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The Indian Drum

by William MacHarg · English · Gutenberg #33065 · 599,344 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Indian Drum

Author: William MacHarg
        Edwin Balmer

Illustrator: Wladyslaw T. Benda


        
Release date: July 3, 2010 [eBook #33065]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33065

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INDIAN DRUM ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: As Constance started away, Spearman suddenly drew her
back to him and kissed her.]





THE INDIAN DRUM


BY

WILLIAM MacHARG

AND

EDWIN BALMER




FRONTISPIECE BY

W. T. BENDA




NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS




_Copyright, 1917,_

BY EDWIN BALMER


_All rights reserved_




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     I  THE MAN WHOM THE STORM HAUNTED
    II  WHO IS ALAN CONRAD?
   III  DISCUSSION OF A SHADOW
    IV  "ARRIVED SAFE; WELL"
     V  AN ENCOUNTER
    VI  CONSTANCE SHERRILL
   VII  THE DEED IN TRUST
  VIII  MR. CORVET'S PARTNER
    IX  VIOLENCE
     X  A WALK BESIDE THE LAKE
    XI  A CALLER
   XII  THE LAND OF THE DRUM
  XIII  THE THINGS FROM CORVET'S POCKETS
   XIV  THE OWNER OF THE WATCH
    XV  OLD BURR OF THE FERRY
   XVI  A GHOST SHIP
  XVII  "HE KILLED YOUR FATHER"
 XVIII  MR. SPEARMAN GOES NORTH
   XIX  THE WATCH UPON THE BEACH
    XX  THE SOUNDING OF THE DRUM
   XXI  THE FATE OF THE MIWAKA




THE INDIAN DRUM


CHAPTER I

THE MAN WHOM THE STORM HAUNTED

Near the northern end of Lake Michigan, where the bluff-bowed
ore-carriers and the big, low-lying, wheat-laden steel freighters from
Lake Superior push out from the Straits of Mackinac and dispute the
right of way, in the island divided channel, with the white-and-gold,
electric lighted, wireless equipped passenger steamers bound for
Detroit and Buffalo, there is a copse of pine and hemlock back from the
shingly beach.  From this copse--dark, blue, primeval, silent at most
times as when the Great Manitou ruled his inland waters--there comes at
time of storm a sound like the booming of an old Indian drum.  This
drum beat, so the tradition says, whenever the lake took a life; and,
as a sign perhaps that it is still the Manitou who rules the waters in
spite of all the commerce of the cities, the drum still beats its roll
for every ship lost on the lake, one beat for every life.

So--men say--they heard and counted the beatings of the drum to
thirty-five upon the hour when, as afterward they learned, the great
steel steamer _Wenota_ sank with twenty-four of its crew and eleven
passengers; so--men say--they heard the requiem of the five who went
down with the schooner _Grant_; and of the seventeen lost with the
_Susan Hart_; and so of a score of ships more.  Once only, it is told,
has the drum counted wrong.

At the height of the great storm of December, 1895, the drum beat the
roll of a sinking ship.  One, two, three--the hearers counted the drum
beats, time and again, in their intermitted booming, to twenty-four.
They waited, therefore, for report of a ship lost with twenty-four
lives; no such news came.  The new steel freighter _Miwaka_, on her
maiden trip during the storm with twenty-five--not twenty-four--aboard
never made her port; no news was ever heard from her; no wreckage ever
was found.  On this account, throughout the families whose fathers,
brothers, and sons were the officers and crew of the _Miwaka_, there
stirred for a time a desperate belief that one of the men on the
_Miwaka_ was saved; that somewhere, somehow, he was alive and might
return.  The day of the destruction of the _Miwaka_ was fixed as
December fifth by the time at which she passed the government lookout
at the Straits; the hour was fixed as five o'clock in the morning only
by the sounding of the drum.

The region, filled with Indian legend and with memories of wrecks,
encourages such beliefs as this.  To northward and to westward a half
dozen warning lights--Ile-aux-Galets ("Skilligalee" the lake men call
it), Waugaushance, Beaver, and Fox Islands--gleam spectrally where the
bone-white shingle outcrops above the water, or blur ghostlike in the
haze; on the dark knolls topping the glistening sand bluffs to
northward, Chippewas and Ottawas, a century and a half ago, quarreled
over the prisoners after the massacre at Fort 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.

      *      *      *      *      *

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 was
this frost on the panes of the Fort Dearborn Club--one of the staidest
of the down-town clubs for men--that the great log fires blazing on the
open hearths added appreciable light as well as warmth to the rooms.

The few members present at this hour of the afternoon showed by their
lazy attitudes and the desultoriness of their conversation the dulling
of vitality which warmth and shelter bring on a day of cold and storm.
On one, however, the storm had had a contrary effect.  With swift,
uneven steps he paced now one room, now another; from time to time he
stopped abruptly by a window, scraped from it with finger nail the
frost, stared out for an instant through the little opening he had
made, then resumed as abruptly his nervous pacing with a manner so
uneasy and distraught that, since his arrival at the club an hour
before, none even among those who knew him best had ventured to speak
to him.

There are, in every great city, a few individuals who from their
fullness of experience in an epoch of the city's life come to epitomize
that epoch in the general mind; when one thinks of a city or of a
section of the country in more personal terms than its square miles,
its towering buildings, and its censused millions, one must think of
those individuals.  Almost every great industry owns one and seldom
more than one; that often enough is not, in a money sense, the
predominant figure of his industry; others of his rivals or even of his
partners may be actually more powerful than he; but he is the
personality; he represents to the outsiders the romance and mystery of
the secrets and early, naked adventures of the great achievement.
Thus, to think of the great mercantile establishments of State Street
is to think immediately of one man; another very vivid and picturesque
personality stands for the stockyards; another rises from the wheat
pit; one more from the banks; one from the steel works.  The man who
was pacing restlessly and alone the rooms of the Fort Dearborn Club on
this stormy afternoon was the man who, to most people, bodied forth the
life underlying all other commerce thereabouts but the least known, the
life of the lakes.

The lakes, which mark unmistakably those who get their living from
them, had put their marks on him.  Though he was slight in frame with a
spare, almost ascetic leanness, he had the wiry strength and endurance
of the man whose youth had been passed upon the water.  He was very
close to sixty now, but his thick, straight hair was still jet black
except for a slash of pure white above one temple; his brows were black
above his deep blue eyes.  Unforgettable eyes, they were; they gazed at
one directly with surprising, disconcerting intrusion into one's
thoughts; then, before amazement altered to resentment, one realized
that, though he was still gazing, his eyes were vacant with
speculation--a strange, lonely withdrawal into himself.  His
acquaintances, in explaining him to strangers, said he had lived too
much by himself of late; he and one man servant shared the great house
which had been unchanged--and in which nothing appeared to have been
worn out or have needed replacing--since his wife left him, suddenly
and unaccountably, about twenty years before.  At that time he had
looked much the same as now; since then, the white slash upon his
temple had grown a bit broader perhaps; his nose had become a trifle
aquiline, his chin more sensitive, his well formed hands a little more
slender.  People said he looked more French, referring to his father
who was known to have been a skin-hunter north of Lake Superior in the
50's but who later married an English girl at Mackinac and settled down
to become a trader in the woods of the North Peninsula, where Benjamin
Corvet was born.

During his boyhood, men came to the peninsula to cut timber; young
Corvet worked with them and began building ships.  Thirty-five years
ago, he had been only one of the hundreds with his fortune in the fate
of a single bottom; but to-day in Cleveland, in Duluth, in Chicago,
more than a score of great steamers under the names of various
interdependent companies were owned or controlled by him and his two
partners, Sherrill and young Spearman.

He was a quiet, gentle-mannered man.  At times, however, he suffered
from fits of intense irritability, and these of late had increased in
frequency and violence.  It had been noticed that these outbursts
occurred generally at times of storm upon the lake, but the mere threat
of financial loss through the destruction of one or even more of his
ships was not now enough to cause them; it was believed that they were
the result of some obscure physical reaction to the storm, and that
this had grown upon him as he grew older.

To-day his irritability was so marked, his uneasiness so much greater
than any one had seen it before, that the attendant whom Corvet had
sent, a half hour earlier, to reserve his usual table for him in the
grill--"the table by the second window"--had started away without
daring to ask whether the table was to be set for one or more.  Corvet
himself had corrected the omission: "For two," he had shot after the
man.  Now, as his uneven footsteps carried him to the door of the
grill, and he went in, the steward, who had started forward at sight of
him, suddenly stopped, and the waiter assigned to his table stood
nervously uncertain, not knowing whether to give his customary greeting
or to efface himself as much as possible.

The tables, at this hour, were all unoccupied.  Corvet crossed to the
one he had reserved and sat down; he turned immediately to the window
at his side and scraped on it a little clear opening through which he
could see the storm outside.  Ten minutes later he looked up sharply
but did not rise, as the man he had been awaiting--Spearman, the
younger of his two partners--came in.

Spearman's first words, audible through the big room, made plain that
he was late to an appointment asked by Corvet; his acknowledgment of
this took the form of an apology, but one which, in tone different from
Spearman's usual bluff, hearty manner, seemed almost contemptuous.  He
seated himself, his big, powerful hands clasped on the table, his gray
eyes studying Corvet closely.  As Corvet, without acknowledging the
apology, took the pad and began to write an order for both, Spearman
interfered; he had already lunched; he would take only a cigar.  The
waiter took the order and went away.

When he returned, the two men were obviously in bitter quarrel.
Corvet's tone, low pitched but violent, sounded steadily in the room,
though his words were inaudible.  The waiter, as he set the food upon
the table, felt relief that Corvet's outburst had fallen on other
shoulders than his.

It had fallen, in fact, upon the shoulders best able to bear it.
Spearman--still called, though he was slightly over forty now, "young"
Spearman--was the power in the great ship-owning company of Corvet,
Sherrill, and Spearman.  Corvet had withdrawn, during recent years,
almost entirely from active life; some said the sorrow and
mortification of his wife's leaving him had made him choose more and
more the seclusion of his library in the big lonely house on the North
Shore, and had given Spearman the chance to rise; but those most
intimately acquainted with the affairs of the great ship-owning firm
maintained that Spearman's rise had not been granted him but had been
forced by Spearman himself.  In any case, Spearman was not the one to
accept Corvet's irritation meekly.

For nearly an hour, the quarrel continued with intermitted truces of
silence.  The waiter, listening, as waiters always do, caught at times
single sentences.

"You have had that idea for some time?" he heard from Corvet.

"We have had an understanding for more than a month."

"How definite?"

Spearman's answer was not audible, but it more intensely agitated
Corvet; his lips set; a hand which held his fork clasped and unclasped
nervously; he dropped his fork and, after that, made no pretense of
eating.

The waiter, following this, caught only single words.
"Sherrill"--that, of course, was the other partner.  "Constance"--that
was Sherrill's daughter.  The other names he heard were names of ships.
But, as the quarrel went on, the manners of the two men changed;
Spearman, who at first had been assailed by Corvet, now was assailing
him.  Corvet sat back in his seat, while Spearman pulled at his cigar
and now and then took it from his lips and gestured with it between his
fingers, as he jerked some ejaculation across the table.

Corvet leaned over to the frosted window, as he had done when alone,
and looked out.  Spearman shot a comment which made Corvet wince and
draw back from the window; then Spearman rose.  He delayed, standing,
to light another cigar deliberately and with studied slowness.  Corvet
looked up at him once and asked a question, to which Spearman replied
with a snap of the burnt match down on the table; he turned abruptly
and strode from the room.  Corvet sat motionless.

The revulsion to self-control, sometimes even to apology, which
ordinarily followed Corvet's bursts of irritation had not come to him;
his agitation plainly had increased.  He pushed from him his uneaten
luncheon and got up slowly.  He went out to the coat room, where the
attendant handed him his coat and hat.  He hung the coat upon his arm.
The doorman, acquainted with him for many years, ventured to suggest a
cab.  Corvet, staring strangely at him, shook his head.

"At least, sir," the man urged, "put on your coat."

Corvet ignored him.

He winced as he stepped out into the smarting, blinding swirl of sleet,
but his shrinking was not physical; it was mental, the unconscious
reaction to some thought the storm called up.  The hour was barely four
o'clock, but so dark was it with the storm that the shop windows were
lit; motorcars, slipping and skidding up the broad boulevard, with
headlights burning; kept their signals clattering constantly to warn
other drivers blinded by the snow.  The sleet-swept sidewalks were
almost deserted; here or there, before a hotel or one of the shops, a
limousine came to the curb, and the passengers dashed swiftly across
the walk to shelter.

Corvet, still carrying his coat upon his arm, turned northward along
Michigan Avenue, facing into the gale.  The sleet beat upon his face
and lodged in the folds of his clothing without his heeding it.

Suddenly he aroused.  "One--two--three--four!" he counted the long,
booming blasts of a steam whistle.  A steamer out on that snow-shrouded
lake was in distress.  The sound ceased, and the gale bore in only the
ordinary storm and fog signals.  Corvet recognized the foghorn at the
lighthouse at the end of the government pier; the light, he knew, was
turning white, red, white, red, white behind the curtain of sleet;
other steam vessels, not in distress, blew their blasts; the long four
of the steamer calling for help cut in again.

Corvet stopped, drew up his shoulders, and stood staring out toward the
lake, as the signal blasts of distress boomed and boomed again.  Color
came now into his pale cheeks for an instant.  A siren swelled and
shrieked, died away wailing, shrieked louder and stopped; the four
blasts blew again, and the siren wailed in answer.

A door opened behind Corvet; warm air rushed out, laden with sweet,
heavy odors--chocolate and candy; girls' laughter, exaggerated
exclamations, laughter again came with it; and two girls holding their
muffs before their faces passed by.

"See you to-night, dear."

"Yes; I'll be there--if he comes."

"Oh, he'll come!"

They ran to different limousines, scurried in, and the cars swept off.

Corvet turned about to the tearoom from which they had come; he could
see, as the door opened again, a dozen tables with their white cloths,
shining silver, and steaming little porcelain pots; twenty or thirty
girls and young women were refreshing themselves, pleasantly, after
shopping or fittings or a concert; a few young men were sipping
chocolate with them.  The blast of the distress signal, the scream of
the siren, must have come to them when the door was opened; but, if
they heard it at all, they gave it no attention; the clatter and
laughter and sipping of chocolate and tea was interrupted only by those
who reached quickly for a shopping list or some filmy possession
threatened by the draft.  They were as oblivious to the lake in front
of their windows, to the ship struggling for life in the storm, as
though the snow were a screen which shut them into a distant world.

To Corvet, a lake man for forty years, there was nothing strange in
this.  Twenty miles, from north to south, the city--its business
blocks, its hotels and restaurants, its homes--faced the water and,
except where the piers formed the harbor, all unprotected water, an
open sea where in times of storm ships sank and grounded, men fought
for their lives against the elements and, losing, drowned and died; and
Corvet was well aware that likely enough none of those in that tearoom
or in that whole building knew what four long blasts meant when they
were blown as they were now, or what the siren meant that answered.
But now, as he listened to the blasts which seemed to have grown more
desperate, this profoundly affected Corvet.  He moved once to stop one
of the couples coming from the tearoom.  They hesitated, as he stared
at them; then, when they had passed him, they glanced back.  Corvet
shook himself together and went on.

He continued to go north.  He had not seemed, in the beginning, to have
made conscious choice of this direction; but now he was following it
purposely.  He stopped once at a shop which sold men's things to make a
telephone call.  He asked for Miss Sherrill when the number answered;
but he did not wish to speak to her, he said; he wanted merely to be
sure she would be there if he stopped in to see her in half an hour.
Then--north again.  He crossed the bridge.  Now, fifteen minutes later,
he came in sight of the lake once more.

Great houses, the Sherrill house among them, here face the Drive, the
bridle path, the strip of park, and the wide stone esplanade which
edges the lake.  Corvet crossed to this esplanade.  It was an ice-bank
now; hummocks of snow and ice higher than a man's head shut off view of
the floes tossing and crashing as far out as the blizzard let one see;
but, dislodged and shaken by the buffeting of the floe, they let the
gray water swell up from underneath and wash around his feet as he went
on.  He did not stop at the Sherrill house or look toward it, but went
on fully a quarter of a mile beyond it; then he came back, and with an
oddly strained and queer expression and attitude, he stood staring out
into the lake.  He could not hear the distress signals now.

Suddenly he turned.  Constance Sherrill, seeing him from a window of
her home, had caught a cape about her and run out to him.

"Uncle Benny!" she hailed him with the affectionate name she had used
with her father's partner since she was a baby.  "Uncle Benny, aren't
you coming in?"

"Yes," he said vaguely.  "Yes, of course."  He made no move but
remained staring at her.  "Connie!" he exclaimed suddenly, with strange
reproach to himself in his tone.  "Connie!  Dear little Connie!"

"Why?" she asked him.  "Uncle Benny, what's the matter?"

He seemed to catch himself together.  "There was a ship out there in
trouble," he said in a quite different tone.  "They aren't blowing any
more; are they all right?"

"It was one of the M and D boats--the _Louisiana_, they told me.  She
went by here blowing for help, and I called up the office to find out.
A tug and one other of their line got out to her; she had started a
cylinder head bucking the ice and was taking in a little water.  Uncle
Benny, you must put on your coat."

She brushed the sleet from his shoulders and collar, and held the coat
for him; he put it on obediently.

"Has Spearman been here to-day?" he asked, not looking at her.

"To see father?"

"No; to see you."

"No."

He seized her wrist.  "Don't see him, when he comes!" he commanded.

"Uncle Benny!"

"Don't see him!" Corvet repeated.  "He's asked you to marry him, hasn't
he?"

Connie could not refuse the answer.  "Yes."

"And you?"

"Why--why, Uncle Benny, I haven't answered him yet."

"Then don't--don't; do you understand, Connie?"

She hesitated, frightened for him.  "I'll--I'll tell you before I see
him, if you want me to, Uncle Benny," she granted.

"But if you shouldn't be able to tell me then, Connie; if you
shouldn't--want to then?"  The humility of his look perplexed her; if
he had been any other man--any man except Uncle Benny--she would have
thought some shameful and terrifying threat hung over him; but he broke
off sharply.  "I must go home," he said uncertainly.  "I must go home;
then I'll come back.  Connie, you won't give him an answer till I come
back, will you?"

"No."  He got her promise, half frightened, half bewildered; then he
turned at once and went swiftly away from her.

She ran back to the door of her father's house.  From there she saw him
reach the corner and turn west to go to Astor Street.  He was walking
rapidly and did not hesitate.

The trite truism which relates the inability of human beings to know
the future, has a counterpart not so often mentioned: We do not always
know our own past until the future has made plain what has happened to
us.  Constance Sherrill, at the close of this, the most important day
in her life, did not know at all that it had been important to her.
All she felt was a perplexed, but indefinite uneasiness about Uncle
Benny.  How strangely he had acted!  Her uneasiness increased when the
afternoon and evening passed without his coming back to see her as he
had promised, but she reflected he had not set any definite time when
she was to expect him.  During the night her anxiety grew still
greater; and in the morning she called his house up on the telephone,
but the call was unanswered.  An hour later, she called again; still
getting no result, she called her father at his office, and told him of
her anxiety about Uncle Benny, but without repeating what Uncle Benny
had said to her or the promise she had made to him.  Her father made
light of her fears; Uncle Benny, he reminded her, often acted queerly
in bad weather.  Only partly reassured, she called Uncle Benny's house
several more times during the morning, but still got no reply; and
after luncheon she called her father again, to tell him that she had
resolved to get some one to go over to the house with her.

Her father, to her surprise, forbade this rather sharply; his voice,
she realized, was agitated and excited, and she asked him the reason;
but instead of answering her, he made her repeat to him her
conversation of the afternoon before with Uncle Benny, and now he
questioned her closely about it.  But when she, in her turn, tried to
question him, he merely put her off and told her not to worry.  Later,
when she called him again, resolved to make him tell her what was the
matter, he had left the office.

In the late afternoon, as dusk was drawing into dark, she stood at the
window, watching the storm, which still continued, with one of those
delusive hopes which come during anxiety that, because it was the time
of day at which she had seen Uncle Benny walking by the lake the day
before, she might see him there again, when she saw her father's motor
approaching.  It was coming from the north, not from the south as it
would have been if he was coming from his office or his club, and it
had turned into the drive from the west.  She knew, therefore, that he
was coming from Uncle Benny's house, and, as the car swerved and
wheeled in, she ran out into the hall to meet him.

He came in without taking off hat or coat; she could see that he was
perturbed, greatly agitated.

"What is it, father?" she demanded.  "What has happened?"

"I do not know, my dear."

"It is something--something that has happened to Uncle Benny?"

"I am afraid so, dear--yes.  But I do not know what it is that has
happened, or I would tell you."

He put his arm about her and drew her into a room opening off the
hall--his study.  He made her repeat again to him the conversation she
had had with Uncle Benny and tell him how he had acted; but she saw
that what she told him did not help him.  He seemed to consider it
carefully, but in the end to discard or disregard it.

Then he drew her toward him.

"Tell me, little daughter.  You have been a great deal with Uncle Benny
and have talked with him; I want you to think carefully.  Did you ever
hear him speak of any one called Alan Conrad?"

She thought.  "No, father."

"No reference ever made by him at all to either name--Alan or Conrad?"

"No, father."

"No reference either to any one living in Kansas, or to a town there
called Blue Rapids?"

"No, father.  Who is Alan Conrad?"

"I do not know, dear.  I never heard the name until to-day, and Henry
Spearman had never heard it.  But it appears to be intimately connected
in some way with what was troubling Uncle Benny yesterday.  He wrote a
letter yesterday to Alan Conrad in Blue Rapids and mailed it himself;
and afterward he tried to get it back, but it already had been taken up
and was on its way.  I have not been able to learn anything more about
the letter than that.  He seems to have been excited and troubled all
day; he talked queerly to you, and he quarreled with Henry, but
apparently not about anything of importance.  And to-day that name,
Alan Conrad, came to me in quite another way, in a way which makes it
certain that it is closely connected with whatever has happened to
Uncle Benny.  You are quite sure you never heard him mention it, dear?"

"Quite sure, father."

He released her and, still in his hat and coat, went swiftly up the
stairs.  She ran after him and found him standing before a highboy in
his dressing room.  He unlocked a drawer in the highboy, and from
within the drawer he took a key.  Then, still disregarding her, he
hurried back down-stairs.

As she followed him, she caught up a wrap and pulled it around her.  He
had told the motor, she realized now, to wait; but as he reached the
door, he turned and stopped her.

"I would rather you did not come with me, little daughter.  I do not
know at all what it is that has happened--I will let you know as soon
as I find out."

The finality in his tone stopped her from argument.  As the house door
and then the door of the limousine closed after him, she went back
toward the window, slowly taking off the wrap.  She saw the motor shoot
swiftly out upon the drive, turn northward in the way that it had come,
and then turn again, and disappear.  She could only stand and watch for
it to come back and listen for the 'phone; for the moment she found it
difficult to think.  Something had happened to Uncle Benny, something
terrible, dreadful for those who loved him; that was plain, though only
the fact and not its nature was known to her or to her father; and that
something was connected--intimately connected, her father had
said--with a name which no one who knew Uncle Benny, ever had heard
before, with the name of Alan Conrad of Blue Rapids, Kansas.  Who was
this Alan Conrad, and what could his connection be with Uncle Benny so
to precipitate disaster upon him?




CHAPTER II

WHO IS ALAN CONRAD?

The recipient of the letter which Benjamin Corvet had written and later
so excitedly attempted to recover, was asking himself a question which
was almost the same as the question which Constance Sherrill had asked.
He was, the second morning later, waiting for the first of the two
daily eastbound trains which stopped at the little Kansas town of Blue
Rapids which he called home.  As long as he could look back into his
life, the question, who is this person they call Alan Conrad, and what
am I to the man who writes from Chicago, had been the paramount enigma
of existence for him.  Since he was now twenty-three, as nearly as he
had been able to approximate it, and as distinct recollection of
isolated, extraordinary events went back to the time when he was five,
it was quite eighteen years since he had first noticed the question put
to the people who had him in charge: "So this is little Alan Conrad.
Who is he?"

Undoubtedly the question had been asked in his presence before;
certainly it was asked many times afterwards; but it was since that day
when, on his noticing the absence of a birthday of his own, they had
told him he was five, that he connected the evasion of the answer with
the difference between himself and the other children he saw, and
particularly between himself and the boy and girl in the same house
with him.  When visitors came from somewhere far off, no one of them
ever looked surprised at seeing the other children or asked about them.
Always, when some one came, it was, "So this is little Jim!" and "This
is Betty; she's more of a Welton every day!"  Then, each time with that
change in the voice and in the look of the eyes and in the feel of the
arms about him--for though Alan could not feel how the arms hugged Jim
and Betty, he knew that for him it was quite different--"So this is
Alan Conrad," or, "So this is the child!" or, "This, I suppose, is the
boy I've heard about!"

However, there was a quite definite, if puzzling, advantage at times in
being Alan Conrad.  Following the arrival of certain letters, which
were distinguished from most others arriving at the house by having no
ink writing on the envelope but just a sort of purple or black printing
like newspapers, Alan invariably received a dollar to spend just as he
liked.  To be sure, unless "papa" took him to town, there was nothing
for him to spend it upon; so, likely enough, it went into the square
iron bank, of which the key was lost; but quite often he did spend it
according to plans agreed upon among all his friends and, in memory of
these occasions and in anticipation of the next, "Alan's dollar" became
a community institution among the children.

But exhilarating and wonderful as it was to be able of one's self to
take three friends to the circus, or to be the purveyor of twenty whole
packages--not sticks--of gum, yet the dollar really made only more
plain the boy's difference.  The regularity and certainty of its
arrival as Alan's share of some larger sum of money which came to
"papa" in the letter, never served to make the event ordinary or
accepted.

"Who gives it to you, Alan?" was a question more often asked, as time
went on.  The only answer Alan could give was, "It comes from Chicago."
The postmark on the envelope, Alan noticed, was always Chicago; that
was all he ever could find out about his dollar.  He was about ten
years old when, for a reason as inexplicable as the dollar's coming,
the letters with the typewritten addresses and the enclosed money
ceased.

Except for the loss of the dollar at the end of every second month--a
loss much discussed by all the children and not accepted as permanent
till more than two years had passed--Alan felt no immediate results
from the cessation of the letters from Chicago; and when the first
effects appeared, Jim and Betty felt them quite as much as he.  Papa
and mamma felt them, too, when the farm had to be given up, and the
family moved to the town, and papa went to work in the woolen mill
beside the river.

Papa and mamma, at first surprised and dismayed by the stopping of the
letters, still clung to the hope of the familiar, typewritten addressed
envelope appearing again; but when, after two years, no more money
came, resentment which had been steadily growing against the person who
had sent the money began to turn against Alan; and his "parents" told
him all they knew about him.

In 1896 they had noticed an advertisement for persons to care for a
child; they had answered it to the office of the newspaper which
printed it.  In response to their letter a man called upon them and,
after seeing them and going around to see their friends, had made
arrangements with them to take a boy of three, who was in good health
and came of good people.  He paid in advance board for a year and
agreed to send a certain amount every two months after that time.  The
man brought the boy, whom he called Alan Conrad, and left him.  For
seven years the money agreed upon came; now it had ceased, and papa had
no way of finding the man--the name given by him appeared to be
fictitious, and he had left no address except "general delivery,
Chicago"--Papa knew nothing more than that.  He had advertised in the
Chicago papers after the money stopped coming, and he had communicated
with every one named Conrad in or near Chicago, but he had learned
nothing.  Thus, at the age of thirteen, Alan definitely knew that what
he already had guessed--the fact that he belonged somewhere else than
in the little brown house--was all that any one there could tell him;
and the knowledge gave persistence to many internal questionings.
Where did he belong?  Who was he?  Who was the man who had brought him
here?  Had the money ceased coming because the person who sent it was
dead?  In that case, connection of Alan with the place where he
belonged was permanently broken.  Or would some other communication
from that source reach him some time--if not money, then something
else?  Would he be sent for some day?  He did not resent "papa and
mamma's" new attitude of benefactors toward him; instead, loving them
both because he had no one else to love, he sympathized with it.  They
had struggled hard to keep the farm.  They had ambitions for Jim; they
were scrimping and sparing now so that Jim could go to college, and
whatever was given to Alan was taken away from Jim and diminished by
just that much his opportunity.

But when Alan asked papa to get him a job in the woolen mill at the
other side of town where papa himself worked in some humble and
indefinite capacity, the request was refused.  Thus, externally at
least, Alan's learning the little that was known about himself made no
change in his way of living; he went, as did Jim, to the town school,
which combined grammar and high schools under one roof; and, as he grew
older, he clerked--as Jim also did--in one of the town stores during
vacations and in the evenings; the only difference was this: that Jim's
money, so earned, was his own, but Alan carried his home as part
payment of those arrears which had mounted up against him since the
letters ceased coming.  At seventeen, having finished high school, he
was clerking officially in Merrill's general store, when the next
letter came.

It was addressed this time not to papa, but to Alan Conrad.  He seized
it, tore it open, and a bank draft for fifteen hundred dollars fell
out.  There was no letter with the enclosure, no word of communication;
just the draft to the order of Alan Conrad.  Alan wrote the Chicago
bank by which the draft had been issued; their reply showed that the
draft had been purchased with currency, so there was no record of the
identity of the person who had sent it.  More than that amount was due
for arrears for the seven years during which no money was sent, even
when the total which Alan had earned was deducted.  So Alan merely
endorsed the draft over to "father"; and that fall Jim went to college.
But, when Jim discovered that it not only was possible but planned at
the university for a boy to work his way through, Alan went also.

Four wonderful years followed.  The family of a professor of physics,
with whom he was brought in contact by his work outside of college,
liked him and "took him up."  He lodged finally in their house and
became one of them.  In companionship with these educated people, ideas
and manners came to him which he could not have acquired at home;
athletics straightened and added bearing to his muscular, well-formed
body; his pleasant, strong young face acquired self-reliance and
self-control.  Life became filled with possibilities for himself which
it had never held before.

But on his day of graduation he had to put away the enterprises he had
planned and the dreams he dreamed and, conscious that his debt to
father and mother still remained unpaid, he had returned to care for
them; for father's health had failed and Jim who had opened a law
office in Kansas City, could do nothing to help.

No more money had followed the draft from Chicago and there had been no
communication of any kind; but the receipt of so considerable a sum had
revived and intensified all Alan's speculations about himself.  The
vague expectation of his childhood that sometime, in some way, he would
be "sent for" had grown during the last six years to a definite belief.
And now--on the afternoon before--the summons had come.

This time, as he tore open the envelope, he saw that besides a check,
there was writing within--an uneven and nervous-looking but plainly
legible communication in longhand.  The letter made no explanation.  It
told him, rather than asked him, to come to Chicago, gave minute
instructions for the journey, and advised him to telegraph when he
started.  The check was for a hundred dollars to pay his expenses.
Check and letter were signed by a name completely strange to him.

He was a distinctly attractive looking lad, as he stood now on the
station platform of the little town, while the eastbound train rumbled
in, and he fingered in his pocket the letter from Chicago.

As the train came to a stop, he pushed his suitcase up on to a car
platform and stood on the bottom step, looking back at the little town
standing away from its railroad station among brown, treeless hills,
now scantily snow-covered--the town which was the only home he ever
consciously had known.  His eyes dampened and he choked, as he looked
at it and at the people on the station platform--the station-master,
the drayman, the man from the post office who would receive the mail
bag, people who called him by his first name, as he called them by
theirs.  He did not doubt at all that he would see the town and them
again.  The question was what he would be when he did see them.  They
and it would not be changed, but he would.  As the train started, he
picked up the suitcase and carried it into the second day-coach.

Finding a seat, at once he took the letter from his pocket and for the
dozenth time reread it.  Was Corvet a relative?  Was he the man who had
sent the remittances when Alan was a little boy, and the one who later
had sent the fifteen hundred dollars?  Or was he merely a go-between,
perhaps a lawyer?  There was no letterhead to give aid in these
speculations.  The address to which Alan was to come was in Astor
Street.  He had never heard the name of the street before.  Was it a
business street, Corvet's address in some great office building,
perhaps?

He tried by repeating both names over and over to himself to arouse any
obscure, obliterated childhood memory he might have had of then; but
the repetition brought no result.  Memory, when he stretched it back to
its furthest, showed him only the Kansas prairie.

Late that afternoon he reached Kansas City, designated in the letter as
the point where he would change cars.  That night saw him in his
train--a transcontinental with berths nearly all made up and people
sleeping behind the curtains.  Alan undressed and got into his berth,
but he lay awake most of the night, excited and expectant.  The late
February dawn showed him the rolling lands of Iowa which changed, while
he was at breakfast in the dining car, to the snow-covered fields and
farms of northern Illinois.  Toward noon, he could see, as the train
rounded curves, that the horizon to the east had taken on a murky look.
Vast, vague, the shadow--the emanation of hundreds of thousands of
chimneys--thickened and grew more definite as the train sped on;
suburban villages began supplanting country towns; stations became more
pretentious.  They passed factories; then hundreds of acres of little
houses of the factory workers in long rows; swiftly the buildings
became larger, closer together; he had a vision of miles upon miles of
streets, and the train rolled slowly into a long trainshed and stopped.

Alan, following the porter with his suitcase from the car, stepped down
among the crowds hurrying to and from the trains.  He was not confused,
he was only intensely excited.  Acting in implicit accord with the
instructions of the letter, which he knew by heart, he went to the
uniformed attendant and engaged a taxicab--itself no small experience;
there would be no one at the station to meet him, the letter had said.
He gave the Astor Street address and got into the cab.  Leaning forward
in his seat, looking to the right and then to the left as he was driven
through the city, his first sensation was only disappointment.

Except that it was larger, with more and bigger buildings and with more
people upon its streets, Chicago apparently did not differ from Kansas
City.  If it was, in reality, the city of his birth, or if ever he had
seen these streets before, they now aroused no memories in him.

It had begun to snow again.  For a few blocks the taxicab drove north
past more or less ordinary buildings, then turned east on a broad
boulevard where tall tile and brick and stone structures towered till
their roofs were hidden in the snowfall.  The large, light flakes,
falling lazily, were thick enough so that, when the taxicab swung to
the north again, there seemed to Alan only a great vague void to his
right.  For the hundred yards which he could view clearly, the space
appeared to be a park; now a huge granite building, guarded by stone
lions, went by; then more park; but beyond--  A strange stir and
tingle, quite distinct from the excitement of the arrival at the
station, pricked in Alan's veins, and hastily he dropped the window to
his right and gazed out again.  The lake, as he had known since his
geography days, lay to the east of Chicago; therefore that void out
there beyond the park was the lake or, at least, the harbor.  A
different air seemed to come from it; sounds...  Suddenly it all was
shut off; the taxicab, swerving a little, was dashing between business
blocks; a row of buildings had risen again upon the right; they broke
abruptly to show him a wooden-walled chasm in which flowed a river full
of ice with a tug dropping its smokestack as it went below the bridge
which the cab crossed; buildings on both sides again; then, to the
right, a roaring, heaving, crashing expanse.

The sound, Alan knew, had been coming to him as an undertone for many
minutes; now it overwhelmed, swallowed all other sound.  It was great,
not loud; all sound which Alan had heard before, except the soughing of
the wind over his prairies, came from one point; even the monstrous
city murmur was centered in comparison with this.  Alan could see only
a few hundred yards out over the water as the taxicab ran along the
lake drive, but what was before him was the surf of a sea; that
constant, never diminishing, never increasing roar came from far beyond
the shore; the surge and rise and fall and surge again were of a sea in
motion.  Floes floated, tossed up, tumbled, broke, and rose again with
the rush of the surf; spray flew up between the floes; geysers spurted
high into the air as the pressure of the water, bearing up against the
ice, burst between two great ice-cakes before the waves cracked them
and tumbled them over.  And all was without wind; over the lake, as
over the land, the soft snowflakes lazily floated down, scarcely
stirred by the slightest breeze; that roar was the voice of the water,
that awful power its own.

Alan choked and gasped for breath, his pulses pounding in his throat;
he had snatched off his hat and, leaning out of the window sucked the
lake air into his lungs.  There had been nothing to make him expect
this overwhelming crush of feeling.  The lake--he had thought of it, of
course, as a great body of water, an interesting sight for a prairie
boy to see; that was all.  No physical experience in all his memory had
affected him like this; and it was without warning; the strange thing
that had stirred within him as the car brought him to the drive
down-town was strengthened now a thousand-fold; it amazed, half
frightened, half dizzied him.  Now, as the motor suddenly swung around
a corner and shut the sight of the lake from him, Alan sat back
breathless.

"Astor Street," he read the marker on the corner a block back from the
lake, and he bent quickly forward to look, as the car swung to the
right into Astor Street.  It was--as in this neighborhood it must be--a
residence street of handsome mansions built close together.  The car
swerved to the east curb about the middle of the block and came to a
stop.  The house before which it had halted was a large stone house of
quiet, good design; it was some generation older, apparently, than the
houses on each side of it which were brick and terra cotta of recent,
fashionable architecture; Alan only glanced at them long enough to get
that impression before he opened the cab door and got out; but as the
cab drove away, he stood beside his suitcase looking up at the old
house which bore the number given in Benjamin Corvet's letter, then
around at the other houses and back to that again.

The neighborhood obviously precluded the probability of Corvet's being
merely a lawyer--a go-between.  He must be some relative; the question
ever present in Alan's thought since the receipt of the letter, but
held in abeyance, as to the possibility and nearness of Corvet's
relation to him, took sharper and more exact form now than he had dared
to let it take before.  Was his relationship to Corvet, perhaps, the
closest of all relationships?  Was Corvet his ... father?  He checked
the question within himself, for the time had passed for mere
speculation upon it now.  Alan was trembling excitedly; for--whoever
Corvet might be--the enigma of Alan's existence was going to be
answered when he had entered that house.  He was going to know who he
was.  All the possibilities, the responsibilities, the attachments, the
opportunities, perhaps, of that person whom he was--but whom, as yet,
he did not know--were before him.

He half expected the heavy, glassless door at the top of the stone
steps to be opened by some one coming out to greet him, as he took up
his suitcase; but the gray house, like the brighter mansions on both
sides of it, remained impassive.  If any one in that house had observed
his coming, no sign was given.  He went up the steps and, with fingers
excitedly unsteady, he pushed the bell beside the door.

The door opened almost instantly--so quickly after the ring, indeed,
that Alan, with leaping throb of his heart, knew that some one must
have been awaiting him.  But the door opened only halfway, and the man
who stood within, gazing out at Alan questioningly, was obviously a
servant.

"What is it?" he asked, as Alan stood looking at him and past him to
the narrow section of darkened hall which was in sight.

Alan put his hand over the letter in his pocket.  "I've come to see Mr.
Corvet," he said--"Mr. Benjamin Corvet."

"What is your name?"

Alan gave his name; the man repeated it after him, in the manner of a
trained servant, quite without inflection.  Alan, not familiar with
such tones, waited uncertainly.  So far as he could tell, the name was
entirely strange to the servant, awaking neither welcome nor
opposition, but indifference.  The man stepped back, but not in such a
manner as to invite Alan in; on the contrary, he half closed the door
as he stepped back, leaving it open only an inch or two; but it was
enough so that Alan heard him say to some one within:

"He says he's him."

"Ask him in; I will speak to him."  It was a girl's voice--this second
one, a voice such as Alan never had heard before.  It was low and soft
but quite clear and distinct, with youthful, impulsive modulations and
the manner of accent which Alan knew must go with the sort of people
who lived in houses like those on this street.

The servant, obeying the voice, returned and opened wide the door.

"Will you come in, sir?"

Alan put down his suitcase on the stone porch; the man made no move to
pick it up and bring it in.  Then Alan stepped into the hall face to
face with the girl who had come from the big room on the right.

She was quite a young girl--not over twenty-one or twenty-two, Alan
judged; like girls brought up in wealthy families, she seemed to Alan
to have gained young womanhood in far greater degree in some respects
than the girls he knew, while, at the same time, in other ways, she
retained more than they some characteristics of a child.  Her slender
figure had a woman's assurance and grace; her soft brown hair was
dressed like a woman's; her gray eyes had the open directness of the
girl.  Her face--smoothly oval, with straight brows and a skin so
delicate that at the temples the veins showed dimly blue--was at once
womanly and youthful; and there was something altogether likable and
simple about her, as she studied Alan now.  She had on a street dress
and hat; whether it was this, or whether it was the contrast of her
youth and vitality with this somber, darkened house that told him, Alan
could not tell, but he felt instinctively that this house was not her
home.  More likely, it was some indefinable, yet convincing expression
of her manner that gave him that impression.  While he hazarded, with
fast beating heart, what privilege of acquaintance with her Alan Conrad
might have, she moved a little nearer to him.  She was slightly pale,
he noticed now, and there were lines of strain and trouble about her
eyes.

"I am Constance Sherrill," she announced.  Her tone implied quite
evidently that she expected him to have some knowledge of her, and she
seemed surprised to see that her name did not mean more to him.

"Mr. Corvet is not here this morning," she said.

He hesitated, but persisted: "I was to see him here to-day, Miss
Sherrill.  He wrote me, and I telegraphed him I would be here to-day."

"I know," she answered.  "We had your telegram.  Mr. Corvet was not
here when it came, so my father opened it."  Her voice broke oddly, and
he studied her in indecision, wondering who that father might be that
opened Mr. Corvet's telegrams.

"Mr. Corvet went away very suddenly," she explained.  She seemed, he
thought, to be trying to make something plain to him which might be a
shock to him; yet herself to be uncertain what the nature of that shock
might be.  Her look was scrutinizing, questioning, anxious, but not
unfriendly.  "After he had written you and something else had
happened--I think--to alarm my father about him, father came here to
his house to look after him.  He thought something might have ...
happened to Mr. Corvet here in his house.  But Mr. Corvet was not here."

"You mean he has--disappeared?"

"Yes; he has disappeared."

Alan gazed at her dizzily.  Benjamin Corvet--whoever he might be--had
disappeared; he had gone.  Did any one else, then, know about Alan
Conrad?

"No one has seen Mr. Corvet," she said, "since the day he wrote to you.
We know that--that he became so disturbed after doing that--writing to
you--that we thought you must bring with you information of him."

"Information!"

"So we have been waiting for you to come here and tell us what you know
about him or--or your connection with him."




CHAPTER III

DISCUSSION OF A SHADOW

Alan, as he looked confusedly and blankly at her, made no attempt to
answer the question she had asked, or to explain.  For the moment, as
he fought to realize what she had said and its meaning for himself, all
his thought was lost in mere dismay, in the denial and checking of what
he had been feeling as he entered the house.  His silence and
confusion, he knew, must seem to Constance Sherrill unwillingness to
answer her; for she did not suspect that he was unable to answer her.
She plainly took it in that way; but she did not seem offended; it was
sympathy, rather, that she showed.  She seemed to appreciate, without
understanding except through her feelings, that--for some
reason--answer was difficult and dismaying for him.

"You would rather explain to father than to me," she decided.

He hesitated.  What he wanted now was time to think, to learn who she
was and who her father was, and to adjust himself to this strange
reversal of his expectations.

"Yes; I would rather do that," he said.

"Will you come around to our house, then, please?"

She caught up her fur collar and muff from a chair and spoke a word to
the servant.  As she went out on to the porch, he followed her and
stooped to pick up his suitcase.

"Simons will bring that," she said, "unless you'd rather have it with
you.  It is only a short walk."

He was recovering from the first shock of her question now, and,
reflecting that men who accompanied Constance Sherrill probably did not
carry hand baggage, he put the suitcase down and followed her to the
walk.  As she turned north and he caught step beside her, he studied
her with quick interested glances, realizing her difference from all
other girls he ever had walked with, but he did not speak to her nor
she to him.  Turning east at the first corner, they came within sight
and hearing again of the turmoil of the lake.

"We go south here," she said at the corner of the Drive.  "Our house is
almost back to back with Mr. Corvet's."

Alan, looking up after he had made the turn with her, recognized the
block as one he had seen pictured sometimes in magazines and
illustrated papers as a "row" of the city's most beautiful homes.
Larger, handsomer, and finer than the mansions on Astor Street, each
had its lawn or terrace in front and on both sides, where snow-mantled
shrubs and straw-bound rosebushes suggested the gardens of spring.
They turned in at the entrance of a house in the middle of the block
and went up the low, wide stone steps; the door opened to them without
ring or knock; a servant in the hall within took Alan's hat and coat,
and he followed Constance past some great room upon his right to a
smaller one farther down the hall.

"Will you wait here, please?" she asked.

He sat down, and she left him; when her footsteps had died away, and he
could hear no other sounds except the occasional soft tread of some
servant, he twisted himself about in his chair and looked around.  A
door between the room he was in and the large room which had been upon
his right as they came in--a drawing-room--stood open; he could see
into the drawing-room, and he could see through the other door a
portion of the hall; his inspection of these increased the bewilderment
he felt.  Who were these Sherrills?  Who was Corvet, and what was his
relation to the Sherrills?  What, beyond all, was their and Corvet's
relation to Alan Conrad--to himself?  The shock and confusion he had
felt at the nature of his reception in Corvet's house, and the
strangeness of his transition from his little Kansas town to a place
and people such as this, had prevented him from inquiring directly from
Constance Sherrill as to that; and, on her part, she had assumed,
plainly, that he already knew and need not be told.

He got up and moved about the rooms; they, like all rooms, must tell
something about the people who lived in them.  The rooms were large and
open; Alan, in dreaming and fancying to himself the places to which he
might some day be summoned, had never dreamed of entering such a home
as this.  For it was a home; in its light and in its furnishings there
was nothing of the stiffness and aloofness which Alan, never having
seen such rooms except in pictures, had imagined to be necessary evils
accompanying riches and luxury; it was not the richness of its
furnishings that impressed him first, it was its livableness.  Among
the more modern pieces in the drawing-room and hall were some which
were antique.  In the part of the hall that he could see, a black and
ancient-looking chair whose lines he recognized, stood against the
wall.  He had seen chairs like that, heirlooms of colonial
Massachusetts or Connecticut, cherished in Kansas farmhouses and
recalling some long-past exodus of the family from New England.  On the
wall of the drawing-room, among the beautiful and elusive paintings and
etchings, was a picture of a ship, plainly framed; he moved closer to
look at it, but he did not know what kind of ship it was except that it
was a sailing ship of some long-disused design.  Then he drew back
again into the smaller room where he had been left, and sat down again
to wait.

A comfortable fire of cannel coal was burning in this smaller room in a
black fire-basket set in a white marble grate, obviously much older
than the house; there were big easy leather chairs before it, and
beside it there were bookcases.  On one of these stood a two-handled
silver trophy cup, and hung high upon the wall above the mantel was a
long racing sweep with the date '85 painted in black across the blade.
He had the feeling, coming quite unconsciously, of liking the people
who lived in this handsome house.

He straightened and looked about, then got up, as Constance Sherrill
came back into the room.

"Father is not here just now," she said.  "We weren't sure from your
telegram exactly at what hour you would arrive, and that was why I
waited at Mr. Corvet's to be sure we wouldn't miss you.  I have
telephoned father, and he's coming home at once."

She hesitated an instant in the doorway, then turned to go out again.

"Miss Sherrill--" he said.

She halted.  "Yes."

"You told me you had been waiting for me to come and explain my
connection with Mr. Corvet.  Well--I can't do that; that is what I came
here hoping to find out."

She came back toward him slowly.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

He was forcing himself to disregard the strangeness which his
surroundings and all that had happened in the last half hour had made
him feel; leaning his arms on the back of the chair in which he had
been sitting, he managed to smile reassuringly; and he fought down and
controlled resolutely the excitement in his voice, as he told her
rapidly the little he knew about himself.

He could not tell definitely how she was affected by what he said.  She
flushed slightly, following her first start of surprise after he had
begun to speak; when he had finished, he saw that she was a little pale.

"Then you don't know anything about Mr. Corvet at all," she said.

"No; until I got his letter sending for me here, I'd never seen or
heard his name."

She was thoughtful for a moment.

"Thank you for telling me," she said.  "I'll tell my father when he
comes."

"Your father is--?" he ventured.

She understood now that the name of Sherrill had meant nothing to him.
"Father is Mr. Corvet's closest friend, and his business partner as
well," she explained.

He thought she was going to tell him something more about them; but she
seemed then to decide to leave that for her father to do.  She crossed
to the big chair beside the grate and seated herself.  As she sat
looking at him, hands clasped beneath her chin, and her elbows resting
on the arm of the chair, there was speculation and interest in her
gaze; but she did not ask him anything more about himself.  She
inquired about the Kansas weather that week in comparison with the
storm which had just ceased in Chicago, and about Blue Rapids, which
she said she had looked up upon the map, and he took this chat for what
it was--notification that she did not wish to continue the other topic
just then.

She, he saw, was listening, like himself, for the sound of Sherrill's
arrival at the house; and when it came, she recognized it first, rose,
and excused herself.  He heard her voice in the hall, then her father's
deeper voice which answered; and ten minutes later, he looked up to see
the man these things had told him must be Sherrill standing in the door
and looking at him.

He was a tall man, sparely built; his broad shoulders had been those of
an athlete in his youth; now, at something over fifty, they had taken
on a slight, rather studious stoop, and his brown hair had thinned upon
his forehead.  His eyes, gray like his daughter's, were thoughtful
eyes; just now deep trouble filled them.  His look and bearing of a
refined and educated gentleman took away all chance of offense from the
long, inquiring scrutiny to which he subjected Alan's features and
figure before he came into the room.

Alan had risen at sight of him; Sherrill, as he came in, motioned him
back to his seat; he did not sit down himself, but crossed to the
mantel and leaned against it.

"I am Lawrence Sherrill," he said.

As the tall, graceful, thoughtful man stood looking down at him, Alan
could tell nothing of the attitude of this friend of Benjamin Corvet
toward himself.  His manner had the same reserve toward Alan, the same
questioning consideration of him, that Constance Sherrill had had after
Alan had told her about himself.

"My daughter has repeated to me what you told her, Mr. Conrad,"
Sherrill observed.  "Is there anything you want to add to me regarding
that?"

"There's nothing I can add," Alan answered.  "I told her all that I
know about myself."

"And about Mr. Corvet?"

"I know nothing at all about Mr. Corvet."

"I am going to tell you some things about Mr. Corvet," Sherrill said.
"I had reason--I do not want to explain just yet what that reason
was--for thinking you could tell us certain things about Mr. Corvet,
which would, perhaps, make plainer what has happened to him.  When I
tell you about him now, it is in the hope that, in that way, I may
awake some forgotten memory of him in you; if not that, you may
discover some coincidences of dates or events in Corvet's life with
dates or events in your own.  Will you tell me frankly, if you do
discover anything like that?"

"Yes; certainly."

Alan leaned forward in the big chair, hands clasped between his knees,
his blood tingling sharply in his face and fingertips.  So Sherrill
expected to make him remember Corvet!  There was strange excitement in
this, and he waited eagerly for Sherrill to begin.  For several
moments, Sherrill paced up and down before the fire; then he returned
to his place before the mantel.

"I first met Benjamin Corvet," he commenced, "nearly thirty years ago.
I had come West for the first time the year before; I was about your
own age and had been graduated from college only a short time, and a
business opening had offered itself here.

"There was a sentimental reason--I think I must call it that--as well,
for my coming to Chicago.  Until my generation, the property of our
family had always been largely--and generally exclusively--in ships.
It is a Salem family; a Sherrill was a sea-captain, living in Salem,
they say, when his neighbors--and he, I suppose--hanged witches; we had
privateers in 1812 and our clippers went round the Horn in '49.  The
_Alabama_ ended our ships in '63, as it ended practically the rest of
the American shipping on the Atlantic; and in '73, when our part of the
_Alabama_ claims was paid us, my mother put it in bonds waiting for me
to grow up.

"Sentiment, when I came of age, made me want to put this money back
into ships flying the American flag; but there was small chance of
putting it--and keeping it, with profit--in American ships on the sea.
In Boston and New York, I had seen the foreign flags on the deep-water
ships--British, German, French, Norwegian, Swedish, and Greek; our flag
flew mostly on ferries and excursion steamers.  But times were booming
on the great lakes.  Chicago, which had more than recovered from the
fire, was doubling its population every decade; Cleveland, Duluth, and
Milwaukee were leaping up as ports.  Men were growing millions of
bushels of grain which they couldn't ship except by lake; hundreds of
thousands of tons of ore had to go by water; and there were tens of
millions of feet of pine and hardwood from the Michigan forests.
Sailing vessels such as the Sherrills had always operated, it is true,
had seen their day and were disappearing from the lakes; were being
'sold,' many of them, as the saying is, 'to the insurance companies' by
deliberate wrecking.  Steamers were taking their place.  Towing had
come in.  The first of the whalebacks was built about that time, and we
began to see those processions of a barge and two, three, or four tows
which the lakemen called 'the sow and her pigs.'  Men of all sorts had
come forward, of course, and, serving the situation more or less
accidentally, were making themselves rich.

"It was railroading which had brought me West; but I had brought with
me the _Alabama_ money to put into ships.  I have called it sentiment,
but it was not merely that; I felt, young man though I was, that this
transportation matter was all one thing, and that in the end the
railroads would own the ships.  I have never engaged very actively in
the operation of the ships; my daughter would like me to be more active
in it than I have been; but ever since, I have had money in lake
vessels.  It was the year that I began that sort of investment that I
first met Corvet."

Alan looked up quickly.  "Mr. Corvet was--?" he asked.

"Corvet was--is a lakeman," Sherrill said.

Alan sat motionless, as he recollected the strange exaltation that had
come to him when he saw the lake for the first time.  Should he tell
Sherrill of that?  He decided it was too vague, too indefinite to be
mentioned; no doubt any other man used only to the prairie might have
felt the same.

"He was a ship owner, then," he said.

"Yes; he was a shipowner--not, however, on a large scale at that time.
He had been a master, sailing ships which belonged to others; then he
had sailed one of his own.  He was operating then, I believe, two
vessels; but with the boom times on the lakes, his interests were
beginning to expand.  I met him frequently in the next few years, and
we became close friends."

Sherrill broke off and stared an instant down at the rug.  Alan bent
forward; he made no interruption but only watched Sherrill attentively.

"It was one of the great advantages of the West, I think--and
particularly of Chicago at that time--that it gave opportunity for
friendships of that sort," Sherrill said.  "Corvet was a man of a sort
I would have been far less likely ever to have known intimately in the
East.  He was both what the lakes had made him and what he had made of
himself; a great reader--wholly self-educated; he had, I think, many of
the attributes of a great man--at least, they were those of a man who
should have become great; he had imagination and vision.  His whole
thought and effort, at that time, were absorbed in furthering and
developing the traffic on the lakes, and not at all from mere desire
for personal success.  I met him for the first time one day when I went
to his office on some business.  He had just opened an office at that
time in one of the old ramshackle rows along the river front; there was
nothing at all pretentious about it--the contrary, in fact; but as I
went in and waited with the others who were there to see him, I had the
sense of being in the ante-room of a great man.  I do not mean there
was any idiotic pomp or lackyism or red tape about it; I mean that the
others who were waiting to see him, and who knew him, were keyed up by
the anticipation and keyed me up....

"I saw as much as I could of him after that, and our friendship became
very close.

"In 1892, when I married and took my residence here on the lake
shore--the house stood where this one stands now--Corvet bought the
house on Astor Street.  His only reason for doing it was, I believe,
his desire to be near me.  The neighborhood was what they call
fashionable; neither Corvet nor Mrs. Corvet--he had married in
1889--had social ambitions of that sort.  Mrs. Corvet came from
Detroit; she was of good family there--a strain of French blood in the
family; she was a schoolteacher when he married her, and she had made a
wonderful wife for him--a good woman, a woman of very high ideals; it
was great grief to both of them that they had no children.

"Between 1886, when I first met him, and 1895, Corvet laid the
foundation of great success; his boats seemed lucky, men liked to work
for him, and he got the best skippers and crews.  A Corvet captain
boasted of it and, if he had had bad luck on another line, believed his
luck changed when he took a Corvet ship; cargoes in Corvet bottoms
somehow always reached port; there was a saying that in storm a Corvet
ship never asked help; it gave it; certainly in twenty years no Corvet
ship had suffered serious disaster.  Corvet was not yet rich, but
unless accident or undue competition intervened, he was certain to
become so.  Then something happened."

Sherrill looked away at evident loss how to describe it.

"To the ships?" Alan asked him.

"No; to him.  In 1896, for no apparent reason, a great change came over
him."

"In 1896!"

"That was the year."

Alan bent forward, his heart throbbing in his throat.  "That was also
the year when I was brought and left with the Weltons in Kansas," he
said.

Sherrill did not speak for a moment.  "I thought," he said finally, "it
must have been about that time; but you did not tell my daughter the
exact date."

"What kind of change came over him that year?" Alan asked.

Sherrill gazed down at the rug, then at Alan, then past him.  "A change
in his way of living," he replied.  "The Corvet line of boats went on,
expanded; interests were acquired in other lines; and Corvet and those
allied with him swiftly grew rich.  But in all this great development,
for which Corvet's genius and ability had laid the foundation, Corvet
himself ceased to take active part.  I do not mean that he formally
retired; he retained his control of the business, but he very seldom
went to the office and, except for occasional violent, almost pettish
interference in the affairs of the company, he left it in the hands of
others.  He took into partnership, about a year later, Henry Spearman,
a young man who had been merely a mate on one of his ships.  This
proved subsequently to have been a good business move, for Spearman has
tremendous energy, daring, and enterprise; and no doubt Corvet had
recognized these qualities in him before others did.  But at the time
it excited considerable comment.  It marked, certainly, the beginning
of Corvet's withdrawal from active management.  Since then he has been
ostensibly and publicly the head of the concern, but he has left the
management almost entirely to Spearman.  The personal change in Corvet
at that time is harder for me to describe to you."

Sherrill halted, his eyes dark with thought, his lips, pressed closely
together; Alan waited.

"When I saw Corvet again, in the summer of '96--I had been South during
the latter part of the winter and East through the spring--I was
impressed by the vague but, to me, alarming change in him.  I was
reminded, I recall, of a friend I had had in college who had thought he
was in perfect health and had gone to an examiner for life insurance
and had been refused, and was trying to deny to himself and others that
anything could be the matter.  But with Corvet I knew the trouble was
not physical.  The next year his wife left him."

"The year of--?" Alan asked.

"That was 1897.  We did not know at first, of course, that the
separation was permanent.  It proved so, however; and Corvet, I know
now, had understood it to be that way from the first.  Mrs. Corvet went
to France--the French blood in her, I suppose, made her select that
country; she had for a number of years a cottage near Trouville, in
Normandy, and was active in church work.  I know there was almost no
communication between herself and her husband during those years, and
her leaving him markedly affected Corvet.  He had been very fond of her
and proud of her.  I had seen him sometimes watching her while she
talked; he would gaze at her steadily and then look about at the other
women in the room and back to her, and his head would nod just
perceptibly with satisfaction; and she would see it sometimes and
smile.  There was no question of their understanding and affection up
to the very time she so suddenly and so strangely left him.  She died
in Trouville in the spring of 1910, and Corvet's first information of
her death come to him through a paragraph in a newspaper."

Alan had started; Sherrill looked at him questioningly.

"The spring of 1910," Alan explained, "was when I received the bank
draft for fifteen hundred dollars."

Sherrill nodded; he did not seem surprised to hear this; rather it
appeared to be confirmation of something in his own thought.

"Following his wife's leaving him," Sherrill went on, "Corvet saw very
little of any one.  He spent most of his time in his own house;
occasionally he lunched at his club; at rare intervals, and always
unexpectedly, he appeared at his office.  I remember that summer he was
terribly disturbed because one of his ships was lost.  It was not a bad
disaster, for every one on the ship was saved, and hull and cargo were
fully covered by insurance; but the Corvet record was broken; a Corvet
ship had appealed for help; a Corvet vessel had not reached port....
And later in the fall, when two deckhands were washed from another of
his vessels and drowned, he was again greatly wrought up, though his
ships still had a most favorable record.  In 1902 I proposed to him
that I buy full ownership in the vessels I partly controlled and ally
them with those he and Spearman operated.  It was a time of
combination--the railroads and the steel interests were acquiring the
lake vessels; and though I believed in this, I was not willing to enter
any combination which would take the name of Sherrill off the list of
American shipowners.  I did not give Corvet this as my reason; and he
made me at that time a very strange counter-proposition--which I have
never been able to understand, and which entailed the very obliteration
of my name which I was trying to avoid.  He proposed that I accept a
partnership in his concern on a most generous basis, but that the name
of the company remain as it was, merely Corvet and Spearman.
Spearman's influence and mine prevailed upon him to allow my name to
appear; since then, the firm name has been Corvet, Sherrill, and
Spearman.

"Our friendship had strengthened and ripened during those years.  The
intense activity of Corvet's mind, which as a younger man he had
directed wholly to the shipping, was directed, after he had isolated
himself in this way, to other things.  He took up almost feverishly an
immense number of studies--strange studies most of them for a man whose
youth had been almost violently active and who had once been a lake
captain.  I cannot tell you what they all were--geology, ethnology,
nearly a score of subjects; he corresponded with various scientific
societies; he has given almost the whole of his attention to such
things for about twenty years.  Since I have known him, he has
transformed himself from the rather rough, uncouth--though always
spiritually minded--man he was when I first met him into an educated
gentleman whom anybody would be glad to know; but he has made very few
acquaintances in that time, and has kept almost none of his old
friendships.  He has lived alone in the house on Astor Street with only
one servant--the same one all these years.

"The only house he has visited with any frequency has been mine.  He
has always liked my wife; he had--he has a great affection for my
daughter, who, when she was a child, ran in and out of his home as she
pleased.  He would take long walks with her; he'd come here sometimes
in the afternoon to have tea with her on stormy days; he liked to have
her play and sing to him.  My daughter believes now that his present
disappearance--whatever has happened to him--is connected in some way
with herself.  I do not think that is so--"

Sherrill broke off and stood in thought for a moment; he seemed to
consider, and to decide that it was not necessary to say anything more
on that subject.

"Recently Corvet's moroseness and irritability had very greatly
increased; he had quarreled frequently and bitterly with Spearman over
business affairs.  He had seemed more than usually eager at times to
see me or to see my daughter; and at other times he had seemed to avoid
us and keep away.  I have had the feeling of late, though I could not
give any actual reason for it except Corvet's manner and look, that the
disturbance which had oppressed him for twenty years was culminating in
some way.  That culmination seems to have been reached three days ago,
when he wrote summoning you here.  Henry Spearman, whom I asked about
you when I learned you were coming, had never heard of you; Mr.
Corvet's servant had never heard of you....

"Is there anything in what I have told you which makes it possible for
you to recollect or to explain?"

Alan shook his head, flushed, and then grew a little pale.  What
Sherrill told him had excited him by the coincidences it offered
between events in Benjamin Corvet's life and his own; it had not made
him "recollect" Corvet, but it had given definiteness and direction to
his speculations as to Corvet's relation to himself.

Sherrill drew one of the large chairs nearer to Alan and sat down
facing him.  He felt in an inner pocket and brought out an envelope;
from the envelope he took three pictures, and handed the smallest of
them to Alan.  As Alan took it, he saw that it was a tintype of himself
as a round-faced boy of seven.

"That is you?" Sherrill asked.

"Yes; it was taken by the photographer in Blue Rapids.  We all had our
pictures taken on that day--Jim, Betty, and I.  Mr. Welton"--for the
first time Alan consciously avoided giving the title "Father" to the
man in Kansas--"sent one of me to the 'general delivery' address of the
person in Chicago."

"And this?"

The second picture, Alan saw, was one that had been taken in front of
the barn at the farm.  It showed Alan at twelve, in overalls and
barefooted, holding a stick over his head at which a shepherd dog was
jumping.

"Yes; that is Shep and I--Jim's and my dog, Mr. Sherrill.  It was taken
by a man who stopped at the house for dinner one day; he liked Shep and
wanted a picture of him; so he got me to make Shep jump, and he took
it."

"You don't remember anything about the man?"

"Only that he had a camera and wanted a picture of Shep."

"Doesn't it occur to you that it was your picture he wanted, and that
he had been sent to get it?  I wanted your verification that these
earlier pictures were of you, but this last one is easily recognizable."

Sherrill unfolded the third picture; it was larger than the others and
had been folded across the middle to get it into the envelope.  Alan
leaned forward to look at it.

"That is the University of Kansas football team," he said.  "I am the
second one in the front row; I played end my junior year and tackle
when I was a senior.  Mr. Corvet--?"

"Yes; Mr. Corvet had these pictures.  They came into my possession day
before yesterday, the day after Corvet disappeared; I do not want to
tell just yet how they did that."

Alan's face, which had been flushed at first with excitement, had gone
quite pale, and his hands, as he clenched and unclenched them
nervously, were cold, and his lips were very dry.  He could think of no
possible relationship between Benjamin Corvet and himself, except one,
which could account for Corvet's obtaining and keeping these pictures
of him through the years.  As Sherrill put the pictures back into their
envelope and the envelope back into his pocket, and Alan watched him,
Alan felt nearly certain now that it had not been proof of the nature
of this relationship that Sherrill had been trying to get from him, but
only corroboration of some knowledge, or partial knowledge, which had
come to Sherrill in some other way.  The existence of this knowledge
was implied by Sherrill's withholding of the way he had come into
possession of the pictures, and his manner showed now that he had
received from Alan the confirmation for which he had been seeking.

"I think you know who I am," Alan said.

Sherrill had risen and stood looking down at him.

"You have guessed, if I am not mistaken, that you are Corvet's son."

The color flamed to Alan's face for an instant, then left it paler than
before.  "I thought it must be that way," he answered; "but you said he
had no children."

"Benjamin Corvet and his wife had no children."

"I thought that was what you meant."  A twinge twisted Alan's face; he
tried to control it but for a moment could not.

Sherrill suddenly put his hand on Alan's shoulder; there was something
so friendly, so affectionate in the quick, impulsive grasp of
Sherrill's fingers, that Alan's heart throbbed to it; for the first
time some one had touched him in full, unchecked feeling for him; for
the first time, the unknown about him had failed to be a barrier and,
instead, had drawn another to him.

"Do not misapprehend your father," Sherrill said quietly.  "I cannot
prevent what other people may think when they learn this; but I do not
share such thoughts with them.  There is much in this I cannot
understand; but I know that it is not merely the result of what others
may think it--of 'a wife in more ports than one,' as you will hear the
lakemen put it.  What lies under this is some great misadventure which
had changed and frustrated all your father's life."

Sherrill crossed the room and rang for a servant.

"I am going to ask you to be my guest for a short time, Alan," he
announced.  "I have had your bag carried to your room; the man will
show you which one it is."

Alan hesitated; he felt that Sherrill had not told him all he
knew--that there were some things Sherrill purposely was withholding
from him; but he could not force Sherrill to tell more than he wished;
so after an instant's irresolution, he accepted the dismissal.

Sherrill walked with him to the door, and gave his directions to the
servant; he stood watching, as Alan and the man went up the stairs.
Then he went back and seated himself in the chair Alan had occupied,
and sat with hands grasping the arms of the chair while he stared into
the fire.

Fifteen minutes later, he heard his daughter's footsteps and looked up.
Constance halted in the door to assure herself that he was now alone;
then she came to him and, seating herself on the arm of the chair, she
put her hand on his thin hair and smoothed it softly; he felt for her
other hand with his and found it, and held it clasped between his palms.

"You've found out who he is, father?" she asked.

"The facts have left me no doubt at all as to that, little daughter."

"No doubt that he is----who?"

Sherrill was silent for a moment--not from uncertainty, but because of
the effect which what he must say would have upon her; then he told her
in almost the same words he had used to Alan.  Constance started,
flushed, and her hand stiffened convulsively between her father's.

They said nothing more to one another; Sherrill seemed considering and
debating something within himself; and presently he seemed to come to a
decision.  He got up, stooped and touched his daughter's hand, and left
the room.  He went up the stairs and on the second floor he went to a
front room and knocked.  Alan's voice told him to come in.  Sherrill
went in and, when he had made sure that the servant was not with Alan,
he closed the door carefully behind him.

Then he turned back to Alan, and for an instant stood indecisive as
though he did not know how to begin what he wanted to say.  As he
glanced down at a key he took from his pocket, his indecision seemed to
receive direction and inspiration from it; and he put it down on Alan's
dresser.

"I've brought you," he said evenly, "the key to your house."

Alan gazed at him, bewildered.  "The key to my house?"

"To the house on Astor Street," Sherrill confirmed.  "Your father
deeded the house and its furniture and all its contents to you the day
before he disappeared.  I have not the deed here; it came into my hands
the day before yesterday at the same time I got possession of the
pictures which might--or might not, for all I knew then--be you.  I
have the deed down-town and will give it to you.  The house is yours in
fee simple, given you by your father, not bequeathed to you by him to
become your property after his death.  He meant by that, I think, even
more than the mere acknowledgment that he is your father."

Sherrill walked to the window and stood as though looking out, but his
eyes were blank with thought.

"For almost twenty years," he said, "your father, as I have told you,
lived in that house practically alone; during all those years a shadow
of some sort was over him.  I don't know at all, Alan, what that shadow
was.  But it is certain that whatever it was that had changed him from
the man he was when I first knew him culminated three days ago when he
wrote to you.  It may be that the consequences of his writing to you
were such that, after he had sent the letter, he could not bring
himself to face them and so has merely ... gone away.  In that case, as
we stand here talking, he is still alive.  On the other hand, his
writing you may have precipitated something that I know nothing of.  In
either case, if he has left anywhere any evidence of what it is that
changed and oppressed him for all these years, or if there is any
evidence of what has happened to him now, it will be found in his
house."

Sherrill turned back to Alan.  "It is for you--not me, Alan," he said
simply, "to make that search.  I have thought seriously about it, this
last half hour, and have decided that is as he would want it--perhaps
as he did want it--to be.  He could have told me what his trouble was
any time in these twenty years, if he had been willing I should know;
but he never did."

Sherrill was silent for a moment.

"There are some things your father did just before he disappeared that
I have not told you yet," he went on.  "The reason I have not told them
is that I have not yet fully decided in my own mind what action they
call for from me.  I can assure you, however, that it would not help
you now in any way to know them."

He thought again; then glanced to the key on the dresser and seemed to
recollect.

"That key," he said, "is one I made your father give me some time ago;
he was at home alone so much that I was afraid something might happen
to him there.  He gave it me because he knew I would not misuse it.  I
used it, for the first time, three days ago, when, after becoming
certain something had gone wrong with him, I went to the house to
search for him; my daughter used it this morning when she went there to
wait for you.  Your father, of course, had a key to the front door like
this one; his servant has a key to the servants' entrance.  I do not
know of any other keys."

"The servant is in charge there now?" Alan asked.

"Just now there is no one in the house.  The servant, after your father
disappeared, thought that, if he had merely gone away, he might have
gone back to his birthplace near Manistique, and he went up there to
look for him.  I had a wire from him to-day that he had not found him
and was coming back."

Sherrill waited a moment to see whether there was anything more Alan
wanted to ask; then he went out.




CHAPTER IV

"ARRIVED SAFE; WELL"

As the door closed behind Sherrill, Alan went over to the dresser and
picked up the key which Sherrill had left.  It was, he saw, a flat key
of a sort common twenty years before, not of the more recent corrugated
shape.  As he looked at it and then away from it, thoughtfully turning
it over and over in his fingers, it brought no sense of possession to
him.  Sherrill had said the house was his, had been given him by his
father; but that fact could not actually make it his in his
realization.  He could not imagine himself owning such a house or what
he would do with it if it were his.  He put the key, after a moment, on
the ring with two or three other keys he had, and dropped them into his
pocket; then he crossed to a chair and sat down.

He found, as he tried now to disentangle the events of the afternoon,
that from them, and especially from his last interview with Sherrill,
two facts stood out most clearly.  The first of these related more
directly to his father--to Benjamin Corvet.  When such a man as
Benjamin Corvet must have been, disappears--when, without warning and
without leaving any account of himself he vanishes from among those who
knew him--the persons most closely interested pass through three stages
of anxiety.  They doubt first whether the disappearance is real and
whether inquiry on their part will not be resented; they waken next to
realization that the man is actually gone, and that something must be
done; the third stage is open and public inquiry.  Whatever might be
the nature of the information Sherrill was withholding from him, Alan
saw that its effect on Sherrill had been to shorten very greatly
Sherrill's time of doubt as to Corvet's actual disappearance.  The
Sherrills--particularly Sherrill himself--had been in the second stage
of anxiety when Alan came; they had been awaiting Alan's arrival in the
belief that Alan could give them information which would show them what
must be "done" about Corvet.  Alan had not been able to give them this
information; but his coming, and his interview with Sherrill, had
strongly influenced Sherrill's attitude.  Sherrill had shrunk, still
more definitely and consciously, after that, from prying into the
affairs of his friend; he had now, strangely, almost withdrawn himself
from the inquiry, and had given it over to Alan.

Sherrill had spoken of the possibility that something might have
"happened" to Covert; but it was plain he did not believe he had met
with actual violence.  He had left it to Alan to examine Corvet's
house; but he had not urged Alan to examine it at once; he had left the
time of the examination to be determined by Alan.  This showed clearly
that Sherrill believed--perhaps had sufficient reason for
believing--that Corvet had simply "gone away."  The second of Alan's
two facts related even more closely and personally to Alan himself.
Corvet, Sherrill had said, had married in 1889.  But Sherrill in long
knowledge of his friend, had shown firm conviction that there had been
no mere vulgar liaison in Corvet's life.  Did this mean that there
might have been some previous marriage of Alan's father--some marriage
which had strangely overlapped and nullified his public marriage?  In
that case, Alan could be, not only in fact but legally, Corvet's son;
and such things as this, Alan knew, had sometimes happened, and had
happened by a strange combination of events, innocently for all
parties.  Corvet's public separation from his wife, Sherrill had said,
had taken place in 1897, but the actual separation between them might,
possibly, have taken place long before that.

Alan resolved to hold these questions in abeyance; he would not accept
or grant the stigma which his relationship to Corvet seemed to attach
to himself until it had been proved to him.  He had come to Chicago
expecting, not to find that there had never been anything wrong, but to
find that the wrong had been righted in some way at last.  But what was
most plain of all to him, from what Sherrill had told him, was that the
wrong--whatever it might be--had not been righted; it existed still.

The afternoon had changed swiftly into night; dusk had been gathering
during his last talk with Sherrill, so that he hardly had been able to
see Sherrill's face, and just after Sherrill had left him, full dark
had come.  Alan did not know how long he had been sitting in the
darkness thinking out these things; but now a little clock which had
been ticking steadily in the blackness tinkled six.  Alan heard a knock
at his door, and when it was repeated, he called, "Come in."

The light which came in from the hall, as the door was opened, showed a
man servant.  The man, after a respectful inquiry, switched on the
light.  He crossed into the adjoining room--a bedroom; the room where
Alan was, he thought, must be a dressing room, and there was a bath
between.  Presently the man reappeared, and moved softly about the
room, unpacking Alan's suitcase.  He hung Alan's other suit in the
closet on hangers; he put the linen, except for one shirt, in the
dresser drawers, and he put Alan's few toilet things with the
ivory-backed brushes and comb and other articles on the dressing stand.

Alan watched him queerly; no one except himself ever had unpacked
Alan's suitcase before; the first time he had gone away to college--it
was a brand new suitcase then--"mother" had packed it; after that first
time, Alan had packed and unpacked it.  It gave him an odd feeling now
to see some one else unpacking his things.  The man, having finished
and taken everything out, continued to look in the suitcase for
something else.

"I beg pardon, sir," he said finally, "but I cannot find your buttons."

"I've got them on," Alan said.  He took them out and gave them to the
valet with a smile; it was good to have something to smile at, if it
was only the realization that he never had thought before of any one's
having more than one set of buttons for ordinary shirts.  Alan
wondered, with a sort of trepidation, whether the man would expect to
stay and help him dress; but he only put the buttons in the clean shirt
and reopened the dresser drawers and laid out a change of things.

"Is there anything else, sir?" he asked.

"Nothing, thank you," Alan said.

"I was to tell you, sir, Mr. Sherrill is sorry he cannot be at home to
dinner to-night.  Mrs. Sherrill and Miss Sherrill will be here.  Dinner
is at seven, sir."

Alan dressed slowly, after the man had gone; and at one minute before
seven he went down-stairs.

There was no one in the lower hall and, after an instant of
irresolution and a glance into the empty drawing-room, he turned into
the small room at the opposite side of the hall.  A handsome, stately,
rather large woman, whom he found there, introduced herself to him
formally as Mrs. Sherrill.

He knew from Sherrill's mention of the year of their marriage that Mrs.
Sherrill's age must be about forty-five, but if he had not known this,
he would have thought her ten years younger.  In her dark eyes and her
carefully dressed, coal-black hair, and in the contour of her youthful
looking, handsome face, he could not find any such pronounced
resemblance to her daughter as he had seen in Lawrence Sherrill.  Her
reserved, yet almost too casual acceptance of Alan's presence, told him
that she knew all the particulars about himself which Sherrill had been
able to give; and as Constance came down the stairs and joined them
half a minute later, Alan was certain that she also knew.

Yet there was in her manner toward Alan a difference from that of her
mother--a difference which seemed almost opposition.  Not that Mrs.
Sherrill's was unfriendly or critical; rather, it was kind with the
sort of reserved kindness which told Alan, almost as plainly as words,
that she had not been able to hold so charitable a conviction in regard
to Corvet's relationship with Alan as her husband held, but that she
would be only the more considerate to Alan for that.  It was this
kindness which Constance set herself to oppose, and which she opposed
as reservedly and as subtly as it was expressed.  It gave Alan a
strange, exhilarating sensation to realize that, as the three talked
together, this girl was defending him.

Not him alone, of course, or him chiefly.  It was Benjamin Corvet, her
friend, whom she was defending primarily; yet it was Alan too; and all
went on without a word about Benjamin Corvet or his affairs being
spoken.

Dinner was announced, and they went into the great dining-room, where
the table with its linen, silver, and china gleamed under shaded
lights.  The oldest and most dignified of the three men servants who
waited upon them in the dining-room Alan thought must be a butler--a
species of creature of whom Alan had heard but never had seen; the
other servants, at least, received and handed things through him, and
took their orders from him.  As the silent-footed servants moved about,
and Alan kept up a somewhat strained conversation with Mrs. Sherrill--a
conversation in which no reference to his own affairs was yet made--he
wondered whether Constance and her mother always dressed for dinner in
full evening dress as now, or whether they were going out.  A word from
Constance to her mother told him this latter was the case, and while it
did not give complete answer to his internal query, it showed him his
first glimpse of social engagements as a part of the business of life.
In spite of the fact that Benjamin Corvet, Sherrill's close friend, had
disappeared--or perhaps because he had disappeared and, as yet, it was
not publicly known--their and Sherrill's engagements had to be
fulfilled.

What Sherrill had told Alan of his father had been iterating itself
again and again in Alan's thoughts; now he recalled that Sherrill had
said that his daughter believed that Corvet's disappearance had had
something to do with her.  Alan had wondered at the moment how that
could be; and as he watched her across the table and now and then
exchanged a comment with her, it puzzled him still more.  He had
opportunity to ask her when she waited with him in the library, after
dinner was finished and her mother had gone up-stairs; but he did not
see then how to go about it.

"I'm sorry," she said to him, "that we can't be home to-night; but
perhaps you would rather be alone?"

He did not answer that.

"Have you a picture here, Miss Sherrill, of--my father?" he asked.

"Uncle Benny had had very few pictures taken; but there is one here."

She went into the study, and came back with a book open at a half-tone
picture of Benjamin Corvet.  Alan took it from her and carried it
quickly closer to the light.  The face that looked up to him from the
heavily glazed page was regular of feature, handsome in a way, and
forceful.  There were imagination and vigor of thought in the broad,
smooth forehead; the eyes were strangely moody and brooding; the mouth
was gentle, rather kindly; it was a queerly impelling, haunting face.
This was his father!  But, as Alan held the picture, gazing down upon
it, the only emotion which came to him was realization that he felt
none.  He had not expected to know his father from strangers on the
street; but he had expected, when told that his father was before him,
to feel through and through him the call of a common blood.  Now,
except for consternation at his own lack of feeling, he had no emotion
of any sort; he could not attach to this man, because he bore the name
which some one had told him was his father's, the passions which, when
dreaming of his father, he had felt.

As he looked up from the picture to the girl who had given it to him,
startled at himself and believing she must think his lack of feeling
strange and unnatural, he surprised her gazing at him with wetness in
her eyes.  He fancied at first it must be for his father, and that the
picture had brought back poignantly her fears.  But she was not looking
at the picture, but at him; and when his eyes met hers, she quickly
turned away.

His own eyes filled, and he choked.  He wanted to thank her for her
manner to him in the afternoon, for defending his father and him, as
she had at the dinner table, and now for this unplanned, impulsive
sympathy when she saw how he had not been able to feel for this man who
was his father and how he was dismayed by it.  But he could not put his
gratitude in words.

A servant's voice came from the door, startling him.

"Mrs. Sherrill wishes you told she is waiting, Miss Sherrill."

"I'll be there at once."  Constance, also, seemed startled and
confused; but she delayed and looked back to Alan.

"If--if we fail to find your father," she said, "I want to tell you
what a man he was."

"Will you?" Alan asked.  "Will you?"

She left him swiftly, and he heard her mother's voice in the hall.  A
motor door closed sharply, after a minute or so; then the house door
closed.  Alan stood still a moment longer, then, remembering the book
which he held, he drew a chair up to the light, and read the short, dry
biography of his father printed on the page opposite the portrait.  It
summarized in a few hundred words his father's life.  He turned to the
cover of the book and read its title, "Year Book of the Great Lakes,"
and a date of five years before; then he looked through it.  It
consisted in large part, he saw, merely of lists of ships, their kind,
their size, the date when they were built, and their owners.  Under
this last head he saw some score of times the name "Corvet, Sherrill
and Spearman."  There was a separate list of engines and boilers, and
when they had been built and by whom.  There was a chronological table
of events during the year upon the lakes.  Then he came to a part
headed "Disasters of the Year," and he read some of them; they were
short accounts, drily and unfeelingly put, but his blood thrilled to
these stories of drowning, freezing, blinded men struggling against
storm and ice and water, and conquering or being conquered by them.
Then he came to his father's picture and biography once more and, with
it, to pictures of other lakemen and their biographies.  He turned to
the index and looked for Sherrill's name, and then Spearman's; finding
they were not in the book, he read some of the other ones.

There was a strange similarity, he found, in these biographies, among
themselves as well as to that of his father.  These men had had, the
most of them, no tradition of seamanship, such as Sherrill had told him
he himself had had.  They had been sons of lumbermen, of farmers, of
mill hands, miners, or fishermen.  They had been very young for the
most part, when they had heard and answered the call of the lakes--the
ever-swelling, fierce demand of lumber, grain, and ore for outlet; and
they had lived hard; life had been violent, and raw, and brutal to
them.  They had sailed ships, and built ships, and owned and lost them;
they had fought against nature and against man to keep their ships, and
to make them profitable, and to get more of them.  In the end a few, a
very few comparatively, had survived; by daring, by enterprise, by
taking great chances, they had thrust their heads above those of their
fellows; they had come to own a half dozen, a dozen, perhaps a score of
bottoms, and to have incomes of fifty, of a hundred, of two hundred
thousand dollars a year.

Alan shut the book and sat thoughtful.  He felt strongly the immensity,
the power, the grandeur of all this; but he felt also its violence and
its fierceness.  What might there not have been in the life of his
father who had fought up and made a way for himself through such things?

The tall clock in the hall struck nine.  He got up and went out into
the hall and asked for his hat and coat.  When they had been brought
him, he put them on and went out.

The snow had stopped some time before; a strong and increasing wind had
sprung up, which Alan, with knowledge of the wind across his prairies,
recognized as an aftermath of the greater storm that had produced it;
for now the wind was from the opposite direction--from the west.  He
could see from the Sherrills' door step, when he looked toward the
lighthouse at the harbor mouth winking red, white, red, white, at him,
that this offshore wind was causing some new commotion and upheaval
among the ice-floes; they groaned and labored and fought against the
opposing pressure of the waves, under its urging.

He went down the steps and to the corner and turned west to Astor
Street.  When he reached the house of his father, he stopped under a
street-lamp, looking up at the big, stern old mansion questioningly.
It had taken on a different look for him since he had heard Sherrill's
account of his father; there was an appeal to him that made his throat
grow tight, in its look of being unoccupied, in the blank stare of its
unlighted windows which contrasted with the lighted windows in the
houses on both sides, and in the slight evidences of disrepair about
it.  He waited many minutes, his hand upon the key in his pocket; yet
he could not go in, but instead walked on down the street, his thoughts
and feelings in a turmoil.

He could not call up any sense that the house was his, any more than he
had been able to when Sherrill had told him of it.  He own a house on
that street!  Yet was that in itself any more remarkable than that he
should be the guest, the friend of such people as the Sherrills?  No
one as yet, since Sherrill had told him he was Corvet's son, had called
him by name; when they did, what would they call him?  Alan Conrad
still?  Or Alan Corvet?

He noticed, up a street to the west, the lighted sign of a drug store
and turned up that way; he had promised, he had recollected now, to
write to ... those in Kansas--he could not call them "father" and
"mother" any more--and tell them what he had discovered as soon as he
arrived.  He could not tell them that, but he could write them at least
that he had arrived safely and was well.  He bought a postcard in the
drug store, and wrote just, "Arrived safely; am well" to John Welton in
Kansas.  There was a little vending machine upon the counter, and he
dropped in a penny and got a box of matches and put them in his pocket.

He mailed the card and turned back to Astor Street; and he walked more
swiftly now, having come to his decision, and only shot one quick look
up at the house as he approached it.  With what had his father shut
himself up within that house for twenty years?  And was it there still?
And was it from that that Benjamin Corvet had fled?  He saw no one in
the street, and was certain no one was observing him as, taking the key
from his pocket, he ran up the steps and unlocked the outer door.
Holding this door open to get the light from the street lamp, he fitted
the key into the inner door; then he closed the outer door.  For fully
a minute, with fast beating heart and a sense of expectation of he knew
not what, he kept his hand upon the key before he turned it; then he
opened the door and stepped into the dark and silent house.




CHAPTER V

AN ENCOUNTER

Alan, standing in the darkness of the hall, felt in his pocket for his
matches and struck one on the box.  The light showed the hall in front
of him, reaching back into some vague, distant darkness, and great
rooms with wide portiered doorways gaping on both sides.  He turned
into the room upon his right, glanced to see that the shades were drawn
on the windows toward the street, then found the switch and turned on
the electric light.

As he looked around, he fought against his excitement and feeling of
expectancy; it was--he told himself--after all, merely a vacant house,
though bigger and more expensively furnished than any he ever had been
in except the Sherrills; and Sherrill's statement to him had implied
that anything there might be in it which could give the reason for his
father's disappearance would be probably only a paper, a record of some
kind.  It was unlikely that a thing so easily concealed as that could
be found by him on his first examination of the place; what he had come
here for now--he tried to make himself believe--was merely to obtain
whatever other information it could give him about his father and the
way his father had lived, before Sherrill and he had any other
conversation.

Alan had not noticed, when he stepped into the hall in the morning,
whether the house then had been heated; now he appreciated that it was
quite cold and, probably, had been cold for the three days since his
father had gone, and his servant had left to look for him.  Coming from
the street, it was not the chilliness of the house he felt but the
stillness of the dead air; when a house is heated, there is always some
motion of the air, but this air was stagnant.  Alan had dropped his hat
on a chair in the hall; he unbuttoned his overcoat but kept it on, and
stuffed his gloves into his pocket.

A light in a single room, he thought, would not excite curiosity or
attract attention from the neighbors or any one passing in the street;
but lights in more than one room might do that.  He resolved to turn
off the light in each room as he left it, before lighting the next one.

It had been a pleasant as well as a handsome house, if he could judge
by the little of it he could see, before the change had come over his
father.  The rooms were large with high ceilings.  The one where he
stood, obviously was a library; bookshelves reached three quarters of
the way to the ceiling on three of its walls except where they were
broken in two places by doorways, and in one place on the south wall by
an open fireplace.  There was a big library table-desk in the center of
the room, and a stand with a shaded lamp upon it nearer the fireplace.
A leather-cushioned Morris chair--a lonely, meditative-looking
chair--was by the stand and at an angle toward the hearth; the rug in
front of it was quite worn through and showed the floor underneath.  A
sympathy toward his father, which Sherrill had not been able to make
him feel, came to Alan as he reflected how many days and nights
Benjamin Corvet must have passed reading or thinking in that chair
before his restless feet could have worn away the tough, Oriental
fabric of the rug.

There were several magazines on the top of the large desk, some
unwrapped, some still in their wrappers; Alan glanced at them and saw
that they all related to technical and scientific subjects.  The desk
evidently had been much used and had many drawers; Alan pulled one open
and saw that it was full of papers; but his sensation as he touched the
top one made him shut the drawer again and postpone prying of that sort
until he had looked more thoroughly about the house.

He went to the door of the connecting room and looked into it.  This
room, dusky in spite of the light which shone past him through the wide
doorway, was evidently another library; or rather it appeared to have
been the original library, and the front room had been converted into a
library to supplement it.  The bookcases here were built so high that a
little ladder on wheels was required for access to the top shelves.
Alan located the light switch in the room; then he returned, switched
off the light in the front room, crossed in the darkness into the
second room, and pressed the switch.

A weird, uncanny, half wail, half moan, coming from the upper hall,
suddenly filled the house.  Its unexpectedness and the nature of the
sound stirred the hair upon his head, and he started back; then he
pressed the switch again, and the noise stopped.  He lighted another
match, found the right switch, and turned on the light.  Only after
discovering two long tiers of white and black keys against the north
wall did Alan understand that the switch must control the motor working
the bellows of an organ which had pipes in the upper hall; it was the
sort of organ that can be played either with fingers or by means of a
paper roll; a book of music had fallen upon the keys, so that one was
pressed down, causing the note to sound when the bellows pumped.

But having accounted for the sound did not immediately end the start
that it had given Alan.  He had the feeling which so often comes to one
in an unfamiliar and vacant house that there was some one in the house
with him.  He listened and seemed to hear another sound in the upper
hall, a footstep.  He went out quickly to the foot of the stairs and
looked up them.

"Is any one here?" he called.  "Is any one here?"

His voice brought no response.  He went half way up the curve of the
wide stairway, and called again, and listened; then he fought down the
feeling he had had; Sherrill had said there would be no one in the
house, and Alan was certain there was no one.  So he went back to the
room where he had left the light.

The center of this room, like the room next to it, was occupied by a
library table-desk.  He pulled open some of the drawers in it; one or
two had blue prints and technical drawings in them; the others had only
the miscellany which accumulates in a room much used.  There were
drawers also under the bookcases all around the room; they appeared,
when Alan opened some of them, to contain pamphlets of various
societies, and the scientific correspondence of which Sherrill had told
him.  He looked over the titles of some of the books on the shelves--a
multitude of subjects, anthropology, exploration, deep-sea fishing,
ship-building, astronomy.  The books in each section of the shelves
seemed to correspond in subject with the pamphlets and correspondence
in the drawer beneath, and these, by their dates, to divide themselves
into different periods during the twenty years that Benjamin Corvet had
lived alone here.

Alan felt that seeing these things was bringing his father closer to
him; they gave him a little of the feeling he had been unable to get
when he looked at his father's picture.  He could realize better now
the lonely, restless man, pursued by some ghost he could not kill,
taking up for distraction one subject of study after another,
exhausting each in turn until he could no longer make it engross him,
and then absorbing himself in the next.

These two rooms evidently had been the ones most used by his father;
the other rooms on this floor, as Alan went into them one by one, he
found spoke far less intimately of Benjamin Corvet.  A dining-room was
in the front of the house to the north side of the hall; a service room
opened from it, and on the other side of the service room was what
appeared to be a smaller dining-room.  The service room communicated
both by dumb waiter and stairway with rooms below; Alan went down the
stairway only far enough to see that the rooms below were servants'
quarters; then he came back, turned out the light on the first floor,
struck another match, and went up the stairs to the second story.

The rooms opening on to the upper hall, it was plain to him, though
their doors were closed, were mostly bedrooms.  He put his hand at
hazard on the nearest door and opened it.  As he caught the taste and
smell of the air in the room--heavy, colder, and deader even than the
air in the rest of the house--he hesitated; then with his match he
found the light switch.

The room and the next one which communicated with it evidently were--or
had been--a woman's bedroom and boudoir.  The hangings, which were
still swaying from the opening of the door, had taken permanently the
folds in which they had hung for many years; there were the scores of
long-time idleness, not of use, in the rugs and upholstery of the
chairs.  The bed, however, was freshly made up, as though the bed
clothing had been changed occasionally.  Alan went through the bedroom
to the door of the boudoir, and saw that that too had the same look of
unoccupancy and disuse.  On the low dressing table were scattered such
articles as a woman starting on a journey might think it not worth
while to take with her.  There was no doubt that these were the rooms
of his father's wife.

Had his father preserved them thus, as she had left them, in the hope
that she might come back, permitting himself to fix no time when he
abandoned that hope, or even to change them after he had learned that
she was dead?  Alan thought not; Sherrill had said that Corvet had
known from the first that his separation from his wife was permanent.
The bed made up, the other things neglected, and evidently looked after
or dusted only at long separated periods, looked more as though Corvet
had shrunk from seeing them or even thinking of them, and had left them
to be looked after wholly by the servant, without ever being able to
bring himself to give instructions that they should be changed.  Alan
felt that he would not be surprised to learn that his father never had
entered these ghostlike rooms since the day his wife had left him.

On the top of a chest of high drawers in a corner near the dressing
table were some papers.  Alan went over to look at them; they were
invitations, notices of concerts and of plays twenty years old--the
mail, probably, of the morning she had gone away, left where her maid
or she herself had laid them, and only picked up and put back there at
the times since when the room was dusted.  As Alan touched them, he saw
that his fingers left marks in the dust on the smooth top of the chest;
he noticed that some one else had touched the things and made marks of
the same sort as he had made.  The freshness of these other marks
startled him; they had been made within a day or so.  They could not
have been made by Sherrill, for Alan had noticed that Sherrill's hands
were slender and delicately formed; Corvet, too, was not a large man;
Alan's own hand was of good size and powerful, but when he put his
fingers over the marks the other man had made, he found that the other
hand must have been larger and more powerful than his own.  Had it been
Corvet's servant?  It might have been, though the marks seemed too
fresh for that; for the servant, Sherrill had said, had left the day
Corvet's disappearance was discovered.

Alan pulled open the drawers to see what the other man might have been
after.  It had not been the servant; for the contents of the
drawers--old brittle lace and woman's clothing--were tumbled as though
they had been pulled out and roughly and inexpertly pushed back; they
still showed the folds in which they had lain for years and which
recently had been disarranged.

This proof that some one had been prying about in the house before
himself and since Corvet had gone, startled Alan and angered him.  It
brought him suddenly a sense of possession which he had not been able
to feel when Sherrill had told him the house was his; it brought an
impulse of protection of these things about him.  Who had been
searching in Benjamin Corvet's--in Alan's house?  He pushed the drawers
shut hastily and hurried across the hall to the room opposite.  In this
room--plainly Benjamin Corvet's bedroom--were no signs of intrusion.
He went to the door of the room connecting with it, turned on the
light, and looked in.  It was a smaller room than the others and
contained a roll-top desk and a cabinet.  The cover of the desk was
closed, and the drawers of the cabinet were shut and apparently
undisturbed.  Alan recognized that probably in this room he would find
the most intimate and personal things relating to his father; but
before examining it, he turned back to inspect the bedroom.

It was a carefully arranged and well-cared-for room, plainly in
constant use.  A reading stand, with a lamp, was beside the bed with a
book marked about the middle.  On the dresser were hair-brushes and a
comb, and a box of razors, none of which were missing.  When Benjamin
Corvet had gone away, he had not taken anything with him, even toilet
articles.  With the other things on the dresser, was a silver frame for
a photograph with a cover closed and fastened over the portrait; as
Alan took it up and opened it, the stiffness of the hinges and the
edges of the lid gummed to the frame by disuse, showed that it was long
since it had been opened.  The picture was of a woman of perhaps
thirty--a beautiful woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a refined,
sensitive, spiritual-looking face.  The dress she wore was the same,
Alan suddenly recognized, which he had seen and touched among the
things in the chest of drawers; it gave him a queer feeling now to have
touched her things.  He felt instinctively, as he held the picture and
studied it, that it could have been no vulgar bickering between wife
and husband, nor any caprice of a dissatisfied woman, that had made her
separate herself from her husband.  The photographer's name was stamped
in one corner, and the date--1894, the year after Alan had been born.

But Alan felt that the picture and the condition of her rooms across
the hall did not shed any light on the relations between her and
Benjamin Corvet; rather they obscured them; for his father neither had
put the picture away from him and devoted her rooms to other uses, nor
had he kept the rooms arranged and ready for her return and her picture
so that he would see it.  He would have done one or the other of these
things, Alan thought, if it were she his father had wronged--or, at
least, if it were only she.

Alan reclosed the case, and put the picture down; then he went into the
room with the desk.  He tried the cover of the desk, but it appeared to
be locked; after looking around vainly for a key, he tried again,
exerting a little more force, and this time the top went up easily,
tearing away the metal plate into which the claws of the lock clasped
and the two long screws which had held it.  He examined the lock,
surprised, and saw that the screws must have been merely set into the
holes; scars showed where a chisel or some metal implement had been
thrust in under the top to force it up.  The pigeonholes and little
drawers in the upper part of the desk, as he swiftly opened them, he
found entirely empty.  He hurried to the cabinet; the drawers of the
cabinet too had been forced, and very recently; for the scars and the
splinters of wood were clean and fresh.  These drawers and the drawers
in the lower part of the desk either were empty, or the papers in them
had been disarranged and tumbled in confusion, as though some one had
examined them hastily and tossed them back.

Sherrill had not done that, nor any one who had a business to be there.
If Benjamin Corvet had emptied some of those drawers before he went
away, he would not have relocked empty drawers.  To Alan, the marks of
violence and roughness were unmistakably the work of the man with the
big hands who had left marks upon the top of the chest of drawers; and
the feeling that he had been in the house very recently was stronger
than ever.

Alan ran out into the hall and listened; he heard no sound; but he went
back to the little room more excited than before.  For what had the
other man been searching?  For the same things which Alan was looking
for?  And had the other man got them?  Who might the other be, and what
might be his connection with Benjamin Corvet?  Alan had no doubt that
everything of importance must have been taken away, but he would make
sure of that.  He took some of the papers from the drawers and began to
examine them; after nearly an hour of this, he had found only one
article which appeared connected in any way with what Sherrill had told
him or with Alan himself.  In one of the little drawers of the desk he
found several books, much worn as though from being carried in a
pocket, and one of these contained a series of entries stretching over
several years.  These listed an amount--$150.--opposite a series of
dates with only the year and the month given, and there was an entry
for every second month.

Alan felt his fingers trembling as he turned the pages of the little
book and found at the end of the list a blank, and below, in the same
hand but in writing which had changed slightly with the passage of
years, another date and the confirming entry of $1,500.  The other
papers and books were only such things as might accumulate during a
lifetime on the water and in business--government certificates,
manifests, boat schedules of times long gone by, and similar papers.
Alan looked through the little book again and put it in his pocket.  It
was, beyond doubt, his father's memorandum of the sums sent to Blue
Rapids for Alan; it told him that here he had been in his father's
thoughts; in this little room, within a few steps from those deserted
apartments of his wife, Benjamin Corvet had sent "Alan's dollar"--that
dollar which had been such a subject of speculation in his childhood
for himself and for all the other children.  He grew warm at the
thought as he began putting the other things back into the drawers.

He started and straightened suddenly; then he listened attentively, and
his skin, warm an instant before, turned cold and prickled.  Somewhere
within the house, unmistakably on the floor below him, a door had
slammed.  The wind, which had grown much stronger in the last hour, was
battering the windows and whining round the corners of the building;
but the house was tightly closed; it could not be the wind that had
blown the door shut.  Some one--it was beyond question now, for the
realization was quite different from the feeling he had had about that
before--was in the house with him.  Had his father's servant come back?
That was impossible; Sherrill had received a wire from the man that
day, and he could not get back to Chicago before the following morning
at the earliest.  But the servant, Sherrill had said, was the only
other one besides his father who had a key.  Was it ... his father who
had come back?  That, though not impossible, seemed improbable.

Alan stooped quickly, unlaced and stripped off his shoes, and ran out
into the hall to the head of the stairs where he looked down and
listened.  From here the sound of some one moving about came to him
distinctly; he could see no light below, but when he ran down to the
turn of the stairs, it became plain that there was a very dim and
flickering light in the library.  He crept on farther down the
staircase.  His hands were cold and moist from his excitement, and his
body was hot and trembling.

Whoever it was that was moving about down-stairs, even if he was not
one who had a right to be there, at least felt secure from
interruption.  He was going with heavy step from window to window;
where he found a shade up, he pulled it down brusquely and with a
violence which suggested great strength under a nervous strain; a
shade, which had been pulled down, flew up, and the man damned it as
though it had startled him; then, after an instant, he pulled it down
again.

Alan crept still farther down and at last caught sight of him.  The man
was not his father; he was not a servant; it was equally sure at the
same time that he was not any one who had any business to be in the
house and that he was not any common house-breaker.

He was a big, young-looking man, with broad shoulders and very evident
vigor; Alan guessed his age at thirty-five; he was handsome--he had a
straight forehead over daring, deep-set eyes; his nose, lips, and chin
were powerfully formed; and he was expensively and very carefully
dressed.  The light by which Alan saw these things came from a flat
little pocket searchlight that the man carried in one hand, which threw
a little brilliant circle of light as he directed it; and now, as the
light chanced to fall on his other hand--powerful and heavily
muscled--Alan recollected the look and size of the finger prints on the
chest of drawers upstairs.  He did not doubt that this was the same man
who had gone through the desk; but since he had already rifled the
desks, what did he want here now?  As the man moved out of sight, Alan
crept on down as far as the door to the library; the man had gone on
into the rear room, and Alan went far enough into the library so he
could see him.

He had pulled open one of the drawers in the big table in the rear
room--the room where the organ was and where the bookshelves reached to
the ceiling--and with his light held so as to show what was in it, he
was tumbling over its contents and examining them.  He went through one
after another of the drawers of the table like this; after examining
them, he rose and kicked the last one shut disgustedly; he stood
looking about the room questioningly, then he started toward the front
room.

He cast the light of his torch ahead of him; but Alan had time to
anticipate his action and to retreat to the hall.  He held the hangings
a little way from the door jamb so he could see into the room.  If this
man were the same who had looted the desk up-stairs, it was plain that
he had not procured there what he wanted or all of what he wanted; and
now he did not know where next to look.

He had, as yet, neither seen nor heard anything to alarm him, and as he
went to the desk in the front room and peered impatiently into the
drawers, he slammed them shut, one after another.  He straightened and
stared about.  "Damn Ben!  Damn Ben!" he ejaculated violently and
returned to the rear room.  Alan, again following him, found him on his
knees in front of one of the drawers under the bookcases.  As he
continued searching through the drawers, his irritation became greater
and greater.  He jerked one drawer entirely out of its case, and the
contents flew in every direction; swearing at it, and damning "Ben"
again, he gathered up the letters.  One suddenly caught his attention;
he began reading it closely, then snapped it back into the drawer,
crammed the rest on top of it, and went on to the next of the files.
He searched in this manner through half a dozen drawers, plainly
finding nothing at all he wanted; he dragged some of the books from
their cases, felt behind them and shoved back some of the books but
dropped others on the floor and blasphemy burst from him.

He cursed "Ben" again and again, and himself, and God; he damned men by
name, but so violently and incoherently that Alan could not make out
the names; terribly he swore at men living and men "rotting in Hell."
The beam of light from the torch in his hand swayed aside and back and
forth.  Without warning, suddenly it caught Alan as he stood in the
dark of the front room; and as the dim white circle of light gleamed
into Alan's face, the man looked that way and saw him.

The effect of this upon the man was so strange and so bewildering to
Alan that Alan could only stare at him.  The big man seemed to shrink
into himself and to shrink back and away from Alan.  He roared out
something in a bellow thick with fear and horror; he seemed to choke
with terror.  There was nothing in his look akin to mere surprise or
alarm at realizing that another was there and had been seeing and
overhearing him.  The light which he still gripped swayed back and
forth and showed him Alan again, and he raised his arm before his face
as he recoiled.

The consternation of the man was so complete that it checked Alan's
rush toward him; he halted, then advanced silently and watchfully.  As
he went forward, and the light shone upon his face again, the big man
cried out hoarsely:

"Damn you--damn you, with the hole above your eye!  The bullet got you!
And now you've got Ben!  But you can't get me!  Go back to Hell!  You
can't get me!  I'll get you--I'll get you!  You--can't save the
_Miwaka_!"

He drew back his arm and with all his might hurled the flashlight at
Alan.  It missed and crashed somewhere behind him, but did not go out;
the beam of light shot back and wavered and flickered over both of
them, as the torch rolled on the floor.  Alan rushed forward and,
thrusting through the dark, his hand struck the man's chest and seized
his coat.

The man caught at and seized Alan's arm; he seemed to feel of it and
assure himself of its reality.

"Flesh!  Flesh!" he roared in relief; and his big arms grappled Alan.
As they struggled, they stumbled and fell to the floor, the big man
underneath.  His hand shifted its hold and caught Alan's throat; Alan
got an arm free and, with all his force, struck the man's face.  The
man struck back--a heavy blow on the side of Alan's head which dizzied
him but left him strength to strike again, and his knuckles reached the
man's face once more, but he got another heavy blow in return.  The man
was grappling no longer; he swung Alan to one side and off of him, and
rolled himself away.  He scrambled to his feet and dashed out through
the library, across the hall, and into the service room.  Alan heard
his feet clattering down the stairway to the floor beneath.  Alan got
to his feet; dizzied and not yet familiar with the house, he blundered
against a wall and had to feel his way along it to the service room; as
he slipped and stumbled down the stairway, a door closed loudly at the
end of the corridor he had seen at the foot of the stairs.  He ran
along the corridor to the door; it had closed with a spring lock, and
seconds passed while he felt in the dark for the catch; he found it and
tore the door open, and came out suddenly into the cold air of the
night in a paved passageway beside the house which led in one direction
to the street and in the other to a gate opening on the alley.  He ran
forward to the street and looked up and down, but found it empty; then
he ran back to the alley.  At the end of the alley, where it
intersected the cross street, the figure of the man running away
appeared suddenly out of the shadows, then disappeared; Alan, following
as far as the street, could see nothing more of him; this street too
was empty.

He ran a little farther and looked, then he went back to the house.
The side door had swung shut again and latched.  He felt in his pocket
for his key and went around to the front door.  The snow upon the steps
had been swept away, probably by the servant who had come to the house
earlier in the day with Constance Sherrill, but some had fallen since;
the footsteps made in the early afternoon had been obliterated by it,
but Alan could see those he had made that evening, and the marks where
some one else had gone into the house and not come out again.  In part
it was plain, therefore, what had happened: the man had come from the
south, for he had not seen the light Alan had had in the north and rear
part of the house; believing no one was in the house, the man had gone
in through the front door with a key.  He had been some one familiar
with the house; for he had known about the side door and how to reach
it and that he could get out that way.  This might mean no more than
that he was the same who had searched through the house before; but at
least it made his identity with the former intruder more certain.

Alan let himself in at the front door and turned on the light in the
reading lamp in the library.  The electric torch still was burning on
the floor and he picked it up and extinguished it; he went up-stairs
and brought down his shoes.  He had seen a wood fire set ready for
lighting in the library, and now he lighted it and sat before it drying
his wet socks before he put on his shoes.  He was still shaking and
breathing fast from his struggle with the man and his chase after him,
and by the strangeness of what had taken place.

When the shaft of light from the torch had flashed across Alan's face
in the dark library, the man had not taken him for what he was--a
living person; he had taken him for a specter.  His terror and the
things he had cried out could mean only that.  The specter of whom?
Not of Benjamin Corvet; for one of the things Alan had remarked when he
saw Benjamin Corvet's picture was that he himself did not look at all
like his father.  Besides, what the man had said made it certain that
he did not think the specter was "Ben"; for the specter had "got Ben."
Did Alan look like some one else, then?  Like whom?  Evidently like the
man--now dead for he had a ghost--who had "got" Ben, in the big man's
opinion.  Who could that be?

No answer, as yet, was possible to that.  But if he did look like some
one, then that some one was--or had been--dreaded not only by the big
man who had entered the house, but by Benjamin Corvet as well.  "You
got Ben!" the man had cried out.  Got him?  How?  "But you can't get
me!" he had said.  "You--with the bullet hole above your eye!"  What
did that mean?

Alan got up and went to look at himself in the mirror he had seen in
the hall.  He was white, now that the flush of the fighting was going;
he probably had been pale before with excitement, and over his right
eye there was a round, black mark.  Alan looked down at his hands; a
little skin was off one knuckle, where he had struck the man, and his
fingers were smudged with a black and sooty dust.  He had smudged them
on the papers up-stairs or else in feeling his way about the dark
house, and at some time he had touched his forehead and left the black
mark.  That had been the "bullet hole."

The rest that the man had said had been a reference to some name; Alan
had no trouble to recollect the name and, while he did not understand
it at all, it stirred him queerly--"the _Miwaka_."  What was that?  The
queer excitement and questioning that the name brought, when he
repeated it to himself, was not recollection; for he could not recall
ever having heard the name before; but it was not completely strange to
him.  He could define the excitement it stirred only in that way.

He went back to the Morris chair; his socks were nearly dry, and he put
on his shoes.  He got up and paced about.  Sherrill had believed that
here in this house Benjamin Corvet had left--or might have left--a
memorandum, a record, or an account of some sort which would explain to
Alan, his son, the blight which had hung over his life.  Sherrill had
said that it could have been no mere intrigue, no vulgar personal sin;
and the events of the night had made that very certain; for, plainly,
whatever was hidden in that house involved some one else seriously,
desperately.  There was no other way to explain the intrusion of the
sort of man whom Alan had surprised there an hour ago.

The fact that this other man searched also did not prove that Benjamin
Corvet had left a record in the house, as Sherrill believed; but it
certainly showed that another person believed--or feared--it.  Whether
or not guilt had sent Benjamin Corvet away four days ago, whether or
not there had been guilt behind the ghost which had "got Ben," there
was guilt in the big man's superstitious terror when he had seen Alan.
A bold, powerful man like that one, when his conscience is clear, does
not see a ghost.  And the ghost which he had seen had a bullet hole
above the brows!

Alan did not flatter himself that in any physical sense he had
triumphed over that man; so far as it had gone, his adversary had had
rather the better of the battle; he had endeavored to stun Alan, or
perhaps do worse than stun; but after the first grapple, his purpose
had been to get away.  But he had not fled from Alan; he had fled from
discovery of who he was.  Sherrill had told Alan of no one whom he
could identify with this man; but Alan could describe him to Sherrill.

Alan found a lavatory and washed and straightened his collar and tie
and brushed his clothes.  There was a bruise on the side of his head;
but though it throbbed painfully, it did not leave any visible mark.
He could return now to the Sherrills'.  It was not quite midnight but
he believed by this time Sherrill was probably home; perhaps already he
had gone to bed.  Alan took up his hat and looked about the house; he
was going to return and sleep here, of course; he was not going to
leave the house unguarded for any long time after this; but, after what
had just happened, he felt he could leave it safely for half an hour,
particularly if he left a light burning within.

He did this and stepped out.  The wind from the west was blowing hard,
and the night had become bitter cold; yet, as Alan reached the drive,
he could see far out the tossing lights of a ship and, as he went
toward the Sherrills', he gazed out over the roaring water.  Often on
nights like this, he knew, his father must have been battling such
water.

The man who answered his ring at the Sherrills' recognized him at once
and admitted him; in reply to Alan's question, the servant said that
Mr. Sherrill had not yet returned.  When Alan went to his room, the
valet appeared and, finding that Alan was packing, the man offered his
service.  Alan let him pack and went down-stairs; a motor had just
driven up to the house.

It proved to have brought Constance and her mother; Mrs. Sherrill,
after informing Alan that Mr. Sherrill might not return until some time
later, went up-stairs and did not appear again.  Constance followed her
mother but, ten minutes later came downstairs.

"You're not staying here to-night?" she said.

"I wanted to say to your father," Alan explained, "that I believe I had
better go over to the other house."

She came a little closer to him in her concern.  "Nothing has happened
here?"

"Here?  You mean in this house?"  Alan smiled.  "No; nothing."

She seemed relieved.  Alan, remembering her mother's manner, thought he
understood; she knew that remarks had been made, possibly, which
repeated by a servant might have offended him.

"I'm afraid it's been a hard day for you," she said.

"It's certainly been unusual," Alan admitted.

It had been a hard day for her, too, he observed; or probably the
recent days, since her father's and her own good friend had gone, had
been trying.  She was tired now and nervously excited; but she was so
young that the little signs of strain and worry, instead of making her
seem older, only made her youth more apparent.  The curves of her neck
and her pretty, rounded shoulders were as soft as before; her lustrous,
brown hair was more beautiful, and a slight flush colored her clear
skin.

It had seemed to Alan, when Mrs. Sherrill had spoken to him a few
minutes before, that her manner toward him had been more reserved and
constrained than earlier in the evening; and he had put that down to
the lateness of the hour; but now he realized that she probably had
been discussing him with Constance, and that it was somewhat in
defiance of her mother that Constance had come down to speak with him
again.

"Are you taking any one over to the other house with you?" she inquired.

"Any one?"

"A servant, I mean."

"No."

"Then you'll let us lend you a man from here."

"You're awfully good; but I don't think I'll need any one to-night.
Mr. Corvet's--my father's man--is coming back to-morrow, I understand.
I'll get along very well until then."

She was silent a moment as she looked away.  Her shoulders suddenly
jerked a little.  "I wish you'd take some one with you," she persisted.
"I don't like to think of you alone over there."

"My father must have been often alone there."

"Yes," she said.  "Yes."  She looked at him quickly, then away,
checking a question.  She wanted to ask, he knew, what he had
discovered in that lonely house which had so agitated him; for of
course she had noticed agitation in him.  And he had intended to tell
her or, rather, her father.  He had been rehearsing to himself the
description of the man he had met there in order to ask Sherrill about
him; but now Alan knew that he was not going to refer the matter even
to Sherrill just yet.

Sherrill had believed that Benjamin Corvet's disappearance was from
circumstances too personal and intimate to be made a subject of public
inquiry; and what Alan had encountered in Corvet's house had confirmed
that belief.  Sherrill further had said that Benjamin Corvet, if he had
wished Sherrill to know those circumstances, would have told them to
him; but Corvet had not done that; instead, he had sent for Alan, his
son.  He had given his son his confidence.

Sherrill had admitted that he was withholding from Alan, for the time
being, something that he knew about Benjamin Corvet; it was nothing, he
had said, which would help Alan to learn about his father, or what had
become of him; but perhaps Sherrill, not knowing these other things,
could not speak accurately as to that.  Alan determined to ask Sherrill
what he had been withholding before he told him all of what had
happened in Corvet's house.  There was one other circumstance which
Sherrill had mentioned but not explained; it occurred to Alan now.

"Miss Sherrill--" he checked himself.

"What is it?"

"This afternoon your father said that you believed that Mr. Corvet's
disappearance was in some way connected with you; he said that he did
not think that was so; but do you want to tell me why you thought it?"

"Yes; I will tell you."  She colored quickly.  "One of the last things
Mr. Corvet did--in fact, the last thing we know of his doing before he
sent for you--was to come to me and warn me against one of my friends."

"Warn you, Miss Sherrill?  How?  I mean, warn you against what?"

"Against thinking too much of him."  She turned away.

Alan saw in the rear of the hall the man who had been waiting with the
suitcase.  It was after midnight now and, for far more than the
intended half hour, Alan had left his father's house unwatched, to be
entered by the front door whenever the man, who had entered it before,
returned with his key.

"I think I'll come to see your father in the morning," Alan said, when
Constance looked back to him.

"You won't borrow Simons?" she asked again.

"Thank you, no."

"But you'll come over here for breakfast in the morning?"

"You want me?"

"Certainly."

"I'd like to come very much."

"Then I'll expect you."  She followed him to the door when he had put
on his things, and he made no objection when she asked that the man be
allowed to carry his bag around to the other house.  When he glanced
back, after reaching the walk, he saw her standing inside the door,
watching through the glass after him.

When he had dismissed Simons and reentered the house on Astor Street,
he found no evidences of any disturbance while he had been gone.  On
the second floor, to the east of the room which had been his father's,
was a bedroom which evidently had been kept as a guest chamber; Alan
carried his suitcase there and made ready for bed.

The sight of Constance Sherrill standing and watching after him in
concern as he started back to this house, came to him again and again
and, also, her flush when she had spoken of the friend against whom
Benjamin Corvet had warned her.  Who was he?  It had been impossible at
that moment for Alan to ask her more; besides, if he had asked and she
had told him, he would have learned only a name which he could not
place yet in any connection with her or with Benjamin Corvet.  Whoever
he was, it was plain that Constance Sherrill "thought of him"; lucky
man, Alan said to himself.  Yet Corvet had warned her not to think of
him....

Alan turned back his bed.  It had been for him a tremendous day.
Barely twelve hours before he had come to that house, Alan Conrad from
Blue Rapids, Kansas; now ... phrases from what Lawrence Sherrill had
told him of his father were running through his mind as he opened the
door of the room to be able to hear any noise in Benjamin Corvet's
house, of which he was sole protector.  The emotion roused by his first
sight of the lake went through him again as he opened the window to the
east.

Now--he was in bed--he seemed to be standing, a specter before a man
blaspheming Benjamin Corvet and the souls of men dead.  "And the hole
above the eye! ... The bullet got you! ... So it's you that got Ben!
... I'll get you! ... You can't save the _Miwaka_!"

The _Miwaka_!  The stir of that name was stronger now even than before;
it had been running through his consciousness almost constantly since
he had heard it.  He jumped up and turned on the light and found a
pencil.  He did not know how to spell the name and it was not necessary
to write it down; the name had taken on that definiteness and
ineffaceableness of a thing which, once heard, can never again be
forgotten.  But, in panic that he might forget, he wrote it, guessing
at the spelling--"_Miwaka_."

It was a name, of course; but the name of what?  It repeated and
repeated itself to him, after he got back into bed, until its very
iteration made him drowsy.

Outside the gale whistled and shrieked.  The wind, passing its last
resistance after its sweep across the prairies before it leaped upon
the lake, battered and clamored in its assault about the house.  But as
Alan became sleepier, he heard it no longer as it rattled the windows
and howled under the eaves and over the roof, but as out on the lake,
above the roaring and ice-crunching waves, it whipped and circled with
its chill the ice-shrouded sides of struggling ships.  So, with the
roar of surf and gale in his ears, he went to sleep with the sole
conscious connection in his mind between himself and these people,
among whom Benjamin Corvet's summons had brought him, the one name
"_Miwaka_."




CHAPTER VI

CONSTANCE SHERRILL

In the morning a great change had come over the lake.  The wind still
blew freshly, but no longer fiercely, from the west; and now, from
before the beach beyond the drive, and from the piers and breakwaters
at the harbor mouth, and from all the western shore, the ice had
departed.  Far out, a nearly indiscernible white line marked the
ice-floe where it was traveling eastward before the wind; nearer, and
with only a gleaming crystal fringe of frozen snow clinging to the
shore edge, the water sparkled, blue and dimpling, under the morning
sun; multitudes of gulls, hungry after the storm, called to one another
and circled over the breakwaters, the piers, and out over the water as
far as the eye could see; and a half mile off shore, a little work
boat--a shallop twenty feet long--was put-put-ing on some errand along
a path where twelve hours before no horsepower creatable by man could
have driven the hugest steamer.

Constance Sherrill, awakened by the sunlight reflected from the water
upon her ceiling, found nothing odd or startling in this change; it
roused her but did not surprise her.  Except for the short periods of
her visits away from Chicago, she had lived all her life on the shore
of the lake: the water--wonderful, ever altering--was the first sight
each morning.  As it made wilder and more grim the desolation of a
stormy day, so it made brighter and more smiling the splendor of the
sunshine and, by that much more, influenced one's feelings.

Constance held by preference to the seagoing traditions of her family.
Since she was a child, the lake and the life of the ships had delighted
and fascinated her; very early she had discovered that, upon the lake,
she was permitted privileges sternly denied upon land--an arbitrary
distinction which led her to designate water, when she was a little
girl, as her family's "respectable element."  For while her father's
investments were, in part, on the water, her mother's property all was
on the land.  Her mother, who was a Seaton, owned property somewhere in
the city, in common with Constance's uncles; this property consisted,
as Constance succeeded in ascertaining about the time she was nine, of
large, wholesale grocery buildings.  They and the "brand" had been in
the possession of the Seaton family for many years; both Constance's
uncles worked in the big buildings where the canning was done; and,
when Constance was taken to visit them, she found the place most
interesting--the berries and fruit coming up in great steaming
cauldrons; the machines pushing the cans under the enormous faucets
where the preserves ran out and then sealing the cans and pasting the
bright Seaton "brand" about them.  The people there were
interesting--the girls with flying fingers sorting fruit, and the men
pounding the big boxes together; and the great shaggy-hoofed horses
which pulled the huge, groaning wagons were most fascinating.  She
wanted to ride on one of the wagons; but her request was promptly and
completely squashed.

It was not "done"; nor was anything about the groceries and the canning
to be mentioned before visitors; Constance brought up the subject once
and found out.  It was different about her father's ships.  She could
talk about them when she wanted to; and her father often spoke of them;
and any one who came to the house could speak about them.  Ships,
apparently, were respectable.

When she went down to the docks with her father, she could climb all
over them, if she was only careful of her clothes; she could spend a
day watching one of her father's boats discharging grain or another
unloading ore; and, when she was twelve, for a great treat, her father
took her on one of the freighters to Duluth; and for one delightful,
wonderful week she chummed with the captain and mates and wheelmen and
learned all the pilot signals and the way the different lighthouses
winked.

Mr. Spearman, who recently had become a partner of her father's, was
also on the boat upon that trip.  He had no particular duty; he was
just "an owner" like her father; but Constance observed that, while the
captain and the mates and the engineers were always polite and
respectful to her father, they asked Mr. Spearman's opinion about
things in a very different way and paid real attention--not merely
polite attention--when he talked.  He was a most desirable sort of
acquisition; for he was a friend who could come to the house at any
time, and yet he, himself, had done all sorts of exciting things.  He
had not just gone to Harvard and then become an owner, as Constance's
father had; at fifteen, he had run away from his father's farm back
from the east shore of little Traverse Bay near the northern end of
Lake Michigan.  At eighteen, after all sorts of adventures, he had
become mate of a lumber schooner; he had "taken to steam" shortly after
that and had been an officer upon many kinds of ships.  Then Uncle
Benny had taken him into partnership.  Constance had a most exciting
example of what he could do when the ship ran into a big storm on Lake
Superior.

Coming into Whitefish Bay, a barge had blundered against the vessel; a
seam started, and water came in so fast that it gained on the pumps.
Instantly, Mr. Spearman, not the captain, was in command and, from the
way he steered the ship to protect the seam and from the scheme he
devised to stay the inrush of water, the pumps began to gain at once,
and the ship went into Duluth safe and dry.  Constance liked that in a
man of the sort whom people knew.  For, as the most active
partner--though not the chief stockholder--of Corvet, Sherrill and
Spearman, almost every one in the city knew him.  He had his bachelor
"rooms" in one of the newest and most fashionable of the apartment
buildings facing the lake just north of the downtown city; he had
become a member of the best city and country clubs; and he was welcomed
quickly along the Drive, where the Sherrills' mansion was coming to be
considered a characteristic "old" Chicago home.

But little over forty, and appearing even younger, Spearman was
distinctly of the new generation; and Constance Sherrill was only one
of many of the younger girls who found in Henry Spearman refreshing
relief from the youths who were the sons of men but who could never
become men themselves.  They were nice, earnest boys with all sorts of
serious Marxian ideas of establishing social justice in the plants
which their fathers had built; and carrying the highest motives into
the city or national politics.  But the industrial reformers, Constance
was quite certain, never could have built up the industries with which
they now, so superiorly, were finding fault; the political purifiers
either failed of election or, if elected, seemed to leave politics
pretty much as they had been before.  The picture of Spearman,
instantly appealed to and instantly in charge in the emergency,
remained and became more vivid within Constance, because she never saw
him except when he dominated.

And a decade most amazingly had bridged the abyss which had separated
twelve years and thirty-two.  At twenty-two, Constance Sherrill was
finding Henry Spearman--age forty-two--the most vitalizing and
interesting of the men who moved, socially, about the restricted
ellipse which curved down the lake shore south of the park and up Astor
Street.  He had, very early, recognized that he possessed the vigor and
courage to carry him far, and he had disciplined himself until the
coarseness and roughness, which had sometimes offended the little girl
of ten years before, had almost vanished.  What crudities still came
out, romantically reminded of his hard, early life on the lakes.  Had
there been anything in that life of his of which he had not told
her--something worse than merely rough and rugged, which could strike
at her?  Uncle Benny's last, dramatic appeal to her had suggested that;
but even at the moment when he was talking to her, fright for Uncle
Benny--not dread that there had been anything wrong in Henry's
life--had most moved her.  Uncle Benny very evidently was not himself.
As long as Constance could remember, he had quarreled violently with
Henry; his antagonism to Henry had become almost an obsession; and
Constance had her father's word for it that, a greater part of the
time, Uncle Benny had no just ground for his quarrel with Henry.  A
most violent quarrel had occurred upon that last day, and undoubtedly
its fury had carried Uncle Benny to the length of going to Constance as
he did.

Constance had come to this conclusion during the last gloomy and stormy
days; this morning, gazing out upon the shining lake, clear blue under
the wintry sun, she was more satisfied than before.  Summoning her
maid, she inquired first whether anything had been heard since last
night of Mr. Corvet.  She was quite sure, if her father had had word,
he would have awakened her; and there was no news.  But Uncle Benny's
son, she remembered, was coming to breakfast.

Uncle Benny's son!  That suggested to Constance's mother only something
unpleasant, something to be avoided and considered as little as
possible.  But Alan--Uncle Benny's son--was not unpleasant at all; he
was, in fact, quite the reverse.  Constance had liked him from the
moment that, confused a little by Benjamin Corvet's absence and
Simons's manner in greeting him, he had turned to her for explanation;
she had liked the way he had openly studied her and approved her, as
she was approving him; she had liked the way he had told her of
himself, and the fact that he knew nothing of the man who proved to be
his father; she had liked very much the complete absence of impulse to
force or to pretend feeling when she had brought him the picture of his
father--when he, amazed at himself for not feeling, had looked at her;
and she had liked most of all his refusal, for himself and for his
father, to accept positive stigma until it should be proved.

She had not designated any hour for breakfast, and she supposed that,
coming from the country, he would believe breakfast to be early.  But
when she got downstairs, though it was nearly nine o'clock, he had not
come; she went to the front window to watch for him, and after a few
minutes she saw him approaching, looking often to the lake as though
amazed by the change in it.

She went to the door and herself let him in.

"Father has gone down-town," she told him, as he took off his things.
"Mr. Spearman returns from Duluth this morning, and father wished to
tell him about you as soon as possible.  I told father you had come to
see him last night; and he said to bring you down to the office."

"I overslept, I'm afraid," Alan said.

"You slept well, then?"

"Very well--after a while."

"I'll take you down-town myself after breakfast."

She said no more but led him into the breakfast room.  It was a
delightful, cozy little room, Dutch furnished, with a single wide
window to the east, an enormous hooded fireplace taking up half the
north wall, and blue Delft tiles set above it and paneled in the walls
all about the room.  There were the quaint blue windmills, the fishing
boats, the baggy-breeked, wooden-shod folk, the canals and barges, the
dikes and their guardians, and the fishing ship on the Zuyder Zee.

Alan gazed about at these with quick, appreciative interest.  His
quality of instantly noticing and appreciating anything unusual was,
Constance thought, one of his pleasantest and best characteristics.

"I like those too; I selected them myself in Holland," she observed.

She took her place beside the coffee pot, and when he remained
standing--"Mother always has her breakfast in bed; that's your place,"
she said.

He took the chair opposite her.  There was fruit upon the table;
Constance took an orange and passed the little silver basket across.

"This is such a little table; we never use it if there's more than two
or three of us; and we like to help ourselves here."

"I like it very much," Alan said.

"Coffee right away or later?"

"Whenever you do.  You see," he explained, smiling in a way that
pleased her, "I haven't the slightest idea what else is coming or
whether anything more at all is coming."  A servant entered, bringing
cereal and cream; he removed the fruit plates, put the cereal dish and
two bowls before Constance, and went out.  "And if any one in Blue
Rapids," Alan went on, "had a man waiting in the dining-room and at
least one other in the kitchen, they would not speak of our activities
here as 'helping ourselves.'  I'm not sure just how they would speak of
them; we--the people I was with in Kansas--had a maidservant at one
time when we were on the farm, and when we engaged her, she asked, 'Do
you do your own stretching?'  That meant serving from the stove to the
table, usually."

He was silent for a few moments; when he looked at her across the table
again, he seemed about to speak seriously.  His gaze left her face and
then came back.

"Miss Sherrill," he said gravely, "what is, or was, the _Miwaka_?  A
ship?"

He made no attempt to put the question casually; rather, he had made it
more evident that it was of concern to him by the change in his manner.

"The _Miwaka_?" Constance said.

"Do you know what it was?"

"Yes; I know; and it was a ship."

"You mean it doesn't exist any more?"

"No; it was lost a long time ago."

"On the lakes here?"

"On Lake Michigan."

"You mean by lost that it was sunk?"

"It was sunk, of course; but no one knows what happened to it--whether
it was wrecked or burned or merely foundered."

The thought of the unknown fate of the ship and crew--of the ship which
had sailed and never reached port and of which nothing ever had been
heard but the beating of the Indian drum--set her blood tingling as it
had done before, when she had been told about the ship, or when she had
told others about it and the superstition connected with it.  It was
plain Alan Conrad had not asked about it idly; something about the
_Miwaka_ had come to him recently and had excited his intense concern.

"Whose ship was it?" he asked.  "My father's?"

"No; it belonged to Stafford and Ramsdell.  They were two of the big
men of their time in the carrying trade on the lakes, but their line
has been out of business for years; both Mr. Stafford and Mr. Ramsdell
were lost with the _Miwaka_."

"Will you tell me about it, and them, please?"

"I've told you almost all I can about Stafford and Ramsdell, I'm
afraid; I've just heard father say that they were men who could have
amounted to a great deal on the lakes, if they had lived--especially
Mr. Stafford, who was very young.  The _Miwaka_ was a great new steel
ship--built the year after I was born; it was the first of nearly a
dozen that Stafford and Ramsdell had planned to build.  There was some
doubt among lake men about steel boats at that time; they had begun to
be built very largely quite a few years before, but recently there had
been some serious losses with them.  Whether it was because they were
built on models not fitted for the lakes, no one knew; but several of
them had broken in two and sunk, and a good many men were talking about
going back to wood.  But Stafford and Ramsdell believed in steel and
had finished this first one of their new boats.

"She left Duluth for Chicago, loaded with ore, on the first day of
December, with both owners and part of their families on board.  She
passed the Soo on the third and went through the Straits of Mackinac on
the fourth into Lake Michigan.  After that, nothing was ever heard of
her."

"So probably she broke in two like the others?"

"Mr. Spearman and your father both thought so; but nobody ever knew--no
wreckage came ashore--no message of any sort from any one on board.  A
very sudden winter storm had come up and was at its 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 beat twenty-four before it
stopped and then began to beat again and beat twenty-four; so, later,
everybody knew it had been beating for the _Miwaka_; for every other
ship on the lake got to port; but there were twenty-five altogether on
the _Miwaka_, so either the drum beat wrong or--" she hesitated.

"Or what?"

"Or the drum was right, and some one was saved.  Many people believed
that.  It was years before the families of the men on board gave up
hope, because of the Drum; maybe some haven't given up hope yet."

Alan made no comment for a moment.  Constance had seen the blood flush
to his face and then leave it, and her own pulse had beat as swiftly as
she rehearsed the superstition.  As he gazed at her and then away, it
was plain that he had heard something additional about the
_Miwaka_--something which he was trying to fit into what she told him.

"That's all anybody knows?"  His gaze came back to her at last.

"Yes; why did you ask about it--the _Miwaka_?  I mean, how did you hear
about it so you wanted to know?"

He considered an instant before replying.  "I encountered a reference
to the _Miwaka_--I supposed it must be a ship--in my father's house
last night."

His manner, as he looked down at his coffee cup, toying with it,
prevented her then from asking more; he seemed to know that she wished
to press it, and he looked up quickly.

"I met my servant--my father's servant--this morning," he said.

"Yes; he got back this morning.  He came here early to report to father
that he had no news of Uncle Benny; and father told him you were at the
house and sent him over."

Alan was studying the coffee cup again, a queer expression on his face
which she could not read.

"He was there when I woke up this morning, Miss Sherrill.  I hadn't
heard anybody in the house, but I saw a little table on wheels standing
in the hall outside my door and a spirit lamp and a little coffee pot
on it, and a man bending over it, warming the cup.  His back was toward
me, and he had straight black hair, so that at first I thought he was a
Jap; but when he turned around, I saw he was an American Indian."

"Yes; that was Wassaquam."

"Is that his name?  He told me it was Judah."

"Yes--Judah Wassaquam.  He's a Chippewa from the north end of the lake.
They're very religious there, most of the Indians at the foot of the
lake; and many of them have a Biblical name which they use for a first
name and use their Indian name for a last one."

"He called me 'Alan' and my father 'Ben.'"

"The Indians almost always call people by their first names."

"He said that he had always served 'Ben' his coffee that way before he
got up, and so he had supposed he was to do the same by me; and also
that, long ago, he used to be a deck hand on one of my father's ships."

"Yes; when Uncle Benny began to operate ships of his own, many of the
ships on the lakes had Indians among the deck hands; some had all
Indians for crews and white men only for officers.  Wassaquam was on
the first freighter Uncle Benny ever owned a share in; afterwards he
came here to Chicago with Uncle Benny.  He's been looking after Uncle
Benny all alone now for more than ten years--and he's very much devoted
to him, and fully trustworthy; and besides that, he's a wonderful cook;
but I've wondered sometimes whether Uncle Benny wasn't the only city
man in the world who had an Indian body servant."

"You know a good deal about Indians."

"A little about the lake Indians, the Chippewas and Pottawatomies in
northern Michigan."

"Recollection's a funny thing," Alan said, after considering a moment.
"This morning, after seeing Judah and talking to him--or rather hearing
him talk--somehow a story got running in my head.  I can't make out
exactly what it was--about a lot of animals on a raft; and there was
some one with them--I don't know who; I can't fit any name to him; but
he had a name."

Constance bent forward quickly.  "Was the name Michabou?" she asked.

He returned her look, surprised.  "That's it; how did you know?"

"I think I know the story; and Wassaquam would have known it too, I
think, if you'd ask him; but probably he would have thought it impious
to tell it, because he and his people are great Christians now.
Michabou is one of the Indian names for Manitou.  What else do you
remember of the story?"

"Not much, I'm afraid--just sort of scenes here and there; but I can
remember the beginning now that you have given me the name: 'In the
beginning of all things there was only water and Michabou was floating
on the raft with all the animals.'  Michabou, it seemed, wanted the
land brought up so that men and animals could live on it, and he asked
one of the animals to go down and bring it up--"

"The beaver," Constance supplied.

"Was the beaver the first one?  The beaver dived and stayed down a long
time, so long that when he came up he was breathless and completely
exhausted, but he had not been able to reach the bottom.  Then Michabou
sent down--"

"The otter."

"And he stayed down much longer than the beaver, and when he came up at
last, they dragged him on to the raft quite senseless; but he hadn't
been able to reach the bottom either.  So the animals and Michabou
himself were ready to give it up; but then the little muskrat spoke
up--am I right?  Was this the muskrat?"

"Yes."

"Then you can finish it for me?"

"He dived and he stayed down, the little muskrat," Constance continued,
"longer than the beaver and the otter both together.  Michabou and the
animals waited all day for him to come up, and they watched all through
the night; so then they knew he must be dead.  And, sure enough, they
came after a while across the body floating on the water and apparently
lifeless.  They dragged him onto the raft and found that his little
paws were all tight shut.  They forced open three of the paws and found
nothing in them, but when they opened the last one, they found one
grain of sand tightly clutched in it.  The little muskrat had done it;
he'd reached the bottom!  And out of that one grain of sand, Michabou
made the world."

"That's it," he said.  "Now what is it?"

"The Indian story of creation--or one of them."

"Not a story of the plain Indians surely."

"No; of the Indians who live about the lakes and so got the idea that
everything was water in the first place--the Indians who live on the
islands and peninsulas.  That's how I came to know it."

"I thought that must be it," Alan said.  His hand trembled a little as
he lifted his coffee cup to his lips.

Constance too flushed a little with excitement; it was a surprisingly
close and intimate thing to have explored with another back into the
concealments of his first child consciousness, to have aided another in
the sensitive task of revealing himself to himself.  This which she had
helped to bring back to him must have been one of the first stories
told him; he had been a very little boy, when he had been taken to
Kansas, away from where he must have heard this story--the lakes.  She
was a little nervous also from watching the time as told by the tiny
watch on her wrist.  Henry's train from Duluth must be in now; and he
had not yet called her, as had been his custom recently, as soon as he
returned to town after a trip.  But, in a minute, a servant entered to
inform her that Mr. Spearman wished to speak to her.  She excused
herself to Alan and hurried out.  Henry was calling her from the
railroad station and, he said, from a most particularly stuffy booth
and, besides having a poor connection, there was any amount of noise
about him; but he was very anxious to see Constance as soon as
possible.  Could she be in town that morning and have luncheon with
him?  Yes; she was going down-town very soon and, after luncheon, he
could come home with her if he wished.  He certainly did wish, but he
couldn't tell yet what he might have to do in the afternoon, but please
would she save the evening for him.  She promised and started to tell
him about Alan, then recollected that Henry was going to see her father
immediately at the office.

Alan was standing, waiting for her, when she returned to the breakfast
room.

"Ready to go down-town?" she asked.

"Whenever you are."

"I'll be ready in a minute.  I'm planning to drive; are you afraid?"

He smiled in his pleasant way as he glanced over her; she had become
conscious of saying that sort of thing to tempt the smile.  "Oh, I'll
take the risk."




CHAPTER VII

THE DEED IN TRUST

Her little gasoline-driven car--delicate as though a jeweler had made
it--was waiting for them under the canopy beside the house, when they
went out.  She delayed a moment to ask Alan to let down the windows;
the sky was still clear, and the sunshine had become almost warm,
though the breeze was sharp and cold.  As the car rolled down the
drive, and he turned for a long look past her toward the lake, she
watched his expression.

"It's like a great shuttle, the ice there," she commented, "a monster
shuttle nearly three hundred miles long.  All winter it moves back and
forth across the lake, from east to west and from west to east as the
winds change, blocking each shore half the time and forcing the winter
boats to fight it always."

"The gulls go opposite to it, I suppose, sticking to open water."

"The gulls?  That depends upon the weather.  'Sea-gull, sea-gull,'" she
quoted, "'sit on the sand; It's never fair weather when you're on the
land.'"

Alan started a little.  "What was that?" he asked.

"That rhyme?  One which the wives of the lake men teach their children.
Did you remember that too?"

"After you said it."

"Can you remember the rest of it?"

"'Green to Green--Red to Red,'" Alan repeated to himself.  "'Green to
green' and then something about--how is it, 'Back her--back and
stopper.'"

"That's from a lake rhyme too, but another one!" she cried.  "And
that's quite a good one.  It's one of the pilot rules that every lake
person knows.  Some skipper and wheelsman set them to rhyme years ago,
and the lake men teach the rhymes to their children so that they'll
never go wrong with a ship.  It keeps them clearer in their heads than
any amount of government printing.  Uncle Benny used to say they've
saved any number of collisions.

  "Meeting steamers do not dread,"

she recited,

  "When you see three lights ahead!
  Port your helm and show your red.
  For passing steamers you should try
  To keep this maxim in your eye,
  Green to Green--or Red to Red--
  Perfect safety--go ahead.
  Both in safety and in doubt,
  Always keep a good lookout;
  Should there be no room to turn,
  Stop your ship and go astern."


"Now we're coming to your 'back and stopper':

  "If to starboard Red appear,
  'Tis your duty to keep clear;
  Act as judgment says is proper.
  Port or starboard--back or stop her!
  But when on your port is seen
  A steamer with a light of Green,
  There's not much for you to do--
  The Green light must look out for you."


She had driven the car swiftly on the boulevard to the turn where the
motorway makes west to Rush Street, then it turned south again toward
the bridge.  As they reached the approach to the bridge and the cars
congested there, Constance was required to give all her attention to
the steering; not until they were crossing the bridge was she able to
glance at her companion's face.

To westward, on both sides of the river, summer boats were laid up,
their decks covered with snow.  On the other side, still nearer to the
bridge, were some of the winter vessels; and, while the motor was on
the span, the bells began ringing the alarm to clear the bridge so it
could turn to let through a great steamer just in from the lake, the
sun glistening on the ice covering its bows and sides back as far as
Alan could see.

Forward of the big, black, red-banded funnel, a cloud of steam bellowed
up and floated back, followed by another, and two deep, reverberating
blasts rumbled up the river majestically, imperiously.  The shrill
little alarm bells on the bridge jangled more nervously and excitedly,
and the policeman at the south end hastily signalled the motor cars
from the city to stop, while he motioned those still on the bridge to
scurry off; for a ship desired to pass.

"Can we stop and see it?" Alan appealed, as Constance ran the car from
the bridge just before it began to turn.

She swung the car to the side of the street and stopped; as he gazed
back, he was--she knew--seeing not only his first great ship close by,
but having his first view of his people--the lake men from whom now he
knew from the feeling he had found within himself, and not only from
what had been told him, that he had come.

The ship was sheathed in ice from stem to stern; tons of the gleaming,
crystal metal weighed the forecastle; the rail all round had become a
frozen bulwark; the boats were mere hummocks of ice; the bridge was
encased, and from the top of the pilot house hung down giant
stalactites which an axeman was chopping away.  Alan could see the
officers on the bridge, the wheelsman, the lookout; he could see the
spurt of water from the ship's side as it expelled with each thrust of
the pumps; he could see the whirlpool about the screw, as slowly,
steadily, with signals clanging clearly somewhere below, the steamer
went through the draw.  From up the river ahead of it came the jangling
of bells and the blowing of alarm whistles as the other bridges were
cleared to let the vessel through.  It showed its stern now; Alan read
the name and registry aloud: "'_Groton of Escanaba_!'  Is that one of
yours, Miss Sherrill; is that one of yours and my--Mr. Corvet's?"

She shook her head, sorry that she had to say no.  "Shall we go on now?"

The bridge was swinging shut again; the long line of motor cars, which
had accumulated from the boulevard from the city, began slowly to move.
Constance turned the car down the narrow street, fronted by warehouses
which Alan had passed the morning before, to Michigan Avenue, with the
park and harbor to the left.  When she glanced now at Alan, she saw
that a reaction of depression had followed excitement at seeing the
steamer pass close by.

Memory, if he could call it that, had given him a feeling for ships and
for the lake; a single word--_Miwaka_--a childish rhyme and story,
which he might have heard repeated and have asked for a hundred times
in babyhood.  But these recollections were only what those of a
three-years' child might have been.  Not only did they refuse to
connect themselves with anything else, but by the very finality of
their isolation, they warned him that they--and perhaps a few more
vague memories of similar sort--were all that recollection ever would
give him.  He caught himself together and turned his thoughts to the
approaching visit to Sherrill--and his father's offices.

Observing the towering buildings to his right, he was able to identify
some of the more prominent structures, familiar from photographs of the
city.  Constance drove swiftly a few blocks down this boulevard; then,
with a sudden, "Here we are!" she shot the car to the curb and stopped.
She led Alan into one of the tallest and best-looking of the buildings,
where they took an elevator placarded "Express" to the fifteenth floor.

On several of the doors opening upon the wide marble hall where the
elevator left them, Alan saw the names, "Corvet, Sherrill and
Spearman."  As they passed, without entering, one of these doors which
stood propped open, and he looked in, he got his first realization of
the comparatively small land accommodations which a great business
conducted upon the water requires.  What he saw within was only one
large room, with hardly more than a dozen, certainly not a score of
desks in it; nearly all the desks were closed, and there were not more
than three or four people in the room, and these apparently
stenographers.  Doors of several smaller offices, opening upon the
larger room, bore names, among which he saw "Mr. Corvet" and "Mr.
Spearman."

"It won't look like that a month from now," Constance said, catching
his expression.  "Just now, you know, the straits and all the northern
lakes are locked fast with ice.  There's nothing going on now except
the winter traffic on Lake Michigan and, to a much smaller extent, on
Ontario and Erie; we have an interest in some winter boats, but we
don't operate them from here.  Next month we will be busy fitting out,
and the month after that all the ships we have will be upon the water."

She led the way on past to a door farther down the corridor, which bore
merely the name, "Lawrence Sherrill"; evidently Sherrill, who had
interests aside from the shipping business, had offices connected with
but not actually a part of the offices of Corvet, Sherrill, and
Spearman.  A girl was on guard on the other side of the door; she
recognized Constance Sherrill at once and, saying that Mr. Sherrill had
been awaiting Mr. Conrad, she opened an inner door and led Alan into a
large, many-windowed room, where Sherrill was sitting alone before a
table-desk.  He arose, a moment after the door opened, and spoke a word
to his daughter, who had followed Alan and the girl to the door, but
who had halted there.  Constance withdrew, and the girl from the outer
office also went away, closing the door behind her.  Sherrill pulled
the "visitor's chair" rather close to his desk and to his own big
leather chair before asking Alan to seat himself.

"You wanted to tell me, or ask me, something last night, my daughter
has told me," Sherrill said cordially.  "I'm sorry I wasn't home when
you came back."

"I wanted to ask you, Mr. Sherrill," Alan said, "about those facts in
regard to Mr. Corvet which you mentioned to me yesterday but did not
explain.  You said it would not aid me to know them; but I found
certain things in Mr. Corvet's house last night which made me want to
know, if I could, everything you could tell me."

Sherrill opened a drawer and took out a large, plain envelope.

"I did not tell you about these yesterday, Alan," he said, "not only
because I had not decided how to act in regard to these matters, but
because I had not said anything to Mr. Spearman about them previously,
because I expected to get some additional information from you.  After
seeing you, I was obliged to wait for Spearman to get back to town.
The circumstances are such that I felt myself obliged to talk them over
first with him; I have done that this morning; so I was going to send
for you, if you had not come down."

Sherrill thought a minute, still holding the envelope closed in his
hand.

"On the day after your father disappeared," he went on, "but before I
knew he was gone--or before any one except my daughter felt any alarm
about him--I received a short note from him.  I will show it to you
later, if you wish; its exact wording, however, is unimportant.  It had
been mailed very late the night before and apparently at the mail box
near his house or at least, by the postmark, somewhere in the
neighborhood; and for that reason had not been taken up before the
morning collection and did not reach the office until I had been here
and gone away again about eleven o'clock.  I did not get it, therefore,
until after lunch.  The note was agitated, almost incoherent.  It told
me he had sent for you--Alan Conrad, of Blue Rapids, Kansas--but spoke
of you as though you were some one I ought to have known about, and
commended you to my care.  The remainder of it was merely an agitated,
almost indecipherable farewell to me.  When I opened the envelope, a
key had fallen out.  The note made no reference to the key, but
comparing it with one I had in my pocket, I saw that it appeared to be
a key to a safety deposit box in the vaults of a company where we both
had boxes.

"The note, taken in connection with my daughter's alarm about him, made
it so plain that something serious had happened to Corvet, that my
first thought was merely for him.  Corvet was not a man with whom one
could readily connect the thought of suicide; but, Alan, that was the
idea I had.  I hurried at once to his house, but the bell was not
answered, and I could not get in.  His servant, Wassaquam, has very few
friends, and the few times he has been away from home of recent years
have been when he visited an acquaintance of his--the head porter in a
South Side hotel.  I went to the telephone in the house next door and
called the hotel and found Wassaquam there.  I asked Wassaquam about
the letter to 'Alan Conrad,' and Wassaquam said Corvet had given it to
him to post early in the evening.  Several hours later, Corvet had sent
him out to wait at the mail box for the mail collector to get the
letter back.  Wassaquam went out to the mail box, and Corvet came out
there too, almost at once.  The mail collector, when he came, told
them, of course, that he could not return the letter; but Corvet
himself had taken the letters and looked them through.  Corvet seemed
very much excited when he discovered the letter was not there; and when
the mail man remembered that he had been late on his previous trip and
so must have taken up the letter almost at once after it was mailed,
Corvet's excitement increased on learning that it was already probably
on the train on its way west.  He controlled himself later enough at
least to reassure Wassaquam; for an hour or so after, when Corvet sent
Wassaquam away from the house, Wassaquam had gone without feeling any
anxiety about him.

"I told Wassaquam over the telephone only that something was wrong, and
hurried to my own home to get the key, which I had, to the Corvet
house; but when I came back and let myself into the house, I found it
empty and with no sign of anything having happened.

"The next morning, Alan, I went to the safe deposit vaults as soon as
they were open.  I presented the numbered key and was told that it
belonged to a box rented by Corvet, and that Corvet had arranged about
three days before for me to have access to the box if I presented the
key.  I had only to sign my name in their book and open the box.  In
it, Alan, I found the pictures of you which I showed you yesterday and
the very strange communications that I am going to show you now."

Sherrill opened the long envelope from which several thin, folded
papers fell.  He picked up the largest of these, which consisted of
several sheets fastened together with a clip, and handed it to Alan
without comment.  Alan, as he looked at it and turned the pages, saw
that it contained two columns of typewriting carried from page to page
after the manner of an account.

The column to the left was an inventory of property and profits and
income by months and years, and the one to the right was a list of
losses and expenditures.  Beginning at an indefinite day or month in
the year 1895, there was set down in a lump sum what was indicated as
the total of Benjamin Corvet's holdings at that time.  To this, in
sometimes undated items, the increase had been added.  In the opposite
column, beginning apparently from the same date in 1895, were the
missing man's expenditures.  The painstaking exactness of these left no
doubt of their correctness; they included items for natural
depreciation of perishable properties and, evidently, had been worked
over very recently.  Upon the last sheet, the second column had been
deducted from the first, and an apparently purely arbitrary sum of two
hundred thousand dollars had been taken away.  From the remainder there
had been taken away approximately one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars more.

Alan having ascertained that the papers contained only this account,
looked up questioningly to Sherrill; but Sherrill, without speaking,
merely handed him the second of the papers....  This, Alan saw, had
evidently been folded to fit a smaller envelope.  Alan unfolded it and
saw that it was a letter written in the same hand which had written the
summons he had received in Blue Rapids and had made the entries in the
little memorandum book of the remittances that had been sent to John
Welton.

It began simply:


Lawrence--

This will come to you in the event that I am not able to carry out the
plan upon which I am now, at last, determined.  You will find with this
a list of my possessions which, except for two hundred thousand dollars
settled upon my wife which was hers absolutely to dispose of as she
desired and a further sum of approximately one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars presented in memory of her to the Hospital Service in
France, have been transferred to you without legal reservation.

You will find deeds for all real estate executed and complete except
for recording of the transfer at the county office; bonds,
certificates, and other documents representing my ownership of
properties, together with signed forms for their legal transfer to you,
are in this box.  These properties, in their entirety, I give to you in
trust to hold for the young man now known as Alan Conrad of Blue
Rapids, Kansas, to deliver any part or all over to him or to continue
to hold it all in trust for him as you shall consider to be to his
greatest advantage.

This for the reasons which I shall have told to you or him--I cannot
know which one of you now, nor do I know how I shall tell it.  But when
you learn, Lawrence, think as well of me as you can and help him to be
charitable to me.

With the greatest affection,
  BENJAMIN CORVET.


Alan, as he finished reading, looked up to Sherrill, bewildered and
dazed.

"What does it mean, Mr. Sherrill?--  Does it mean that he has gone away
and left everything he had--everything to me?"

"The properties listed here," Sherrill touched the pages Alan first had
looked at, "are in the box at the vault with the executed forms of
their transfer to me.  If Mr. Corvet does not return, and I do not
receive any other instructions, I shall take over his estate as he has
instructed for your advantage."

"And, Mr. Sherrill, he didn't tell you why?  This is all you know?"

"Yes; you have everything now.  The fact that he did not give his
reasons for this, either to you or me, made me think at first that he
might have made his plan known to some one else, and that he had been
opposed--to the extent even of violence done upon him--to prevent his
carrying it out.  But the more I have considered this, the less likely
it has seemed to me.  Whatever had happened to Corvet that had so much
disturbed and excited him lately, seems rather to have precipitated his
plan than deterred him in it.  He may have determined after he had
written this that his actions and the plain indication of his
relationship to you, gave all the explanation he wanted to make.  All
we can do, Alan, is to search for him in every way we can.  There will
be others searching for him too now; for information of his
disappearance has got out.  There have been reporters at the office
this morning making inquiries, and his disappearance will be in the
afternoon papers."

Sherrill put the papers back in their envelope, and the envelope back
into the drawer, which he relocked.

"I went over all this with Mr. Spearman this morning," he said.  "He is
as much at a loss to explain it as I am."

He was silent for a few moments.

"The transfer of Mr. Corvet's properties to me for you," he said
suddenly, "includes, as you have seen, Corvet's interest in the firm of
'Corvet, Sherrill and Spearman.'  I went very carefully through the
deeds and transfers in the deposit box, and it was plain that, while he
had taken great care with the forms of transfer for all the properties,
he had taken particular pains with whatever related to his holdings in
this company and to his shipping interests.  If I make over the
properties to you, Alan, I shall begin with those; for it seems to me
that your father was particularly anxious that you should take a
personal as well as a financial place among the men who control the
traffic of the lakes.  I have told Spearman that this is my intention.
He has not been able to see it my way as yet; but he may change his
views, I think, after meeting you."

Sherrill got up.  Alan arose a little unsteadily.  The list of
properties he had read and the letter and Sherrill's statement
portended so much that its meaning could not all come to him at once.
He followed Sherrill through a short private corridor, flanked with
files lettered "Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman," into the large room he
had seen when he came in with Constance.  They crossed this, and
Sherrill, without knocking, opened the door of the office marked, "Mr.
Spearman."  Alan, looking on past Sherrill as the door opened, saw that
there were some half dozen men in the room, smoking and talking.  They
were big men mostly, ruddy-skinned and weather-beaten in look, and he
judged from their appearance, and from the pile of their hats and coats
upon a chair, that they were officers of the company's ships, idle
while the ships were laid up, but reporting now at the offices and
receiving instructions as the time for fitting out approached.

His gaze went swiftly on past these men to the one who, half seated on
the top of the flat desk, had been talking to them; and his pulse
closed upon his heart with a shock; he started, choked with
astonishment, then swiftly forced himself under control.  For this was
the man whom he had met and whom he had fought in Benjamin Corvet's
house the night before--the big man surprised in his blasphemy of
Corvet and of souls "in Hell" who, at sight of an apparition with a
bullet hole above its eye, had cried out in his fright, "You got Ben!
But you won't get me--damn you!  Damn you!"

Alan's shoulders drew up slightly, and the muscles of his hands
tightened, as Sherrill led him to this man.  Sherrill put his hand on
the man's shoulder; his other hand was still on Alan's arm.

"Henry," he said to the man, "this is Alan Conrad.  Alan, I want you to
know my partner, Mr. Spearman."

Spearman nodded an acknowledgment, but did not put out his hand; his
eyes--steady, bold, watchful eyes--seemed measuring Alan attentively;
and in return Alan, with his gaze, was measuring him.




CHAPTER VIII

MR. CORVET'S PARTNER

The instant of meeting, when Alan recognized in Sherrill's partner the
man with whom he had fought in Corvet's house, was one of swift
readjustment of all his thought--adjustment to a situation of which he
could not even have dreamed, and which left him breathless.  But for
Spearman, obviously, it was not that.  Following his noncommittal nod
of acknowledgment of Sherrill's introduction and his first steady
scrutiny of Alan, the big, handsome man swung himself off from the desk
on which he sat and leaned against it, facing them more directly.

"Oh, yes--Conrad," he said.  His tone was hearty; in it Alan could
recognize only so much of reserve as might be expected from Sherrill's
partner who had taken an attitude of opposition.  The shipmasters,
looking on, could see, no doubt, not even that; except for the
excitement which Alan himself could not conceal, it must appear to them
only an ordinary introduction.

Alan fought sharply down the swift rush of his blood and the tightening
of his muscles.

"I can say truly that I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Spearman," he managed.

There was no recognition of anything beyond the mere surface meaning of
the words in Spearman's slow smile of acknowledgment, as he turned from
Alan to Sherrill.

"I'm afraid you've taken rather a bad time, Lawrence."

"You're busy, you mean.  This can wait, Henry, if what you're doing is
immediate."

"I want some of these men to be back in Mic

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