henney [Illustration: Fresh-water superstition.] Even before the new skipper came aboard the _Chippewa_ in the flour-covered pier in Superior, I knew that this trip was not going to be like other trips. During all the seasons that I had been a radio operator on the Great Lakes I had been hearing a strange tale about him. Rumors, like Lake Erie squalls, are stirred up in a hurry, and usually die down as quickly, but this one was different. It didn’t die. It drifted about with the wind from one end of the Lakes to the other, and windlike, it came first from one direction, then another. The first time I heard it was one fine day near the beginning of my first summer on the Lakes. We had been coasting down Lake Huron ahead of a stiff breeze and were about to enter the river at Port Huron. My eyes were on the tall, straight spruce poles of the Canadian radio station at Sarnia, but, as we came near the lightship which guards the entrance of the river, I noticed a marker and, as we passed it, I thought I could see the masts of a ship a foot or two under water. I could not be sure--I was young and romantic, and thought maybe I was imagining things--and so the next time I had a chance I asked the chief about it. “Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s the _Herman Masterson_ that sank in that big November blizzard last year. The oldest captain in the line lost his grandson then. He had shipped as a cabin boy. He lost his wife in pretty much the same way about twenty years ago.” “Not in the same place, I hope,” I couldn’t help saying. “No, she was lost at the west entrance to the Portage Lake Canal through Keeweenaw. They say that’s why old man Trinder never became skipper of one of the company’s passenger boats--he didn’t want to go near the canal again, and our package carriers don’t make that passage. Trinder and his wife were sailing the old _Betsy B_. They had been married about ten years, but this was their first voyage together. The old _Betsy_ went ashore in a fog while Trinder was hunting the west entrance to the canal. I reckon he’s had enough to make him queer.” I asked him what he meant by queer, but that was all the satisfaction I could get, and no one else I asked ever said anything more definite. It seemed almost as if they didn’t want to betray the old man’s weakness, whatever it was. They did agree that if ever a man had had enough to make him queer, it was old Captain Trinder. To lose a wife in Lake Superior on his own schooner on their first trip together, and to lose his grandson in Huron, and both of them so close to land they could have swum ashore if the weather had been clear, was enough to unhinge any man.