He gazed down at the lists of names which Benjamin Corvet had kept so carefully and so secretly; these were his father's people too; these ragged shores and the islands studding the channels were the lands where his father had spent the most active part of his life. There, then—these lists now made it certain—that event had happened by which that life had been blighted. Chicago and this house here had been for his father only the abode of memory and retribution. North, there by the meeting of the waters, was the region of the wrong which was done.
"That's where I must go!" he said aloud. "That's where I must go!"
Constance Sherrill, on the following afternoon, received a telephone call from her father; he was coming home earlier than usual, he said; if she had planned to go out, would she wait until after he got there? She had, indeed, just come in and had been intending to go out again at once; but she took off her wraps and waited for him. The afternoon's mail was upon a stand in the hall. She turned it over, looking through it—invitations, social notes. She picked from among them an envelope addressed to herself in a firm, clear hand, which, unfamiliar to her, still queerly startled her, and tore it open.
Dear Miss Sherrill, she read,
I am closing for the time being, the house which, for default of other ownership, I must call mine. The possibility that what has occurred here would cause you and your father anxiety about me in case I went away without telling you of my intention is the reason for this note. But it is not the only reason. I could not go away without telling you how deeply I appreciate the generosity and delicacy you and your father have shown to me in spite of my position here and of the fact that I had no claim at all upon you. I shall not forget those even though what happened here last night makes it impossible for me to try to see you again or even to write to you.
ALAN CONRAD.
She heard her father's motor enter the drive and ran to him with the letter in her hand.
"He's written to you then," he said, at sight of it.
"Yes."
"I had a note from him this afternoon at the office, asking me to hold in abeyance for the time being the trust that Ben had left me and returning the key of the house to me for safekeeping."
"Has he already gone?"
"I suppose so; I don't know."
"We must find out." She caught up her wraps and began to put them on. Sherrill hesitated, then assented; and they went round the block together to the Corvet house. The shades, Constance saw as they approached, were drawn; their rings at the doorbell brought no response. Sherrill, after a few instants' hesitation, took the key from his pocket and unlocked the door and they went in. The rooms, she saw, were all in perfect order; summer covers had been put upon the furniture; protecting cloths had been spread over the beds up-stairs. Her father tried the water and the gas, and found they had been turned off. After their inspection, they came out again at the front door, and her father closed it with a snapping of the spring lock.
Constance, as they walked away, turned and looked back at the old house, gloomy and dark among its newer, fresher-looking neighbors; and suddenly she choked, and her eyes grew wet. That feeling was not for Uncle Benny; the drain of days past had exhausted such a surge of feeling for him. That which she could not wink away was for the boy who had come to that house a few weeks ago and for the man who just now had gone.
"Miss Constance Sherrill,Harbor Springs, Michigan."
The address, in large scrawling letters, was written across the brown paper of the package which had been brought from the post office in the little resort village only a few moments before. The paper covered a shoe box, crushed and old, bearing the name of S. Klug, Dealer in Fine Shoes, Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The box, like the outside wrapping, was carefully tied with string.
Constance, knowing no one in Manitowoc and surprised at the nature of the package, glanced at the postmark on the brown paper which she had removed; it too was stamped Manitowoc. She cut the strings about the box and took off the cover. A black and brown dotted silk cloth filled the box; and, seeing it, Constance caught her breath. It was—at least it was very like—the muffler which Uncle Benny used to wear in winter. Remembering him most vividly as she had seen him last, that stormy afternoon when he had wandered beside the lake, carrying his coat until she made him put it on, she recalled this silk cloth, or one just like it, in his coat pocket; she had taken it from his pocket and put it around his neck.
She started with trembling fingers to take it from the box; then, realizing from the weight of the package that the cloth was only a wrapping or, at least, that other things were in the box, she hesitated and looked around for her mother. But her mother had gone out; her father and Henry both were in Chicago; she was alone in the big summer "cottage," except for servants. Constance picked up box and wrapping and ran up to her room. She locked the door and put the box upon the bed; now she lifted out the cloth. It was a wrapping, for the heavier things came with it; and now, also, it revealed itself plainly as the scarf—Uncle Benny's scarf! A paper fluttered out as she began to unroll it—a little cross-lined leaf evidently torn from a pocket memorandum book. It had been folded and rolled up. She spread it out; writing was upon it, the small irregular letters of Uncle Benny's hand.
"Send to Alan Conrad," she read; there followed a Chicago address—the number of Uncle Benny's house on Astor Street. Below this was another line:
"Better care of Constance Sherrill (Miss)." There followed the Sherrills' address upon the Drive. And to this was another correction:
"Not after June 12th; then to Harbor Springs, Mich. Ask some one of that; be sure the date; after June 12th."
Constance, trembling, unrolled the scarf; now coins showed from a fold, next a pocket knife, ruined and rusty, next a watch—a man's large gold watch with the case queerly pitted and worn completely through in places, and last a plain little band of gold of the size for a woman's finger—a wedding ring. Constance, gasping and with fingers shaking so from excitement that she could scarcely hold these objects, picked them up and examined them—the ring first.
It very evidently was, as she had immediately thought, a wedding ring once fitted for a finger only a trifle less slender than her own. One side of the gold band was very much worn, not with the sort of wear which a ring gets on a hand, but by some different sort of abrasion. The other side of the band was roughened and pitted but not so much worn; the inside still bore the traces of an inscription. "As long as we bo ... all live," Constance could read, and the date "June 2, 1891."
It was in January, 1896, Constance remembered, that Alan Conrad had been brought to the people in Kansas; he then was "about three years old." If this wedding ring was his mother's, the date would be about right; it was a date probably something more than a year before Alan was born. Constance put down the ring and picked up the watch. Wherever it had lain, it had been less protected than the ring; the covers of the case had been almost eroded away, and whatever initialing or other marks there might have been upon the outside were gone. But it was like Uncle Benny's watch—or like one of his watches. He had several, she knew, presented to him at various times—watches almost always were the testimonials given to seamen for acts of sacrifice and bravery. She remembered finding some of those testimonials in a drawer at his house once where she was rummaging, when she was a child. One of them had been a watch just like this, large and heavy. The spring which operated the cover would not work, but Constance forced the cover open.
There, inside the cover as she had thought it would be, was engraved writing. Sand had seeped into the case; the inscription was obliterated in part.
"For his courage and skill in seam ... master of ... which he brought to the rescue of the passengers and crew of the steamerWinnebagofoundering ... Point, Lake Erie, November 26th, 1890, this watch is donated by the Buffalo Merchants' Exchange."
Uncle Benny's name, evidently, had been engraved upon the outside. Constance could not particularly remember the rescue of the people of theWinnebago; 1890 was years before she was born, and Uncle Benny did not tell her that sort of thing about himself.
The watch, she saw now, must have lain in water, for the hands under the crystal were rusted away and the face was all streaked and cracked. She opened the back of the watch and exposed the works; they too were rusted and filled with sand. Constance left the watch open and, shivering a little, she gently laid it down upon her bed. The pocket knife had no distinguishing mark of any sort; it was just a man's ordinary knife with the steel turned to rust and with sand in it too. The coins were abraded and pitted discs—a silver dollar, a half dollar and three quarters, not so much abraded, three nickels, and two pennies.
Constance choked, and her eyes filled with tears. These things—plainly they were the things found in Uncle Benny's pockets—corroborated only too fully what Wassaquam believed and what her father had been coming to believe.—that Uncle Benny was dead. The muffler and the scrap of paper had not been in water or in sand. The paper was written in pencil; it had not even been moistened or it would have blurred. There was nothing upon it to tell how long ago it had been written; but it had been written certainly before June twelfth. "After June 12th," it said.
That day was August the eighteenth.
It was seven months since Uncle Benny had gone away. After his strange interview with her that day and his going home, had Uncle Benny gone out directly to his death? There was nothing to show that he had not; the watch and coins must have lain for many weeks, for months, in water and in sand to become eroded in this way. But, aside from this, there was nothing that could be inferred regarding the time or place of Uncle Benny's death. That the package had been mailed from Manitowoc meant nothing definite. Some one—Constance could not know whom—had had the muffler and the scrawled leaf of directions; later, after lying in water and in sand, the things which were to be "sent" had come to that some one's hand. Most probably this some one had been one who was going about on ships; when his ship had touched at Manitowoc, he had executed his charge.
Constance left the articles upon the bed and threw the window more widely open. She trembled and felt stirred and faint, as she leaned against the window, breathing deeply the warm air, full of life and with the scent of the evergreen trees about the house.
The "cottage" of some twenty rooms stood among the pines and hemlocks interspersed with hardwood on "the Point," where were the great fine summer homes of the wealthier "resorters." White, narrow roads, just wide enough for two automobiles to pass abreast, wound like a labyrinth among the tree trunks; and the sound of the wind among the pine needles was mingled with the soft lapping of water. To south and east from her stretched Little Traverse—one of the most beautiful bits of water of the lakes; across from her, beyond the wrinkling water of the bay, the larger town—Petoskey—with its hilly streets pitching down steeply to the water's edge and the docks, and with its great resort hotels, was plainly visible. To westward, from the white life-saving station and the lighthouse, the point ran out in shingle, bone white, outcropping above the water; then for miles away the shallow water was treacherous green and white to where at the north, around the bend of the shore, it deepened and grew blue again, and a single white tower—Ile-aux-Galets Light—kept watch above it.
This was Uncle Benny's country. Here, twenty-five years before, he had first met Henry, whose birthplace—a farm, deserted now—was only a few miles back among the hills. Here, before that, Uncle Benny had been a young man, active, vigorous, ambitious. He had loved this country for itself and for its traditions, its Indian legends and fantastic stories. Half her own love for it—and, since her childhood, it had been to her a region of delight—was due to him and to the things he had told her about it. Distinct and definite memories of that companionship came to her. This little bay, which had become now for the most part only a summer playground for such as she, had been once a place where he and other men had struggled to grow rich swiftly; he had outlined for her the ruined lumber docks and pointed out to her the locations of the dismantled sawmills. It was he who had told her the names of the freighters passing far out, and the names of the lighthouses, and something about each. He had told her too about the Indians. She remembered one starry night when he had pointed out to her in the sky the Indian "Way of Ghosts," the Milky Way, along which, by ancient Indian belief, the souls of Indians traveled up to heaven; and how, later, lying on the recessed seat beside the fireplace where she could touch the dogs upon the hearth, he had pointed out to her through the window the Indian "Way of Dogs" among the constellations, by which the dogs too could make that journey. It was he who had told her about Michabou and the animals; and he had been the first to tell her of the Drum.
The disgrace, unhappiness, the threat of something worse, which must have made death a relief to Uncle Benny, she had seen passed on now to Alan. What more had come to Alan since she had last heard of him? Some terrible substance to his fancies which would assail him again as she had seen him assailed after Luke had come? Might another attack have been made upon him similar to that which he had met in Chicago?
Word had reached her father through shipping circles in May and again in July which told of inquiries regarding Uncle Benny which made her and her father believe that Alan was searching for his father upon the lakes. Now these articles which had arrived made plain to her that he would never find Uncle Benny; he would learn, through others or through themselves, that Uncle Benny was dead. Would he believe then that there was no longer any chance of learning what his father had done? Would he remain away because of that, not letting her see or hear from him again?
She went back and picked up the wedding ring.
The thought which had come to her that this was Alan's mother's wedding ring, had fastened itself upon her with a sense of certainty. It defended that unknown mother; it freed her, at least, from the stigma which Constance's own mother had been so ready to cast. Constance could not yet begin to place Uncle Benny in relation to that ring; but she was beginning to be able to think of Alan and his mother. She held the little band of gold very tenderly in her hand; she was glad that, as the accusation against his mother had come through her people, she could tell him soon of this. She could not send the ring to him, not knowing where he was; that was too much risk. But she could ask him to come to her; this gave that right.
She sat thoughtful for several minutes, the ring clasped warmly in her hand; then she went to her desk and wrote:
Mr. John Welton,Blue Rapids, Kansas.
Dear Mr. Welton:
It is possible that Alan Conrad has mentioned me—or at least told you of my father—in connection with his stay in Chicago. After Alan left Chicago, my father wrote, twice to his Blue Rapids address, but evidently he had instructed the postmaster there to forward his mail and had not made any change in those instructions, for the letters were returned to Alan's address and in that way came back to us. We did not like to press inquiries further than that, as of course he could have communicated with us if he had not felt that there was some reason for not doing so. Now, however, something of such supreme importance to him has come to us that it is necessary for us to get word to him at once. If you can tell me any address at which he can be reached by telegraph or mail—or where a messenger can find him—it will oblige us very much and will be to his interest.
She hesitated, about to sign it; then, impulsively, she added:
I trust you know that we have Alan's interest at heart and that you can safely tell us anything you may know as to where he is or what he may be doing. We all liked him here so very much....
She signed her name. There were still two other letters to write. Only the handwriting of the address upon the package, the Manitowoc postmark and the shoe box furnished clue to the sender of the ring and the watch and the other things. Constance herself could not trace those clues, but Henry or her father could. She wrote to both of them, therefore, describing the articles which had come and relating what she had done. Then she rang for a servant and sent the letters to the post. They were in time to catch the "dummy" train around the bay and, at Petoskey, would get into the afternoon mail. The two for Chicago would be delivered early the next morning, so she could expect replies from Henry and her father on the second day; the letter to Kansas, of course, would take much longer than that.
But the next noon she received a wire from Henry that he was "coming up." It did not surprise her, as she had expected him the end of the week.
Late that evening, she sat with her mother on the wide, screened veranda. The breeze among the pines had died away; the lake was calm. A half moon hung midway in the sky, making plain the hills about the bay and casting a broadening way of silver on the mirror surface of the water. The lights of some boat turning in between the points and moving swiftly caught her attention. As it entered the path of the moonlight, its look was so like that of Henry's power yacht that she arose. She had not expected him until morning; but now the boat was so near that she could no longer doubt that it was his. He must have started within an hour of the receipt of her letter and had been forcing his engines to their fastest all the way up.
He had done that partly, perhaps, for the sheer sport of speed; but partly also for the sake of being sooner with her. It was his way, as soon as he had decided to leave business again and go to her, to arrive as soon as possible; that had been his way recently, particularly. So the sight of the yacht stirred her warmly and she watched while it ran in close, stopped and instantly dropped a dingey from the davits. She saw Henry in the stern of the little boat; it disappeared in the shadow of a pier ... she heard, presently, the gravel of the walk crunch under his quick steps, and then she saw him in the moonlight among the trees. The impetuousness, almost the violence of his hurry to reach her, sent its thrill through her. She went down on the path to meet him.
"How quickly you came!"
"You let yourself think you needed me, Connie!"
"I did..."
He had caught her hand in his and he held it while he brought her to the porch and exchanged greetings with her mother. Then he led her on past and into the house.
When she saw his face, in the light, there were signs of strain in it; she could feel strain now in his fingers which held hers strongly but tensely too.
"You're tired, Henry!"
He shook his head. "It's been rotten hot in Chicago; then I guess I was mentally stoking all the way up here, Connie. When I got started, I wanted to see you to-night ... but first, where are the things you wanted me to see?"
She ran up-stairs and brought them down to him. Her hands were shaking now as she gave them to him; she could not exactly understand why; but her tremor increased as she saw his big hands fumbling as he unwrapped the muffler and shook out the things it enclosed. He took them up one by one and looked at them, as she had done. His fingers were steady now but only by mastering of control, the effort for which amazed her.
He had the watch in his hands.
"The inscription is inside the front," she said.
She pried the cover open again and read, with him, the words engraved within.
"'As master of...' What ship was he master of then, Henry, and how did he rescue theWinnebago'speople?"
"He never talked to me about things like that, Connie. This is all?"
"Yes."
"And nothing since to show who sent them?"
"No."
"Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman will send some one to Manitowoc to make inquiries." Henry put the things back in the box. "But of course, this is the end of Benjamin Corvet."
"Of course," Constance said. She was shaking again and, without willing it, she withdrew a little from Henry. He caught her hand again and drew her back toward him. His hand was quite steady.
"You know why I came to you as quick as I could? You know why I—why my mind was behind every thrust of the engines?"
"No."
"You don't? Oh, you know; you must know now!"
"Yes, Henry," she said.
"I've been patient, Connie. Till I got your letter telling me this about Ben, I'd waited for your sake—for our sakes—though it seemed at times it was impossible. You haven't known quite what's been the matter between us these last months, little girl; but I've known. We've been engaged; but that's about all there's been to it. Don't think I make little of that; you know what I mean. You've been mine; but—but you haven't let me realize it, you see. And I've been patient, for I knew the reason. It was Ben poisoning your mind against me."
"No! No, Henry!"
"You've denied it; I've recognized that you've denied it, not only to me and to your people but to yourself. I, of course, knew, as I know that I am here with your hand in mine, and as we will stand before the altar together, that he had no cause to speak against me. I've waited, Connie, to give him a chance to say to you what he had to say; I wanted you to hear it before making you wholly mine. But now there's no need to wait any longer, you and I. Ben's gone, never to come back. I was sure of that by what you wrote me, so this time when I started to you I brought with me—this."
He felt in his pocket and brought out a ring of plain gold; he held it before her so that she could see within it her own initials and his and a blank left for the date. Her gaze went from it for an instant to the box where he had put back the other ring—Alan's mother's. Feeling for her long ago gazing thus, as she must have, at that ring, held her for a moment. Was it because of that that Constance found herself cold now?
"You mean you want me to marry you—at once, Henry?"
He drew her to him powerfully; she felt him warm, almost rough with passions. Since that day when, in Alan Conrad's presence, he had grasped and kissed her, she had not let him "realize" their engagement, as he had put it.
"Why not?" he turned her face up to his now. "Your mother's here; your father will follow soon; or, if you will, we'll run away—Constance! You've kept me off so long! You don't believe there's anything against me, dear? Do you? Do you?
"No; no! Of course not!"
"Then we're going to be married.... We're going to be married, aren't we? Aren't we, Constance?"
"Yes; yes, of course."
"Right away, we'll have it then; up here; now!"
"No; not now, Henry. Not up here!"
"Not here? Why not?"
She could give no answer. He held her and commanded her again; only when he frightened her, he ceased.
"Whymustit be at once, Henry? I don't understand!"
"It's not must, dear," he denied. "It's just that I want you so!"
When would it be, he demanded then; before spring, she promised at last. But that was all he could make her say. And so he let her go.
The next evening, in the moonlight, she drove him to Petoskey. He had messages to send and preferred to trust the telegraph office in the larger town. Returning they swung out along the country roads. The night was cool here on the hills, under the stars; the fan-shaped glare from their headlights, blurring the radiance of the moon, sent dancing before them swiftly-changing, distorted shadows of the dusty bushes beside the road. Topping a rise, they came suddenly upon his birthplace. She had not designed coming to that place, but she had taken a turn at his direction, and now he asked her to stop the car. He got out and paced about, calling to her and pointing out the desirableness of the spot as the site for their country home. She sat in the motor, watching him and calling back to him.
The house was small, log built, the chinks between the logs stopped with clay. Across the road from it, the silver bark of the birch trees gleamed white among the black-barked timber. Smells of rank vegetation came to her from these woods and from the weed-grown fields about and beyond the house. There had been a small garden beside the house once; now neglected strawberry vines ran riot among the weed stems, and a clump of sunflowers stood with hanging, full-blown heads under the August moon.
She gazed proudly at Henry's strong, well proportioned figure moving about in the moonlight, and she was glad to think that a boy from this house had become the man that he was. But when she tried to think of him as a child here, her mind somehow showed her Alan playing about the sunflowers; and the place was not here; it was the brown, Kansas prairie of which he had told her.
"Sunflower houses," she murmured to herself. "Sunflower houses. They used to cut the stalks and build shacks with them."
"What's that?" Henry said; he had come back near her.
The warm blood rushed to her face. "Nothing," she said, a little ashamed. She opened the door beside her. "Come; we'll go back home now."
Coming from that poor little place, and having made of himself what he had, Henry was such a man as she would be ever proud to have for a husband; there was no man whom she had known who had proved himself as much a man as he. Yet now, as she returned to the point, she was thinking of this lake country not only as Henry's land but as Alan Conrad's too. In some such place he also had been born—born by the mother whose ring waited him in the box in her room.
Alan, upon the morning of the second of these days, was driving northward along the long, sandy peninsula which separates the blue waters of Grand Traverse from Lake Michigan; and, thinking of her, he knew that she was near. He not only had remembered that she would be north at Harbor Point this month; he had seen in one of the Petoskey papers that she and her mother were at the Sherrill summer home. His business now was taking him nearer them than he had been at any time before; and, if he wished to weaken, he might convince himself that he might learn from her circumstances which would aid him in his task. But he was not going to her for help; that was following in his father's footsteps. When he knew everything, then—not till then—he could go to her; for then he would know exactly what was upon him and what he should do.
His visits to the people named on those sheets written by his father had been confusing at first; he had had great difficulty in tracing some of them at all; and, afterwards, he could uncover no certain connection either between them and Benjamin Corvet or between themselves. But recently, he had been succeeding better in this latter.
He had seen—he reckoned them over again—fourteen of the twenty-one named originally on Benjamin Corvet's lists; that is, he had seen either the individual originally named, or the surviving relative written in below the name crossed off. He had found that the crossing out of the name meant that the person was dead, except in the case of two who had left the country and whose whereabouts were as unknown to their present relatives as they had been to Benjamin Corvet, and the case of one other, who was in an insane asylum.
He had found that no one of the persons whom he saw had known Benjamin Corvet personally; many of them did not know him at all, the others knew him only as a name. But, when Alan proceeded, always there was one connotation with each of the original names; always one circumstance bound all together. When he had established that circumstance as influencing the fortunes of the first two on his lists, he had said to himself, as the blood pricked queerly under the skin, that the fact might be a mere coincidence. When he established it also as affecting the fate of the third and of the fourth and of the fifth, such explanation no longer sufficed; and he found it in common to all fourteen, sometimes as the deciding factor of their fate, sometimes as only slightly affecting them, but always it was there.
In how many different ways, in what strange, diverse manifestations that single circumstance had spread to those people whom Alan had interviewed! No two of them had been affected alike, he reckoned, as he went over his notes of them. Now he was going to trace those consequences to another. To what sort of place would it bring him to-day and what would he find there? He knew only that it would be quite distinct from the rest.
The driver beside whom he sat on the front seat of the little automobile was an Indian; an Indian woman and two round-faced silent children occupied the seat behind. He had met these people in the early morning on the road, bound, he discovered, to the annual camp meeting of the Methodist Indians at Northport. They were going his way, and they knew the man of whom he was in search; so he had hired a ride of them. The region through which they were traveling now was of farms, but interspersed with desolate, waste fields where blackened stumps and rotting windfalls remained after the work of the lumberers. The hills and many of the hollows were wooded; there were even places where lumbering was still going on. To his left across the water, the twin Manitous broke the horizon, high and round and blue with haze. To his right, from the higher hilltops, he caught glimpses of Grand Traverse and of the shores to the north, rising higher, dimmer, and more blue, where they broke for Little Traverse and where Constance Sherrill was, two hours away across the water; but he had shut his mind to that thought.
The driver turned now into a rougher road, bearing more to the east.
They passed people more frequently now—groups in farm wagons, or groups or single individuals, walking beside the road. All were going in the same direction as themselves, and nearly all were Indians, drab dressed figures attired obviously in their best clothes. Some walked barefoot, carrying new shoes in their hands, evidently to preserve them from the dust. They saluted gravely Alan's driver, who returned their salutes—"B'jou!" "B'jou!"
Traveling eastward, they had lost sight of Lake Michigan; and suddenly the wrinkled blueness of Grand Traverse appeared quite close to them. The driver turned aside from the road across a cleared field where ruts showed the passing of many previous vehicles; crossing this, they entered the woods. Little fires for cooking burned all about them, and nearer were parked an immense number of farm wagons and buggies, with horses unharnessed and munching grain. Alan's guide found a place among these for his automobile, and they got out and went forward on foot. All about them, seated upon the moss or walking about, were Indians, family groups among which children played. A platform had been built under the trees; on it some thirty Indians, all men, sat in straight-backed chairs; in front of and to the sides of the platform, an audience of several hundred occupied benches, and around the borders of the meeting others were gathered, merely observing. A very old Indian, with inordinately wrinkled skin and dressed in a frock coat, was addressing these people from the platform in the Indian tongue.
Alan halted beside his guide. He saw among the drab-clad figures looking on, the brighter dresses and sport coats of summer visitors who had come to watch. The figure of a girl among these caught his attention, and he started; then swiftly he told himself that it was only his thinking of Constance Sherrill that made him believe this was she. But now she had seen him; she paled, then as quickly flushed, and leaving the group she had been with, came toward him.
He had no choice now whether he would avoid her or not; and his happiness at seeing her held him stupid, watching her. Her eyes were very bright and with something more than friendly greeting; there was happiness in them too. His throat shut together as he recognized this, and his hand closed warmly over the small, trembling hand which she put out to him. All his conscious thought was lost for the moment in the mere realization of her presence; he stood, holding her hand, oblivious that there were people looking; she too seemed careless of that. Then she whitened again and withdrew her hand; she seemed slightly confused. He was confused as well; it was not like this that he had meant to greet her; he caught himself together.
Cap in hand, he stood beside her, trying to look and to feel as any ordinary acquaintance of hers would have looked.
"So they got word to you!" Constance exclaimed; she seemed still confused. "Oh, no—of course they couldn't have done that! They've hardly got my letter yet."
"Your letter?" Alan asked.
"I wrote to Blue Rapids," she explained. "Some things came—they were sent to me. Some things of Uncle Benny's which were meant for you instead of me."
"You mean you've heard from him?"
"No—not that."
"What things, Miss Sherrill?"
"A watch of his and some coins and—a ring." She did not explain the significance of those things, and he could not tell from her mere enumeration of them and without seeing them that they furnished proof that his father was dead. She could not inform him of that, she felt, just here and now.
"I'll tell you about that later. You—you were coming to Harbor Point to see us?"
He colored. "I'm afraid not. I got as near as this to you because there is a man—an Indian—I have to see."
"An Indian? What is his name? You see, I know quite a lot of them."
"Jo Papo."
She shook her head. "No; I don't know him."
She had drawn him a little away from the crowd about the meeting. His blood was beating hard with recognition of her manner toward him. Whatever he was, whatever the disgrace might be that his father had left to him, she was still resolute to share in it. He had known she would be so. She found a spot where the moss was covered with dry pine needles and sat down upon the ground.
"Sit down," she invited; "I want you to tell me what you have been doing."
"I've been on the boats." He dropped down upon the moss beside her. "It's a—wonderful business, Miss Sherrill; I'll never be able to go away from the water again. I've been working rather hard at my new profession—studying it, I mean. Until yesterday I was a not very highly honored member of the crew of the package freighterOscoda; I left her at Frankfort and came up here."
"Is Wassaquam with you?"
"He wasn't on theOscoda; but he was with me at first. Now, I believe, he has gone back to his own people—to Middle Village."
"You mean you've been looking for Mr. Corvet in that way?"
"Not exactly that." He hesitated; but he could see no reason for not telling what he had been doing. He had not so much hidden from her and her father what he had found in Benjamin Corvet's house; rather, he had refrained from mentioning it in his notes to them when he left Chicago because he had thought that the lists would lead to an immediate explanation; they had not led to that, but only to a suggestion, indefinite as jet. He had known that, if his search finally developed nothing more than it had, he must at last consult Sherrill and get Sherrill's aid.
"We found some writing, Miss Sherrill," he said, "in the house on Astor Street that night after Luke came."
"What writing?"
He took the lists from his pocket and showed them to her. She separated and looked through the sheets and read the names written in the same hand that had written the directions upon the slip of paper that came to her four days before, with the things from Uncle Benny's pockets.
"My father had kept these very secretly," he explained. "He had them hidden. Wassaquam knew where they were, and that night after Luke was dead and you had gone home, he gave them to me."
"After I had gone home? Henry went back to see you that night; he had said he was going back, and afterwards I asked him, and he told me he had seen you again. Did you show him these?"
"He saw them—yes."
"He was there when Wassaquam showed you where they were?"
"Yes."
A little line deepened between her brows, and she sat thoughtful.
"So you have been going about seeing these people," she said. "What have you found out?"
"Nothing definite at all. None of them knew my father; they were only amazed to find that any one in Chicago had known their names."
She got up suddenly. "You don't mind if I am with you when you talk with this Indian?"
He arose and looked around for the guide who had brought him. His guide had been standing near, evidently waiting until Alan's attention was turned his way; he gestured now toward a man, a woman, and several children who were lunching, seated about a basket on the ground. The man—thin, patient and of medium size—was of the indefinite age of the Indian, neither young nor yet old. It was evident that life had been hard for the man; he looked worn and undernourished; his clothing was the cast-off suit of some one much larger which had been inexpertly altered to make it fit him. As Alan and Constance approached them, the group turned on them their dark, inexpressive eyes, and the woman got up, but the man remained seated on the ground.
"I'm looking for Jo Papo," Alan explained.
"What you want?" the squaw asked. "You got work?" The words were pronounced with difficulty and evidently composed most of her English vocabulary.
"I want to see him, that's all." Alan turned to the man. "You're Jo Papo, aren't you?"
The Indian assented by an almost imperceptible nod.
"You used to live near Escanaba, didn't you?"
Jo Papo considered before replying; either his scrutiny of Alan reassured him, or he recalled nothing having to do with his residence near Escanaba which disturbed him. "Yes; once," he said.
"Your father was Azen Papo?"
"He's dead," the Indian replied. "Not my father, anyway. Grandfather. What about him?"
"That's what I want to ask you," Alan said. "When did he die and how?"
Jo Papo got up and stood leaning his back against a tree. So far from being one who was merely curious about Indians, this stranger perhaps was coming about an Indian claim—to give money maybe for injustices done in the past.
"My grandfather die fifteen years ago," he informed them. "From cough, I think."
"Where was that?" Alan asked.
"Escanaba—near there."
"What did he do?"
"Take people to shoot deer—fish—a guide. I think he plant a little too."
"He didn't work on the boats?"
"No; my father, he work on the boats."
"What was his name?"
"Like me; Jo Papo too. He's dead."
"What is your Indian name?"
"Flying Eagle."
"What boats did your father work on?"
"Many boats."
"What did he do?"
"Deck hand."
"What boat did he work on last?"
"Last? How do I know? He went away one year and didn't come back? I suppose he was drowned from a boat."
"What year was that?"
"I was little then; I do not know."
"How old were you?"
"Maybe eight years; maybe nine or ten."
"How old are you now?"
"Thirty, maybe."
"Did you ever hear of Benjamin Corvet?"
"Who?"
"Benjamin Corvet."
"No."
Alan turned to Constance; she had been listening intently, but she made no comment. "That is all, then," he said to Papo; "if I find out anything to your advantage, I'll let you know." He had aroused, he understood, expectations of benefit in these poor Indians. Something rose in Alan's throat and choked him. Those of whom Benjamin Corvet had so laboriously kept trace were, very many of them, of the sort of these Indians; that they had never heard of Benjamin Corvet was not more significant than that they were people of whose existence Benjamin Corvet could not have been expected to be aware. What conceivable bond could there have been between Alan's father and such poor people as these? Had his father wronged these people? Had he owed them something? This thought, which had been growing stronger with each succeeding step of Alan's investigations, chilled and horrified him now. Revolt against his father more active than ever before seized him, revolt stirring stronger with each recollection of his interviews with the people upon his list. As they walked away, Constance appreciated that he was feeling something deeply; she too was stirred.
"They all—all I have talked to—are like that," he said to her. "They all have lost some one upon the lakes."
In her feeling for him, she had laid her hand upon his arm; now her fingers tightened to sudden tenseness. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"Oh, it is not definite yet—not clear!" She felt the bitterness in his tone. "They have not any of them been able to make it wholly clear to me. It is like a record that has been—blurred. These original names must have been written down by my father many years ago—many, most of those people, I think—are dead; some are nearly forgotten. The only thing that is fully plain is that in every case my inquiries have led me to those who have lost one, and sometimes more than one relative upon the lakes."
Constance thrilled to a vague horror; it was not anything to which she could give definite reason. His tone quite as much as what he said was its cause. His experience plainly had been forcing him to bitterness against his father; and he did not know with certainty yet that his father was dead.
She had not found it possible to tell him that yet; now consciously she deferred telling him until she could take him to her home and show him what had come. The shrill whistling of the power yacht in which she and her party had come recalled to her that all were to return to the yacht for luncheon, and that they must be waiting for her.
"You'll lunch with us, of course," she said to Alan, "and then go back with us to Harbor Point. It's a day's journey around the two bays; but we've a boat here."
He assented, and they went down to the water where the white and brown power yacht, with long, graceful lines, lay somnolently in the sunlight. A little boat took them out over the shimmering, smooth surface to the ship; swells from a faraway freighter swept under the beautiful, burnished craft, causing it to roll lazily as they boarded it. A party of nearly a dozen men and girls, with an older woman chaperoning them, lounged under the shade of an awning over the after deck. They greeted her gaily and looked curiously at Alan as she introduced him.
As he returned their rather formal acknowledgments and afterward fell into general conversation with them, she became for the first time fully aware of how greatly he had changed from what he had been when he had come to them six months before in Chicago. These gay, wealthy loungers would have dismayed him then, and he would have been equally dismayed by the luxury of the carefully appointed yacht; now he was not thinking at all about what these people might think of him. In return, they granted him consideration. It was not, she saw that they accepted him as one of their own sort, or as some ordinary acquaintance of hers; if they accounted for him to themselves at all, they must believe him to be some officer employed upon her father's ships. He looked like that—with his face darkened and reddened by the summer sun and in his clothing like that of a ship's officer ashore. He had not weakened under the disgrace which Benjamin Corvet had left to him, whatever that might be; he had grown stronger facing it. A lump rose in her throat as she realized that the lakes had been setting their seal upon him, as upon the man whose strength and resourcefulness she loved.
"Have you worked on any of our boats?" she asked him, after luncheon had been finished, and the anchor of the ship had been raised.
A queer expression came upon his face. "I've thought it best not to do that, Miss Sherrill," he replied.
She did not know why the next moment she should think of Henry.
"Henry was going to bring us over in his yacht—theChippewa," she said. "But he was called away suddenly yesterday on business to St. Ignace and used his boat to go over there."
"He's at Harbor Point, then."
"He got there a couple of nights ago and will be back again to-night or to-morrow morning."
The yacht was pushing swiftly, smoothly, with hardly a hum from its motors, north along the shore. He watched intently the rolling, wooded hills and the ragged little bays and inlets. His work and his investigatings had not brought him into the neighborhood before, but she found that she did not have to name the places to him; he knew them from the charts.
"Grand Traverse Light," he said to her as a white tower showed upon their left. Then, leaving the shore, they pushed out across the wide mouth of the larger bay toward Little Traverse. He grew more silent as they approached it.
"It is up there, isn't it," he asked, pointing, "that they hear the Drum?"
"Yes; how did you know the place?"
"I don't know it exactly; I want you to show me."
She pointed out to him the copse, dark, primeval, blue in its contrast with the lighter green of the trees about it and the glistening white of the shingle and of the more distant sand bluffs. He leaned forward, staring at it, until the changed course of the yacht, as it swung about toward the entrance to the bay, obscured it. They were meeting other power boats now of their yacht's own size and many smaller; they passed white-sailed sloops and cat-boats, almost becalmed, with girls and boys diving from their sides and swimming about. As they neared the Point, a panorama of play such as, she knew, he scarcely could have seen before, was spread in front of them. The sun gleamed back from the white sides and varnished decks and shining brasswork of a score or more of cruising yachts and many smaller vessels lying in the anchorage.
"The Chicago to Mackinac yacht race starts this week, and the cruiser fleet is working north to be in at the finish," she offered. Then she saw he was not looking at these things; he was studying with a strange expression the dark, uneven hills which shut in the two towns and the bay.
"You remember how the ship rhymes you told me and that about Michabou and seeing the ships made me feel that I belonged here on the lakes," he reminded her. "I have felt something—not recognition exactly, but something that was like the beginning of recognition—many times this summer when I saw certain places. It's like one of those dreams, you know, in which you are conscious of having had the same dream before. I feel that I ought to know this place."
They landed only a few hundred yards from the cottage. After bidding good-by to her friends, they went up to it together through the trees. There was a small sun room, rather shut off from the rest of the house, to which she led him. Leaving him there, she ran upstairs to get the things.
She halted an instant beside the door, with the box in her hands, before she went back to him, thinking how to prepare him against the significance of these relics of his father. She need not prepare him against the mere fact of his father's death; he had been beginning to believe that already; but these things must have far more meaning for him than merely that. They must frustrate one course of inquiry for him at the same time they opened another; they would close for him forever the possibility of ever learning anything about himself from his father; they would introduce into his problem some new, some unknown person—the sender of these things.
She went in and put the box down upon the card table.
"The muffler in the box was your father's," she told him. "He had it on the day he disappeared. The other things," her voice choked a little, "are the things he must have had in his pockets. They've been lying in water and sand—"
He gazed at her. "I understand," he said after an instant. "You mean that they prove his death."
She assented gently, without speaking. As he approached the box, she drew back from it and slipped away into the next room. She walked up and down there, pressing her hands together. He must be looking at the things now, unrolling the muffler.... What would he be feeling as he saw them? Would he be glad, with that same gladness which had mingled with her own sorrow over Uncle Benny, that his father was gone—gone from his guilt and his fear and his disgrace? Or would he resent that death which thus left everything unexplained to him? He would be looking at the ring. That, at least, must bring more joy than grief to him. He would recognize that it must be his mother's wedding ring; if it told him that his mother must be dead, it would tell him that she had been married, or had believed that she was married!
Suddenly she heard him calling her. "Miss Sherrill!" His voice had a sharp thrill of excitement.
She hurried toward the sun room. She could see him through the doorway, bending over the card table with the things spread out upon its top in front of him.
"Miss Sherrill!" he called again.
"Yes."
He straightened; he was very pale. "Would coins that my father had in his pocket all have been more than twenty years old?"
She ran and bent beside him over the coins. "Twenty years!" she repeated. She was making out the dates of the coins now herself; the markings were eroded, nearly gone in some instances, but in every case enough remained to make plain the date. "Eighteen-ninety—1893—1889," she made them out. Her voice hushed queerly. "What does it mean?" she whispered.
He turned over and reexamined the articles with hands suddenly steadying. "There are two sets of things here," he concluded. "The muffler and paper of directions—they belonged to my father. The other things—it isn't six months or less than six months that they've lain in sand and water to become worn like this; it's twenty years. My father can't have had these things; they were somewhere else, or some one else had them. He wrote his directions to that person—after June twelfth, he said, so it was before June twelfth he wrote it; but we can't tell how long before. It might have been in February, when he disappeared; it might have been any time after that. But if the directions were written so long ago, why weren't the things sent to you before this? Didn't the person have the things then? Did we have to wait to get them? Or—was it the instructions to send them that he didn't have? Or, if he had the instructions, was he waiting to receive word when they were to be sent?"
"To receive word?" she echoed.
"Word from my father! You thought these things proved my father was dead. I think they prove he is alive! Oh, we must think this out!"
He paced up and down the room; she sank into a chair, watching him. "The first thing that we must do," he said suddenly, "is to find out about the watch. What is the 'phone number of the telegraph office?"
She told him, and he went out to the telephone; she sprang up to follow him, but checked herself and merely waited until he came back.
"I've wired to Buffalo," he announced. "The Merchants' Exchange, if it is still in existence, must have a record of the presentation of the watch. At any rate, the wreck of theWinnebagoand the name of the skipper of the other boat must be in the files of the newspapers of that time."
"Then you'll stay here with us until an answer comes."
"If we get a reply by to-morrow morning; I'll wait till then. If not, I'll ask you to forward it to me. I must see about the trains and get back to Frankfort. I can cross by boat from there to Manitowoc—that will be quickest. We must begin there, by trying to find out who sent the package."
"Henry Spearman's already sent to have that investigated."
Alan made no reply; but she saw his lips draw tighter quickly. "I must go myself as soon as I can," he said, after a moment.
She helped him put the muffler and the other articles back into the box; she noticed that the wedding ring was no longer with them. He had taken that, then; it had meant to him all that she had known it must mean....
In the morning she was up very early; but Alan, the servants told her, had risen before she had and had gone out. The morning, after the cool northern night, was chill. She slipped a sweater on and went out on the veranda, looking about for him. An iridescent haze shrouded the hills and the bay; in it she heard a ship's bell strike twice; then another struck twice—then another—and another—and another. The haze thinned as the sun grew warmer, showing the placid water of the bay on which the ships stood double—a real ship and a mirrored one. She saw Alan returning, and knowing from the direction from which he came that he must have been to the telegraph office, she ran to meet him.
"Was there an answer?" she inquired eagerly.
He took a yellow telegraph sheet from his pocket and held it for her to read.
"Watch presented Captain Caleb Stafford, master of propeller freighterMarvin Halchfor rescue of crew and passengers of sinking steamerWinnebagooff Long Point, Lake Erie."
She was breathing quickly in her excitement. "Caleb Stafford!" she exclaimed. "Why, that was Captain Stafford of Stafford and Ramsdell! They owned theMiwaka!"
"Yes," Alan said.
"You asked me about that ship—theMiwaka—that first morning at breakfast!"
"Yes."
A great change had come over him since last night; he was under emotion so strong that he seemed scarcely to dare to speak lest it master him—a leaping, exultant impulse it was, which he fought to keep down.
"What is it, Alan?" she asked. "What is it about theMiwaka? You said you'd found some reference to it in Uncle Benny's house. What was it? What did you find there?"
"The man—" Alan swallowed and steadied himself and repeated—"the man I met in the house that night mentioned it."
"The man who thought you were a ghost?"
"Yes."
"How—how did he mention it?"
"He seemed to think I was a ghost that had haunted Mr. Corvet—the ghost from theMiwaka; at least he shouted out to me that I couldn't save theMiwaka!"
"Save theMiwaka! What do you mean, Alan? TheMiwakawas lost with all her people—officers and crew—no one knows how or where!"
"All except the one for whom the Drum didn't beat!"
"What's that?" Blood pricked in her cheeks. "What do you mean, Alan?"
"I don't know yet; but I think I'll soon find out!"
"No; you can tell me more now, Alan. Surely you can. I must know. I have the right to know. Yesterday, even before you found out about this, you knew things you weren't telling me—things about the people you'd been seeing. They'd all lost people on the lakes, you said; but you found out more than that."
"They'd all lost people on theMiwaka!" he said. "All who could tell me where their people were lost; a few were like Jo Papo we saw yesterday, who knew only the year his father was lost; but the time always was the time that theMiwakadisappeared!"
"Disappeared!" she repeated. Her veins were pricking cold. What did he know, what could any one know of theMiwaka, the ship of which nothing ever was heard except the beating of the Indian Drum? She tried to make him say more; but he looked away now down to the lake.
"TheChippewamust have come in early this morning," he said. "She's lying in the harbor; I saw her on my way to the telegraph office. If Mr. Spearman has come back with her, tell him I'm sorry I can't wait to see him."
"When are you going?"
"Now."
She offered to drive him to Petoskey, but he already had arranged for a man to take him to the train.
She went to her room after he was gone and spread out again on her bed the watch—now the watch of Captain Stafford of theMiwaka—with the knife and coins of more than twenty years ago which came with it. The meaning of them now was all changed; she felt that; but what the new meaning might be could not yet come to her. Something of it had come to Alan; that, undoubtedly, was what had so greatly stirred him; but she could not yet reassemble her ideas. Yet a few facts had become plain.
A maid came to say that Mr. Spearman had come up from his boat for breakfast with her and was downstairs. She went down to find Henry lounging in one of the great wicker chairs in the living room. He arose and came toward her quickly; but she halted before he could seize her.
"I got back, Connie—"
"Yes; I heard you did."
"What's wrong, dear?"
"Alan Conrad has been here, Henry."
"He has? How was that?"
She told him while he watched her intently. "He wired to Buffalo about the watch. He got a reply which he brought to me half an hour ago."
"Yes?"
"The watch belonged to Captain Stafford who was lost with theMiwaka, Henry."
He made no reply; but waited.
"You may not have known that it was his; I mean, you may not have known that it was he who rescued the people of theWinnebago, but you must have known that Uncle Benny didn't."
"Yes; I knew that, Connie," he answered evenly.
"Then why did you let me think the watch was his and that he must be—dead?"
"That's all's the matter? You had thought he was dead. I believed it was better for you—for every one—to believe that."
She drew a little away from him, with hands clasped behind her back, gazing intently at him. "There was some writing found in Uncle Benny's house in Astor Street—a list of names of relatives of people who had lost their lives upon the lake. Wassaquam knew where those things were. Alan says they were given to him in your presence."
She saw the blood rise darkly under his skin. "That is true, Connie."
"Why didn't you tell me about that?"
He straightened as if with anger. "Why should I? Because he thought that I should? What did he tell you about those lists?"
"I asked you, after you went back, if anything else had happened, Henry, and you said, 'nothing.' I should not have considered the finding of those lists 'nothing.'"
"Why not? What were they but names? What has he told you they were, Connie? What has he said to you?"
"Nothing—except that his father had kept them very secretly; but he's found out they were names of people who had relatives on theMiwaka!"
"What?"
Recalling how her blood had run when Alan had told her that, Henry's whiteness and the following suffusion of his face did not surprise her.
He turned away a moment and considered. "Where's Conrad now, Connie?"
"He's gone to Frankfort to cross to Manitowoc."
"To get deeper into that mess, I suppose. He'll only be sorry."
"Sorry?"
"I told that fellow long ago not to start stirring these matters up about Ben Corvet, and particularly I told him that he was not to bring any of it to you. It's not—a thing that a man like Ben covered up for twenty years till it drove him crazy is sure not to be a thing for a girl to know. Conrad seems to have paid no attention to me. But I should think by this time he ought to begin to suspect what sort of thing he's going to turn up. I don't know; but I certainly suspect—Ben leaving everything to that boy, whom no one had heard of, and the sort of thing which has come up since. It's certainly not going to be anything pleasant for any of us, Connie—for you, or your father, or for me, or for anybody who'd cared for Ben, or had been associated with him. Least of all, I should say, would it prove anything pleasant for Conrad. Ben ran away from it, because he knew what it was; why doesn't this fellow let him stay away from it?"
"He—I mean Alan, Henry," she said, "isn't thinking about himself in this; he isn't thinking about his father. He believes—he is certain now—that, whatever his father did, he injured some one; and his idea in going ahead—he hasn't told it to me that way, but I know—is to find out the whole matter in order that he may make recompense. It's a terrible thing, whatever happened. He knows that, and I know; but he wants—and I want him for his sake, even for Uncle Benny's sake—to see it through."
"Then it's a queer concern you've got for Ben! Let it alone, I tell you."
She stood flushed and perplexed, gazing at him. She never had seen him under stronger emotion.
"You misunderstood me once, Connie!" he appealed. "You'll understand me now!"
She had been thinking about that injustice she had done him in her thought—about his chivalry to his partner and former benefactor, when Uncle Benny was still keeping his place among men. Was Henry now moved, in a way which she could not understand, by some other obligation to the man who long ago had aided him? Had Henry hazarded more than he had told her of the nature of the thing hidden which, if she could guess it, would justify what he said?
In the confusion of her thought, one thing came clearly which troubled her and of which she could not speak. The watch of Captain Stafford's and the ring and the coins, which had made her believe that Uncle Benny was dead, had not been proof of that to Henry. Yet he had taken advantage of her belief, without undeceiving her, to urge her to marry him at once.
She knew of the ruthlessness of Henry's business life; he had forced down, overcome all who opposed him, and he had made full use for his own advantage of other men's mistakes and erroneous beliefs and opinions. If he had used her belief in Uncle Benny's death to hasten their marriage, it was something which others—particularly she—could pardon and accept.
If she was drawn to him for his strength and dominance, which sometimes ran into ruthlessness, she had no right to complain if he turned it thus upon her.
She had made Alan promise to write her, if he was not to return, regarding what he learned; and a letter came to her on the fourth day from him in Manitowoc. The postoffice employees had no recollection, he said, of the person who had mailed the package; it simply had been dropped by some one into the receptacle for mailing packages of that sort. They did not know the handwriting upon the wrapper, which he had taken with him; nor was it known at the bank or in any of the stores where he had shown it. The shoe dealer had no recollection of that particular box. Alan, however, was continuing his inquiries.
In September he reported in a brief, totally impersonal note, that he was continuing with the investigations he had been making previous to his visit to Harbor Point; this came from Sarnia, Ontario. In October he sent a different address where he could be found in case anything more came, such as the box which had come to Constance in August.
She wrote to him in reply each time; in lack of anything more important to tell him, she related some of her activities and inquired about his. After she had written him thus twice, he replied, describing his life on the boats pleasantly and humorously; then, though she immediately replied, she did not hear from him again.
She had returned to Chicago late in September and soon was very busy with social affairs, benefits, and bazaars which were given that fall for the Red Cross and the different Allied causes; a little later came a series of the more personal and absorbing luncheons and dances and dinners for her and for Henry, since their engagement, which long had been taken for granted by every one who knew them, was announced now. So the days drifted into December and winter again.
The lake, beating against the esplanade across the Drive before Constance's windows, had changed its color; it had no longer its autumn blue and silver; it was gray, sluggish with floating needle-points of ice held in solution. The floe had not yet begun to form, but the piers and breakwaters had white ice caps frozen from spray—harbingers of the closing of navigation. The summer boats, those of Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman with the rest, were being tied up. The birds were gone; only the gulls remained—gray, clamorous shapes circling and calling to one another across the water. Early in December the newspapers announced the closing of the locks at the "Soo" by the ice.
That she had not heard from Alan was beginning to recur to Constance with strange insistence. He must have left the boats by now, unless he had found work on one of those few which ran through the winter.
He and his occupation, instead of slipping from her thoughts with time, absorbed her more and more. Soon after he had gone to Manitowoc and he had written that he had discovered nothing, she had gone to the office of the Petoskey paper and, looking back over the twenty-year-old files, she had read the account of the loss of theMiwaka, with all on board. That fate was modified only by the Indian Drum beating short. So one man from theMiwakahad been saved somehow, many believed. If that could have been, there was, or there had been, some one alive after the ship "disappeared"—Alan's word went through her with a chill—who knew what had happened to the ship and who knew of the fate of his shipmates.
She had gone over the names again; if there was meaning in the Drum, who was the man who had been saved and visited that fate on Benjamin Corvet? Was it Luke? There was no Luke named among the crew; but such men often went by many names. If Luke had been among the crew of theMiwakaand had brought from that lost ship something which threatened Uncle Benny that, at least, explained Luke.