As Constance started away, Spearman suddenly drew her back to him and kissed her.

THE INDIAN DRUM

BY

WILLIAM MacHARG

AND

EDWIN BALMER

FRONTISPIECE BY
W. T. BENDA

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1917,
BY EDWIN BALMER
All rights reserved

CONTENTS

THE INDIAN DRUM

CHAPTER I

THE MAN WHOM THE STORM HAUNTED

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

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

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

The region, filled with Indian legend and with memories of wrecks, encourages such beliefs as this. To northward and to westward a half dozen warning lights—Ile-aux-Galets ("Skilligalee" the lake men call it), Waugaushance, Beaver, and Fox Islands—gleam spectrally where the bone-white shingle outcrops above the water, or blur ghostlike in the haze; on the dark knolls topping the glistening sand bluffs to northward, Chippewas and Ottawas, a century and a half ago, quarreled over the prisoners after the massacre at Fort Mackinac; to southward, where other hills frown down upon Little Traverse Bay, the black-robed priests in their chapel chant the same masses their predecessors chanted to the Indians of that time. So, whatever may be the origin of that drum, its meaning is not questioned by the forlorn descendants of those Indians, who now make beadwork and sweet-grass baskets for their summer trade, or by the more credulous of the white fishermen and farmers; men whose word on any other subject would receive unquestioning credence will tell you they have heard the drum.

But at bottom, of course, this is only the absurdest of superstitions, which can affect in no way men who to-day ship ore in steel bottoms to the mills of Gary and carry gasoline-engine reaped and threshed wheat to the elevators of Chicago. It is recorded, therefore, only as a superstition which for twenty-years has been connected with the loss of a great ship.

Storm—the stinging, frozen sleet-slash of the February norther whistling down the floe-jammed length of the lake—was assaulting Chicago. Over the lake it was a white, whirling maelstrom, obscuring at midafternoon even the lighthouses at the harbor entrance; beyond that, the winter boats trying for the harbor mouth were bellowing blindly at bay before the jammed ice, and foghorns and sirens echoed loudly in the city in the lulls of the storm.

Battering against the fronts of the row of club buildings, fashionable hotels, and shops which face across the narrow strip of park to the lake front in downtown Chicago, the gale swirled and eddied the sleet till all the wide windows, warm within, were frosted. So heavy was this frost on the panes of the Fort Dearborn Club—one of the staidest of the down-town clubs for men—that the great log fires blazing on the open hearths added appreciable light as well as warmth to the rooms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How definite?"

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

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

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

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

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

Corvet ignored him.

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

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

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

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

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

"See you to-night, dear."

"Yes; I'll be there—if he comes."

"Oh, he'll come!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To see father?"

"No; to see you."

"No."

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

"Uncle Benny!"

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

Connie could not refuse the answer. "Yes."

"And you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I do not know, my dear."

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

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

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

Then he drew her toward him.

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

She thought. "No, father."

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

"No, father."

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

"No, father. Who is Alan Conrad?"

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

"Quite sure, father."

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II

WHO IS ALAN CONRAD?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is your name?"

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

"He says he's him."

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

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

"Will you come in, sir?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You mean he has—disappeared?"

"Yes; he has disappeared."

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

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

"Information!"

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

CHAPTER III

DISCUSSION OF A SHADOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Miss Sherrill—" he said.

She halted. "Yes."

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

She came back toward him slowly.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

She was thoughtful for a moment.

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

"Your father is—?" he ventured.

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

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

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

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

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

"I am Lawrence Sherrill," he said.

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

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

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

"And about Mr. Corvet?"

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

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

"Yes; certainly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sherrill looked away at evident loss how to describe it.

"To the ships?" Alan asked him.

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

"In 1896!"

"That was the year."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The year of—?" Alan asked.

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

Alan had started; Sherrill looked at him questioningly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That is you?" Sherrill asked.

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

"And this?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sherrill had risen and stood looking down at him.

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

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

"Benjamin Corvet and his wife had no children."

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

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

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

Sherrill crossed the room and rang for a servant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No doubt that he is——who?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sherrill was silent for a moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV

"ARRIVED SAFE; WELL"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Nothing, thank you," Alan said.

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

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

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

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