Alan turned to Constance; she had been listening intently, but she made no comment. "That is all, then," he said to Papo; "if I find out anything to your advantage, I"ll let you know." He had aroused, he understood, expectations of benefit in these poor Indians. Something rose in Alan"s throat and choked him. Those of whom Benjamin Corvet had so laboriously kept trace were, very many of them, of the sort of these Indians; that they had never heard of Benjamin Corvet was not more significant than that they were people of whose existence Benjamin Corvet could not have been expected to be aware. What conceivable bond could there have been between Alan"s father and such poor people as these? Had his father wronged these people? Had he owed them something? This thought, which had been growing stronger with each succeeding step of Alan"s investigations, chilled and horrified him now. Revolt against his father more active than ever before seized him, revolt stirring stronger with each recollection of his interviews with the people upon his list. As they walked away, Constance appreciated that he was feeling something deeply; she too was stirred.
"They all--all I have talked to--are like that," he said to her. "They all have lost some one upon the lakes."
In her feeling for him, she had laid her hand upon his arm; now her fingers tightened to sudden tenseness. "What do you mean?" she asked.
"Oh, it is not definite yet--not clear!" She felt the bitterness in his tone. "They have not any of them been able to make it wholly clear to me. It is like a record that has been--blurred. These original names must have been written down by my father many years ago--many, most of those people, I think--are dead; some are nearly forgotten.
The only thing that is fully plain is that in every case my inquiries have led me to those who have lost one, and sometimes more than one relative upon the lakes."
Constance thrilled to a vague horror; it was not anything to which she could give definite reason. His tone quite as much as what he said was its cause. His experience plainly had been forcing him to bitterness against his father; and he did not know with certainty yet that his father was dead.
She had not found it possible to tell him that yet; now consciously she deferred telling him until she could take him to her home and show him what had come. The shrill whistling of the power yacht in which she and her party had come recalled to her that all were to return to the yacht for luncheon, and that they must be waiting for her.
"You"ll lunch with us, of course," she said to Alan, "and then go back with us to Harbor Point. It"s a day"s journey around the two bays; but we"ve a boat here."
He a.s.sented, and they went down to the water where the white and brown power yacht, with long, graceful lines, lay somnolently in the sunlight. A little boat took them out over the shimmering, smooth surface to the ship; swells from a faraway freighter swept under the beautiful, burnished craft, causing it to roll lazily as they boarded it. A party of nearly a dozen men and girls, with an older woman chaperoning them, lounged under the shade of an awning over the after deck. They greeted her gaily and looked curiously at Alan as she introduced him.
As he returned their rather formal acknowledgments and afterward fell into general conversation with them, she became for the first time fully aware of how greatly he had changed from what he had been when he had come to them six months before in Chicago. These gay, wealthy loungers would have dismayed him then, and he would have been equally dismayed by the luxury of the carefully appointed yacht; now he was not thinking at all about what these people might think of him. In return, they granted him consideration. It was not, she saw that they accepted him as one of their own sort, or as some ordinary acquaintance of hers; if they accounted for him to themselves at all, they must believe him to be some officer employed upon her father"s ships. He looked like that--with his face darkened and reddened by the summer sun and in his clothing like that of a ship"s officer ash.o.r.e. He had not weakened under the disgrace which Benjamin Corvet had left to him, whatever that might be; he had grown stronger facing it. A lump rose in her throat as she realized that the lakes had been setting their seal upon him, as upon the man whose strength and resourcefulness she loved.
"Have you worked on any of our boats?" she asked him, after luncheon had been finished, and the anchor of the ship had been raised.
A queer expression came upon his face. "I"ve thought it best not to do that, Miss Sherrill," he replied.
She did not know why the next moment she should think of Henry.
"Henry was going to bring us over in his yacht--the _Chippewa_," she said. "But he was called away suddenly yesterday on business to St.
Ignace and used his boat to go over there."
"He"s at Harbor Point, then."
"He got there a couple of nights ago and will be back again to-night or to-morrow morning."
The yacht was pushing swiftly, smoothly, with hardly a hum from its motors, north along the sh.o.r.e. He watched intently the rolling, wooded hills and the ragged little bays and inlets. His work and his investigatings had not brought him into the neighborhood before, but she found that she did not have to name the places to him; he knew them from the charts.
"Grand Traverse Light," he said to her as a white tower showed upon their left. Then, leaving the sh.o.r.e, they pushed out across the wide mouth of the larger bay toward Little Traverse. He grew more silent as they approached it.
"It is up there, isn"t it," he asked, pointing, "that they hear the Drum?"
"Yes; how did you know the place?"
"I don"t know it exactly; I want you to show me."
She pointed out to him the copse, dark, primeval, blue in its contrast with the lighter green of the trees about it and the glistening white of the shingle and of the more distant sand bluffs. He leaned forward, staring at it, until the changed course of the yacht, as it swung about toward the entrance to the bay, obscured it. They were meeting other power boats now of their yacht"s own size and many smaller; they pa.s.sed white-sailed sloops and cat-boats, almost becalmed, with girls and boys diving from their sides and swimming about. As they neared the Point, a panorama of play such as, she knew, he scarcely could have seen before, was spread in front of them. The sun gleamed back from the white sides and varnished decks and shining bra.s.swork of a score or more of cruising yachts and many smaller vessels lying in the anchorage.
"The Chicago to Mackinac yacht race starts this week, and the cruiser fleet is working north to be in at the finish," she offered. Then she saw he was not looking at these things; he was studying with a strange expression the dark, uneven hills which shut in the two towns and the bay.
"You remember how the ship rhymes you told me and that about Michabou and seeing the ships made me feel that I belonged here on the lakes,"
he reminded her. "I have felt something--not recognition exactly, but something that was like the beginning of recognition--many times this summer when I saw certain places. It"s like one of those dreams, you know, in which you are conscious of having had the same dream before.
I feel that I ought to know this place."
They landed only a few hundred yards from the cottage. After bidding good-by to her friends, they went up to it together through the trees.
There was a small sun room, rather shut off from the rest of the house, to which she led him. Leaving him there, she ran upstairs to get the things.
She halted an instant beside the door, with the box in her hands, before she went back to him, thinking how to prepare him against the significance of these relics of his father. She need not prepare him against the mere fact of his father"s death; he had been beginning to believe that already; but these things must have far more meaning for him than merely that. They must frustrate one course of inquiry for him at the same time they opened another; they would close for him forever the possibility of ever learning anything about himself from his father; they would introduce into his problem some new, some unknown person--the sender of these things.
She went in and put the box down upon the card table.
"The m.u.f.fler in the box was your father"s," she told him. "He had it on the day he disappeared. The other things," her voice choked a little, "are the things he must have had in his pockets. They"ve been lying in water and sand--"
He gazed at her. "I understand," he said after an instant. "You mean that they prove his death."
She a.s.sented gently, without speaking. As he approached the box, she drew back from it and slipped away into the next room. She walked up and down there, pressing her hands together. He must be looking at the things now, unrolling the m.u.f.fler.... What would he be feeling as he saw them? Would he be glad, with that same gladness which had mingled with her own sorrow over Uncle Benny, that his father was gone--gone from his guilt and his fear and his disgrace? Or would he resent that death which thus left everything unexplained to him? He would be looking at the ring. That, at least, must bring more joy than grief to him. He would recognize that it must be his mother"s wedding ring; if it told him that his mother must be dead, it would tell him that she had been married, or had believed that she was married!
Suddenly she heard him calling her. "Miss Sherrill!" His voice had a sharp thrill of excitement.
She hurried toward the sun room. She could see him through the doorway, bending over the card table with the things spread out upon its top in front of him.
"Miss Sherrill!" he called again.
"Yes."
He straightened; he was very pale. "Would coins that my father had in his pocket all have been more than twenty years old?"
She ran and bent beside him over the coins. "Twenty years!" she repeated. She was making out the dates of the coins now herself; the markings were eroded, nearly gone in some instances, but in every case enough remained to make plain the date. "Eighteen-ninety--1893--1889,"
she made them out. Her voice hushed queerly. "What does it mean?" she whispered.
He turned over and reexamined the articles with hands suddenly steadying. "There are two sets of things here," he concluded. "The m.u.f.fler and paper of directions--they belonged to my father. The other things--it isn"t six months or less than six months that they"ve lain in sand and water to become worn like this; it"s twenty years. My father can"t have had these things; they were somewhere else, or some one else had them. He wrote his directions to that person--after June twelfth, he said, so it was before June twelfth he wrote it; but we can"t tell how long before. It might have been in February, when he disappeared; it might have been any time after that. But if the directions were written so long ago, why weren"t the things sent to you before this? Didn"t the person have the things then? Did we have to wait to get them? Or--was it the instructions to send them that he didn"t have? Or, if he had the instructions, was he waiting to receive word when they were to be sent?"
"To receive word?" she echoed.
"Word from my father! You thought these things proved my father was dead. I think they prove he is alive! Oh, we must think this out!"
He paced up and down the room; she sank into a chair, watching him.
"The first thing that we must do," he said suddenly, "is to find out about the watch. What is the "phone number of the telegraph office?"
She told him, and he went out to the telephone; she sprang up to follow him, but checked herself and merely waited until he came back.
"I"ve wired to Buffalo," he announced. "The Merchants" Exchange, if it is still in existence, must have a record of the presentation of the watch. At any rate, the wreck of the _Winnebago_ and the name of the skipper of the other boat must be in the files of the newspapers of that time."
"Then you"ll stay here with us until an answer comes."
"If we get a reply by to-morrow morning; I"ll wait till then. If not, I"ll ask you to forward it to me. I must see about the trains and get back to Frankfort. I can cross by boat from there to Manitowoc--that will be quickest. We must begin there, by trying to find out who sent the package."
"Henry Spearman"s already sent to have that investigated."
Alan made no reply; but she saw his lips draw tighter quickly. "I must go myself as soon as I can," he said, after a moment.
She helped him put the m.u.f.fler and the other articles back into the box; she noticed that the wedding ring was no longer with them. He had taken that, then; it had meant to him all that she had known it must mean....
In the morning she was up very early; but Alan, the servants told her, had risen before she had and had gone out. The morning, after the cool northern night, was chill. She slipped a sweater on and went out on the veranda, looking about for him. An iridescent haze shrouded the hills and the bay; in it she heard a ship"s bell strike twice; then another struck twice--then another--and another--and another. The haze thinned as the sun grew warmer, showing the placid water of the bay on which the ships stood double--a real ship and a mirrored one. She saw Alan returning, and knowing from the direction from which he came that he must have been to the telegraph office, she ran to meet him.