The Indian Drum (1917)/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
THE OWNER OF THE WATCH
"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 freighter Oscoda; I left her at Frankfort and came up here."
"Is Wassaquam with you?"
"He wasn't on the Oscoda; 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—the Chippewa," 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 re-examined 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 the Winnebago and 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, loking 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 freighter Marvin Halch for rescue of crew and passengers of sinking steamer Winnebago off 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 the Miwaka!"
"Yes," Alan said.
"You asked me about that ship—the Miwaka—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 the Miwaka? 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 the Miwaka; at least he shouted out to me that I couldn't save the Miwaka!"
"Save the Miwaka! What do you mean, Alan? The Miwaka was 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 the Miwaka!" 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 the Miwaka disappeared!"
"Disappeared!" she repeated. Her veins were pricking cold. What did he know, what could any one know of the Miwaka, 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.
"The Chippewa must 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 the Miwaka—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 the Miwaka, 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 the Winnebago, 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 the Miwaka!"
"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 the Miwaka, with all on board. That fate was modified only by the Indian Drum beating short. So one man from the Miwaka had 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 the Miwaka and had brought from that lost ship something which threatened Uncle Benny that, at least, explained Luke.
Then another idea had seized her. Captain Caleb Stafford was named among the lost, of course; with him had perished his son, a boy of three. That was all that was said, and all that was to be learned of him, the boy.
Alan had been three then. This was wild, crazy speculation. The ship was lost with all hands; only the Drum, believed in by the superstitious and the most ignorant, denied that. The Drum said that one soul had been saved. How could a child of three have been saved when strong men, to the last one, had perished? And, if he had been saved, he was Stafford's son. Why should Uncle Benny have sent him away and cared for him and then sent for him and, himself disappearing, leave all he had to—Stafford's son?
Or was he Stafford's son? Her thought went back to the things which had been sent—the things from a man's pockets with a wedding ring among them. She had believed that the ring cleared the mother's name; might it in reality only more involve it? Why had it come back like this to the man by whom, perhaps, it had been given? Henry's words came again and again to Constance: "It's a queer concern you've got for Ben. Leave it alone, I tell you!" He knew then something about Uncle Benny which might have brought on some terrible thing which Henry did not know but might guess? Constance went weak within. Uncle Benny's wife had left him, she remembered. Was it better, after all, to "leave it alone?"
But it wasn't a thing which one could command one's mind to leave alone; and Constance could not make herself try to, so long as it concerned Alan. Coming home late one afternoon toward the middle of December, she dismissed the motor and stood gazing at the gulls. The day was chill, gray; the air had the feel, and the voices of the gulls had the sound to her, which precede the coming of a severe storm. The gulls recalled sharply to her the day when Alan first had come to them, and how she had been the one first to meet him and the child verse which had told him that he too was of the lakes.
She went on into the house. A telegraph envelope addressed to her father was on the table in the hall. A servant told her the message had come an hour before, and that he had telephoned to Mr. Sherrill's office, but Mr. Sherrill was not in. There was no reason for her thinking that the message might be from Alan except his presence in her thoughts, but she went at once to the telephone and called her father. He was in now, and he directed her to open the message and read it to him.
"Have some one," she read aloud; she choked in her excitement at what came next—"Have some one who knew Mr. Corvet well enough to recognize him, even if greatly changed, meet Carferry Number 25 Manitowoc Wednesday this week. Alan Conrad."
Her heart was beating fast. "Are you there?" she said into the 'phone.
"Yes."
"Whom shall you send?"
There was an instant's silence. "I shall go myself," her father answered.
She hung up the receiver. Had Alan found Uncle Benny? He had found, apparently, someone whose resemblance to the picture she had showed him was marked enough to make him believe that person might be Benjamin Corvet; or he had heard of some one who, from the account he had received, he thought might be. She read again the words of the telegram . . . "even if greatly changed!" and she felt startling and terrifying warning in that phrase.