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."
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: