Constance Sherrill had come in a few moments before from an afternoon reception; the servants told her at once that something was happening at Mr. Corvet's. They had heard shouts and had seen a man pounding upon the door there, but they had not taken it upon themselves to go over there. She had told the chauffeur to wait with the motor and had run at once to the telephone and called Alan; his attempt to put her off made her certain that what had happened was not finished but was still going on. Her anxiety and the sense of their responsibility for Alan overrode at once all other thought. She told the servants to call her father at the office and tell him something was wrong at Mr. Corvet's; then she called her maid and hurried out to the motor.
"To Mr. Corvet's—quickly!" she directed.
Looking through the front doors of her car as it turned into Astor Street, she saw a young man, carrying a doctor's case, run up the steps of Corvet's house. This, quite unreasonably since she had just talked with Alan, added to her alarm; she put her hand on the catch of the door and opened it a little so as to be ready to leave the car as soon as it stopped. As the car drew to the curb, she sprang out, and stopped only long enough to tell the chauffeur to be attentive and to wait ready to come into the house, if he was called.
The man with the bag—Constance recognized him as a young doctor who was starting in practice in the neighborhood—was just being admitted as she and her maid reached the steps. Alan stood holding the door open and yet blocking entrance when she came up. The sight of him told her that it was not physical hurt that happened to him, but his face showed her there had been basis for her fright.
"You must not come in!" he denied her; but she followed the doctor so that Alan could not close the door upon her. He yielded then, and she and her maid went on into the hall.
She started as she saw the figure upon the couch in the library, and as the sound of its heavy breathing reached her; and the wild fancy which had come to her when the servants had told her of what was going on—a fancy that Uncle Benny had come back—was banished instantly.
Alan led her into the room across from the library.
"You shouldn't have come in," he said. "I shouldn't have let you in; but—you saw him."
"Yes."
"Do you know him?"
"Know him?" She shook her head.
"I mean, you've never seen him before?"
"No."
"His name is Luke—he speaks of himself by that name. Did you ever hear my father mention a man named Luke?"
"No; never."
Luke's voice cut suddenly their conversation; the doctor probably had given him some stimulant.
"Where'sh Ben Corvet?" Luke demanded arrogantly of the doctor. "You go get Ben Corvet! Tell Ben Corvet I want drink right away. Tell Ben Corvet I want my thousan' dollar...!"
Constance turned swiftly to her maid. "Go out to the car and wait for me," she commanded.
Luke's muffled, heavy voice went on; moments while he fought for breath interrupted it.
"You hear me, you damn Injin! ... You go tell Ben Corvet I want my thousan' dollars, or I make it two nex' time! You hear me; you go tell Ben Corvet.... You let me go, you damn Injin!"...
Through the doorway to the library they could see the doctor force Luke back upon the couch; Luke fought him furiously; then, suddenly as he had stirred to strength and fury, Luke collapsed again. His voice went on a moment more, rapidly growing weaker:
"You tell Ben Corvet I want my money, or I'll tell. He knows what I'll tell.... You don't know, you Injin devil.... Ben Corvet knows, and I know.... Tell him I'll tell ... I'll tell ... I'll tell!" The threatening voice stopped suddenly.
Constance, very pale, again faced Alan. "Of course, I understand," she said. "Uncle Benny has been paying blackmail to this man. For years, perhaps...." She repeated the word after an instant, in a frightened voice, "Blackmail!"
"Won't you please go, Miss Sherrill?" Alan urged her. "It was good of you to come; but you mustn't stay now. He's—he's dying, of course."
She seated herself upon a chair. "I'm going to stay with you," she said simply. It was not, she knew, to share the waiting for the man in the next room to die; in that, of itself, there could be nothing for him to feel. It was to be with him while realization which had come to her was settling upon him too—realization of what this meant to him. He was realizing that, she thought; he had realized it; it made him, at moments, forget her while, listening for sounds from the other room, he paced back and forth beside the table or stood staring away, clinging to the portières. He left her presently, and went across the hall to the doctor. The man on the couch had stirred as though to start up again; the voice began once more, but now its words were wholly indistinguishable, meaningless, incoherent. They stopped, and Luke lay still; the doctor—Alan was helping him now—arranged a quite inert form upon the couch. The doctor bent over him.
"Is he dead?" Constance heard Alan ask.
"Not yet," the doctor answered; "but it won't be long, now."
"There's nothing you can do for him?"
The doctor shook his head.
"There's nothing you can do to make him talk—bring him to himself enough so that he will tell what he keeps threatening to tell?"
The doctor shrugged. "How many times, do you suppose, he's been drunk and still not told? Concealment is his established habit now. It's an inhibition; even in wandering, he stops short of actually telling anything."
"He came here—" Alan told briefly to the doctor the circumstances of the man's coming. The doctor moved back from the couch to a chair and sat down.
"I'll wait, of course," he said, "until it's over." He seemed to want to say something else, and after a moment he came out with it. "You needn't be afraid of my talking outside ... professional secrecy, of course."
Alan came back to Constance. Outside, the gray of dusk was spreading, and within the house it had grown dark; Constance heard the doctor turn on a light, and the shadowy glow of a desk lamp came from the library. Alan walked to and fro with uneven steps; he did not speak to her, nor she to him. It was very quiet in the library; she could not even hear Luke's breathing now. Then she heard the doctor moving; Alan went to the light and switched it on, as the doctor came out to them.
"It's over," he said to Alan. "There's a law covers these cases; you may not be familiar with it. I'll make out the death certificate—pneumonia and a weak heart with alcoholism. But the police have to be notified at once; you have no choice as to that. I'll look after those things for you, if you want."
"Thank you; if you will." Alan went with the doctor to the door and saw him drive away. Returning, he drew the library portières; then, coming back to Constance, he picked up her muff and collar from the chair where she had thrown them, and held them out to her.
"You'll go now, Miss Sherrill," he said. "Indeed, you mustn't stay here—your car's still waiting, and—you mustn't stay here ... in this house!"
He was standing, waiting to open the door for her, almost where he had halted on that morning, a few weeks ago, when he had first come to the house in answer to Benjamin Corvet's summons; and she was where she had stood to receive him. Memory of how he had looked then—eager, trembling a little with excitement, expecting only to find his father and happiness—came to her; and as it contrasted with the way she saw him now, she choked queerly as she tried to speak. He was very white, but quite controlled; lines not upon his face before had come there.
"Won't you come over home with me," she said, "and wait for father there till we can think this thing out together?"
Her sweetness almost broke him down. "This ... together! Think this out! Oh, it's plain enough, isn't it? For years—for as long as Wassaquam has been here, my father has been seeing that man and paying blackmail to him twice a year, at least! He lived in that man's power. He kept money in the house for him always! It wasn't anything imaginary that hung over my father—or anything created in his own mind. It was something real—real; it was disgrace—disgrace and worse—something he deserved; and that he fought with blackmail money, like a coward! Dishonor—cowardice—blackmail!"
She drew a little nearer to him. "You didn't want me to know," she said. "You tried to put me off when I called you on the telephone; and—when I came here, you wanted me to go away before I heard. Why didn't you want me to know? If he was your father, wasn't he our—friend? Mine and my father's? You must let us help you."
As she approached, he had drawn back from her. "No; this is mine!" he denied her. "Not yours or your father's. You have nothing to do with this. Didn't he try in little cowardly ways to keep you out of it? But he couldn't do that; your friendship meant too much to him; he couldn't keep away from you. But I can—I can do that! You must go out of this house; you must never come in here again!"
Her eyes filled, as she watched him; never had she liked him so much as now, as he moved to open the door for her.
"I thought," he said almost wistfully, "it seemed to me that, whatever he had done, it must have been mostly against me. His leaving everything to me seemed to mean that I was the one that he had wronged, and that he was trying to make it up to me. But it isn't that; it can't be that! It is something much worse than that! ... Oh, I'm glad I haven't used much of his money! Hardly any—not more than I can give back! It wasn't the money and the house he left me that mattered; what he really left me was just this ... dishonor, shame..."
The doorbell rang, and Alan turned to the door and threw it open. In the dusk the figure of the man outside was not at all recognizable; but as he entered with heavy and deliberate steps, passing Alan without greeting and going straight to Constance, Alan saw by the light in the hall that it was Spearman.
"What's up?" Spearman asked. "They tried to get your father at the office and then me, but neither of us was there. They got me afterwards at the club. They said you'd come over here; but that must have been more than two hours ago."
His gaze went on past her to the drawn hangings of the room to the right; and he seemed to appreciate their significance; for his face whitened under its tan, and an odd hush came suddenly upon him.
"Is it Ben, Connie?" he whispered. "Ben ... come back?"
He drew the curtains partly open. The light in the library had been extinguished, and the light that came from the hall swayed about the room with the movement of the curtains and gave a momentary semblance of life to the face of the man upon the couch. Spearman drew the curtains quickly together again, still holding to them and seeming for an instant to cling to them; then he shook himself together, threw the curtains wide apart, and strode into the room. He switched on the light and went directly to the couch; Alan followed him.
"He's—dead?"
"Who is he?" Alan demanded.
Spearman seemed to satisfy himself first as to the answer to his question. "How should I know who he is?" he asked. "There used to be a wheelsman on the Martha Corvet years ago who looked like him; or looked like what this fellow may have looked like once. I can't be sure."
He turned to Constance. "You're going home, Connie? I'll see you over there. I'll come back about this afterward, Conrad."
Alan followed them to the door and closed it after them. He spread the blankets over Luke. Luke's coats, which Alan had removed, lay upon a chair, and he looked them over for marks of identification; the mackinaw bore the label of a dealer in Manitowoc—wherever that might be; Alan did not know. A side pocket produced an old briar: there was nothing else. Then Alan walked restlessly about, awaiting Spearman. Spearman, he believed, knew this man; Spearman had not even ventured upon modified denial until he was certain that the man was dead; and then he had answered so as not to commit himself, pending learning from Constance what Luke had told.
But Luke had said nothing about Spearman. It had been Corvet, and Corvet alone, of whom Luke had spoken; it was Corvet whom he had accused; it was Corvet who had given him money. Was it conceivable, then, that there had been two such events in Corvet's life? That one of these events concerned the Miwaka and Spearman and some one—some one "with a bullet hole above his eye"—who had "got" Corvet; and that the other event had concerned Luke and something else? It was not conceivable, Alan was sure; it was all one thing. If Corvet had had to do with the Miwaka, then Luke had had to do with it too. And Spearman? But if Spearman had been involved in that guilty thing, had not Luke known it? Then why had not Luke mentioned Spearman? Or had Spearman not been really involved? Had it been, perhaps, only evidence of knowledge of what Corvet had done that Spearman had tried to discover and destroy?
Alan went to the door and opened it, as he heard Spearman upon the steps again. Spearman waited only until the door had been reclosed behind him.
"Well, Conrad, what was the idea of bringing Miss Sherrill into this?"
"I didn't bring her in; I tried the best I could to keep her out."
"Out of what—exactly?"
"You know better than I do. You know exactly what it is. You know that man, Spearman; you know what he came here for. I don't mean money; I mean you know why he came here for money, and why he got it. I tried, as well as I could, to make him tell me; but he wouldn't do it. There's disgrace of some sort here, of course—disgrace that involves my father and, I think, you too. If you're not guilty with my father, you'll help me now; if you are guilty, then, at least, your refusal to help will let me know that."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Then why did you come back here? You came back here to protect yourself in some way."
"I came back, you young fool, to say something to you which I didn't want Miss Sherrill to hear. I didn't know, when I took her away, how completely you'd taken her into—your father's affairs. I told you this man may have been a wheelsman on the Corvet; I don't know more about him than that; I don't even know that certainly. Of course, I knew Ben Corvet was paying blackmail; I've known for years that he was giving up money to some one. I don't know who he paid it to; or for what."
The strain of the last few hours was telling upon Alan; his skin flushed hot and cold by turns. He paced up and down while he controlled himself.
"That's not enough, Spearman," he said finally. "I—I've felt you, somehow, underneath all these things. The first time I saw you, you were in this house doing something you ought not to have been doing; you fought me then; you would have killed me rather than not get away. Two weeks ago, some one attacked me on the street—for robbery, they said; but I know it wasn't robbery—"
"You're not so crazy as to be trying to involve me in that—"
There came a sound to them from the hall, a sound unmistakably denoting some presence. Spearman jerked suddenly up; Alan, going to the door and looking into the hall, saw Wassaquam. The Indian evidently had returned to the house some time before; he had been bringing to Alan now the accounts which he had settled. He seemed to have been standing in the hall for some time, listening; but he came in now, looking inquiringly from one to the other of them.
"Not friends?" he inquired. "You and Henry?"
Alan's passion broke out suddenly. "We're anything but that, Judah. I found him, the first night I got here and while you were away, going through my father's things. I fought with him, and he ran away. He was the one that broke into my father's desks; maybe you'll believe that, even if no one else will."
"Yes?" the Indian questioned. "Yes?" It was plain that he not only believed but that believing gave him immense satisfaction. He took Alan's arm and led him into the smaller library. He knelt before one of the drawers under the bookshelves—the drawer, Alan recalled, which he himself had been examining when he had found Wassaquam watching him. He drew out the drawer and dumped its contents out upon the floor; he turned the drawer about then, and pulled the bottom out of it. Beneath the bottom which he had removed appeared now another bottom and a few sheets of paper scrawled in an uneven hand and with different colored inks.
At sight of them, Spearman, who had followed them into the room, uttered an oath and sprang forward. The Indian's small dark hand grasped Spearman's wrist, and his face twitched itself into a fierce grin which showed how little civilization had modified in him the aboriginal passions. But Spearman did not try to force his way; instead, he drew back suddenly.
Alan stooped and picked up the papers and put them in his pocket. If the Indian had not been there, it would not have been so easy for him to do that, he thought.
Alan went with Wassaquam into the front library, after the Indian had shown Spearman out.
"This was the man, Judah, who came for Mr. Corvet that night I was hurt?"
"Yes, Alan," Wassaquam said.
"He was the man, then, who came here twice a year, at least, to see Mr. Corvet."
"Yes."
"I was sure of it," Alan said. Wassaquam had made no demonstration of any sort since he had snatched at Spearman's wrist to hold him back when Alan had bent to the drawer. Alan could define no real change now in the Indian's manner; but he knew that, since Wassaquam had found him quarreling with Spearman, the Indian somehow had "placed" him more satisfactorily. The reserve, bordering upon distrust, with which Wassaquam had observed Alan, certainly was lessened. It was in recognition of this that Alan now asked, "Can you tell me now why he came here, Judah?"
"I have told you I do not know," Wassaquam replied. "Ben always saw him; Ben gave him money. I do not know why."
Alan had been holding his hand over the papers which he had thrust into his pocket; he went back into the smaller library and spread them under the reading lamp to examine them. Sherrill had assumed that Corvet had left in the house a record which would fully explain what had thwarted his life, and would shed light upon what had happened to Corvet, and why he had disappeared; Alan had accepted this assumption. The careful and secret manner in which these pages had been kept, and the importance which Wassaquam plainly had attached to them—and which must have been a result of his knowing that Corvet regarded them of the utmost importance—made Alan certain that he had found the record which Sherrill had believed must be there. Spearman's manner, at the moment of discovery, showed too that this had been what he had been searching for in his secret visit to the house.
But, as Alan looked the pages over now, he felt a chill of disappointment and chagrin. They did not contain any narrative concerning Benjamin Corvet's life; they did not even relate to a single event. They were no narrative at all. They were—in his first examination of them, he could not tell what they were.
They consisted in all of some dozen sheets of irregular size, some of which had been kept much longer than others, a few of which even appeared fresh and new. The three pages which Alan thought, from their yellowed and worn look, must be the oldest, and which must have been kept for many years, contained only a list of names and addresses. Having assured himself that there was nothing else on them, he laid them aside. The remaining pages, which he counted as ten in number, contained nearly a hundred brief clippings from newspapers; the clippings had been very carefully cut out, they had been pasted with painful regularity on the sheets, and each had been dated across its face—dates made with many different pens and with many different inks, but all in the same irregular handwriting as the letter which Alan had received from Benjamin Corvet.
Alan, his fingers numb in his disappointment, turned and examined all these pages; but they contained nothing else. He read one of the clippings, which was dated "Feb. 1912."
The passing away of one of the oldest residents of Emmet county occurred at the poor farm on Thursday of last week. Mr. Fred Westhouse was one of four brothers brought by their parents into Emmet county in 1846. He established himself here as a farmer and was well known among our people for many years. He was nearly the last of his family, which was quite well off at one time, Mr. Westhouse's three brothers and his father having perished in various disasters upon the lake. His wife died two years ago. He is survived by a daughter, Mrs. Arthur Pearl, of Flint.
He read another:
Hallford-Spens. On Tuesday last Miss Audrey Hallford, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Hallford, of this place, was united in the bonds of holy matrimony to Mr. Robert Spens, of Escanaba. Miss Audrey is one of our most popular young ladies and was valedictorian of her class at the high school graduation last year. All wish the young couple well.
He read another:
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Hal French, a daughter, Saturday afternoon last. Miss Vera Arabella French, at her arrival weighed seven and one-half pounds.
This clipping was dated, in Benjamin Corvet's hand, "Sturgeon Bay, Wis., Aug. 1914." Alan put it aside in bewilderment and amaze and took up again the sheets he first had looked at. The names and addresses on these oldest, yellowed pages had been first written, it was plain, all at the same time and with the same pen and ink, and each sheet in the beginning had contained seven or eight names. Some of these original names and even the addresses had been left unchanged, but most of them had been scratched out and altered many times—other and quite different names had been substituted; the pages had become finally almost illegible, crowded scrawls, rewritten again and again in Corvet's cramped hand. Alan strained forward, holding the first sheet to the light.
Alan seized the clippings he had looked at before and compared them swiftly with the page he had just read; two of the names—Westhouse and French—were the same as those upon this list. Suddenly he grasped the other pages of the list and looked them through for his own name; but it was not there. He dropped the sheets upon the table and got up and began to stride about the room.
He felt that in this list and in these clippings there must be, somehow, some one general meaning—they must relate in some way to one thing; they must have deeply, intensely concerned Benjamin Corvet's disappearance and his present fate, whatever that might be, and they must concern Alan's fate as well. But in their disconnection, their incoherence, he could discern no common thread. What conceivable bond could there have been uniting Benjamin Corvet at once with an old man dying upon a poor farm in Emmet County, wherever that might be, and with a baby girl, now some two years old, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin? He bent suddenly and swept the pages into the drawer of the table and reclosed the drawer, as he heard the doorbell ring and Wassaquam went to answer it. It was the police, Wassaquam came to tell him, who had come for Luke's body.
Alan went out into the hall to meet them. The coroner's man either had come with them or had arrived at the same time; he introduced himself to Alan, and his inquiries made plain that the young doctor whom Alan had called for Luke had fully carried out his offer to look after these things, for the coroner was already supplied with an account of what had taken place. A sailor formerly employed on the Corvet ships, the coroner's office had been told, had come to the Corvet house, ill and seeking aid; Mr. Corvet not being at home, the people of the house had taken the man in and called the doctor; but the man had been already beyond doctors' help and had died in a few hours of pneumonia and alcoholism; in Mr. Corvet's absence it had been impossible to learn the sailor's full name.
Alan left corroboration of this story mostly to Wassaquam, the servant's position in the house being more easily explicable than his own; but he found that his right there was not questioned, and that the police accepted him as a member of the household. He suspected that they did not think it necessary to push inquiry very actively in such a home as this.
After the police had gone, he called Wassaquam into the library and brought the lists and clippings out again.
"Do you know at all what these are, Judah?" he asked.
"No, Alan. I have seen Ben have them, and take them out and put them back. That is all I know."
"My father never spoke to you about them?"
"Once he spoke to me; he said I was not to tell or speak of them to any one, or even to him."
"Do you know any of these people?"
He gave the lists to Wassaquam, who studied them through attentively, holding them to the lamp.
"No, Alan."
"Have you ever heard any of their names before?"
"That may be. I do not know. They are common names."
"Do you know the places?"
"Yes—the places. They are lake ports or little villages on the lakes. I have been in most of them, Alan. Emmet County, Alan, I came from there. Henry comes from there too."
"Henry Spearman?"
"Yes."
"Then that is where they hear the Drum."
"Yes, Alan."
"My father took newspapers from those places, did he not?"
Wassaquam looked over the addresses again. "Yes; from all. He took them for the shipping news, he said. And sometimes he cut pieces out of them—these pieces, I see now; and afterward I burned the papers; he would not let me only throw them away."
"That's all you know about them, Judah?"
"Yes, Alan; that is all."
Alan dismissed the Indian, who, stolidly methodical in the midst of these events, went down-stairs and commenced to prepare a dinner which Alan knew he could not eat. Alan got up and moved about the rooms; he went back and looked over the lists and clippings once more; then he moved about again. How strange a picture of his father did these things call up to him! When he had thought of Benjamin Corvet before, it had been as Sherrill had described him, pursued by some thought he could not conquer, seeking relief in study, in correspondence with scientific societies, in anything which could engross him and shut out memory. But now he must think of him, not merely as one trying to forget; what had thwarted Corvet's life was not only in the past; it was something still going on. It had amazed Sherrill to learn that Corvet, for twenty years, had kept trace of Alan; but Corvet had kept trace in the same way and with the same secrecy of many other people—of about a score of people. When Alan thought of Corvet, alone here in his silent house, he must think of him as solicitous about these people; as seeking for their names in the newspapers which he took for that purpose, and as recording the changes in their lives. The deaths, the births, the marriages among these people had been of the intensest interest to Corvet.
It was possible that none of these people knew about Corvet; Alan had not known about him in Kansas, but had known only that some unknown person had sent money for his support. But he appreciated that it did not matter whether they knew about him or not; for at some point common to all of them, the lives of these people must have touched Corvet's life. When Alan knew what had been that point of contact, he would know about Corvet; he would know about himself.
Alan had seen among Corvet's books a set of charts of the Great Lakes. He went and got that now and an atlas. Opening them upon the table, he looked up the addresses given on Corvet's list. They were most of them, he found, towns about the northern end of the lake; a very few were upon other lakes—Superior and Huron—but most were upon or very close to Lake Michigan. These people lived by means of the lake; they got their sustenance from it, as Corvet had lived, and as Corvet had got his wealth. Alan was feeling like one who, bound, has been suddenly unloosed. From the time when, coming to see Corvet, he had found Corvet gone until now, he had felt the impossibility of explaining from anything he knew or seemed likely to learn the mystery which had surrounded himself and which had surrounded Corvet. But these names and addresses! They indeed offered something to go upon, though Luke now was forever still, and his pockets had told Alan nothing.
He found Emmet County on the map and put his finger on it. Spearman, Wassaquam had said came from there. "The Land of the Drum!" he said aloud. Deep and sudden feeling stirred in him as he traced out this land on the chart—the little towns and villages, the islands and headlands, their lights and their uneven shores. A feeling of "home" had come to him, a feeling he had not had on coming to Chicago. There were Indian names and French up there about the meetings of the great waters. Beaver Island! He thought of Michabou and the raft. The sense that he was of these lakes, that surge of feeling which he had felt first in conversation with Constance Sherrill was strengthened an hundredfold; he found himself humming a tune. He did not know where he had heard it; indeed, it was not the sort of tune which one knows from having heard; it was the sort which one just knows. A rhyme fitted itself to the hum,
"Seagull, seagull sit on the sand,
It's never fair weather when you're on the land."
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 steamer Winnebago foundering ... 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 the Winnebago; 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: