She could give no answer. He held her and commanded her again; only when he frightened her, he ceased.

"Why _must_ it be at once, Henry? I don't understand!"

"It's not must, dear," he denied. "It's just that I want you so!"

When would it be, he demanded then; before spring, she promised at last. But that was all he could make her say. And so he let her go.

The next evening, in the moonlight, she drove him to Petoskey. He had messages to send and preferred to trust the telegraph office in the larger town. Returning they swung out along the country roads. The night was cool here on the hills, under the stars; the fan-shaped glare from their headlights, blurring the radiance of the moon, sent dancing before them swiftly-changing, distorted shadows of the dusty bushes beside the road. Topping a rise, they came suddenly upon his birthplace. She had not designed coming to that place, but she had taken a turn at his direction, and now he asked her to stop the car.

He got out and paced about, calling to her and pointing out the desirableness of the spot as the site for their country home. She sat in the motor, watching him and calling back to him.

The house was small, log built, the c.h.i.n.ks between the logs stopped with clay. Across the road from it, the silver bark of the birch trees gleamed white among the black-barked timber. Smells of rank vegetation came to her from these woods and from the weed-grown fields about and beyond the house. There had been a small garden beside the house once; now neglected strawberry vines ran riot among the weed stems, and a clump of sunflowers stood with hanging, full-blown heads under the August moon.

She gazed proudly at Henry's strong, well proportioned figure moving about in the moonlight, and she was glad to think that a boy from this house had become the man that he was. But when she tried to think of him as a child here, her mind somehow showed her Alan playing about the sunflowers; and the place was not here; it was the brown, Kansas prairie of which he had told her.

"Sunflower houses," she murmured to herself. "Sunflower houses. They used to cut the stalks and build shacks with them."

"What's that?" Henry said; he had come back near her.

The warm blood rushed to her face. "Nothing," she said, a little ashamed. She opened the door beside her. "Come; we'll go back home now."

Coming from that poor little place, and having made of himself what he had, Henry was such a man as she would be ever proud to have for a husband; there was no man whom she had known who had proved himself as much a man as he. Yet now, as she returned to the point, she was thinking of this lake country not only as Henry's land but as Alan Conrad's too. In some such place he also had been born--born by the mother whose ring waited him in the box in her room.

Alan, upon the morning of the second of these days, was driving northward along the long, sandy peninsula which separates the blue waters of Grand Traverse from Lake Michigan; and, thinking of her, he knew that she was near. He not only had remembered that she would be north at Harbor Point this month; he had seen in one of the Petoskey papers that she and her mother were at the Sherrill summer home. His business now was taking him nearer them than he had been at any time before; and, if he wished to weaken, he might convince himself that he might learn from her circ.u.mstances which would aid him in his task.

But he was not going to her for help; that was following in his father's footsteps. When he knew everything, then--not till then--he could go to her; for then he would know exactly what was upon him and what he should do.

His visits to the people named on those sheets written by his father had been confusing at first; he had had great difficulty in tracing some of them at all; and, afterwards, he could uncover no certain connection either between them and Benjamin Corvet or between themselves. But recently, he had been succeeding better in this latter.

He had seen--he reckoned them over again--fourteen of the twenty-one named originally on Benjamin Corvet's lists; that is, he had seen either the individual originally named, or the surviving relative written in below the name crossed off. He had found that the crossing out of the name meant that the person was dead, except in the case of two who had left the country and whose whereabouts were as unknown to their present relatives as they had been to Benjamin Corvet, and the case of one other, who was in an insane asylum.

He had found that no one of the persons whom he saw had known Benjamin Corvet personally; many of them did not know him at all, the others knew him only as a name. But, when Alan proceeded, always there was one connotation with each of the original names; always one circ.u.mstance bound all together. When he had established that circ.u.mstance as influencing the fortunes of the first two on his lists, he had said to himself, as the blood p.r.i.c.ked queerly under the skin, that the fact might be a mere coincidence. When he established it also as affecting the fate of the third and of the fourth and of the fifth, such explanation no longer sufficed; and he found it in common to all fourteen, sometimes as the deciding factor of their fate, sometimes as only slightly affecting them, but always it was there.

In how many different ways, in what strange, diverse manifestations that single circ.u.mstance had spread to those people whom Alan had interviewed! No two of them had been affected alike, he reckoned, as he went over his notes of them. Now he was going to trace those consequences to another. To what sort of place would it bring him to-day and what would he find there? He knew only that it would be quite distinct from the rest.

The driver beside whom he sat on the front seat of the little automobile was an Indian; an Indian woman and two round-faced silent children occupied the seat behind. He had met these people in the early morning on the road, bound, he discovered, to the annual camp meeting of the Methodist Indians at Northport. They were going his way, and they knew the man of whom he was in search; so he had hired a ride of them. The region through which they were traveling now was of farms, but interspersed with desolate, waste fields where blackened stumps and rotting windfalls remained after the work of the lumberers.

The hills and many of the hollows were wooded; there were even places where lumbering was still going on. To his left across the water, the twin Manitous broke the horizon, high and round and blue with haze. To his right, from the higher hilltops, he caught glimpses of Grand Traverse and of the sh.o.r.es to the north, rising higher, dimmer, and more blue, where they broke for Little Traverse and where Constance Sherrill was, two hours away across the water; but he had shut his mind to that thought.

The driver turned now into a rougher road, bearing more to the east.

They pa.s.sed people more frequently now--groups in farm wagons, or groups or single individuals, walking beside the road. All were going in the same direction as themselves, and nearly all were Indians, drab dressed figures attired obviously in their best clothes. Some walked barefoot, carrying new shoes in their hands, evidently to preserve them from the dust. They saluted gravely Alan's driver, who returned their salutes--"B'jou!" "B'jou!"

Traveling eastward, they had lost sight of Lake Michigan; and suddenly the wrinkled blueness of Grand Traverse appeared quite close to them.

The driver turned aside from the road across a cleared field where ruts showed the pa.s.sing of many previous vehicles; crossing this, they entered the woods. Little fires for cooking burned all about them, and nearer were parked an immense number of farm wagons and buggies, with horses unharnessed and munching grain. Alan's guide found a place among these for his automobile, and they got out and went forward on foot. All about them, seated upon the moss or walking about, were Indians, family groups among which children played. A platform had been built under the trees; on it some thirty Indians, all men, sat in straight-backed chairs; in front of and to the sides of the platform, an audience of several hundred occupied benches, and around the borders of the meeting others were gathered, merely observing. A very old Indian, with inordinately wrinkled skin and dressed in a frock coat, was addressing these people from the platform in the Indian tongue.

Alan halted beside his guide. He saw among the drab-clad figures looking on, the brighter dresses and sport coats of summer visitors who had come to watch. The figure of a girl among these caught his attention, and he started; then swiftly he told himself that it was only his thinking of Constance Sherrill that made him believe this was she. But now she had seen him; she paled, then as quickly flushed, and leaving the group she had been with, came toward him.

He had no choice now whether he would avoid her or not; and his happiness at seeing her held him stupid, watching her. Her eyes were very bright and with something more than friendly greeting; there was happiness in them too. His throat shut together as he recognized this, and his hand closed warmly over the small, trembling hand which she put out to him. All his conscious thought was lost for the moment in the mere realization of her presence; he stood, holding her hand, oblivious that there were people looking; she too seemed careless of that. Then she whitened again and withdrew her hand; she seemed slightly confused.

He was confused as well; it was not like this that he had meant to greet her; he caught himself together.

Cap in hand, he stood beside her, trying to look and to feel as any ordinary acquaintance of hers would have looked.

CHAPTER XIV

THE OWNER OF THE WATCH

"So they got word to you!" Constance exclaimed; she seemed still confused. "Oh, no--of course they couldn't have done that! They've hardly got my letter yet."

"Your letter?" Alan asked.

"I wrote to Blue Rapids," she explained. "Some things came--they were sent to me. Some things of Uncle Benny's which were meant for you instead of me."

"You mean you've heard from him?"

"No--not that."

"What things, Miss Sherrill?"

"A watch of his and some coins and--a ring." She did not explain the significance of those things, and he could not tell from her mere enumeration of them and without seeing them that they furnished proof that his father was dead. She could not inform him of that, she felt, just here and now.

"I'll tell you about that later. You--you were coming to Harbor Point to see us?"

He colored. "I'm afraid not. I got as near as this to you because there is a man--an Indian--I have to see."

"An Indian? What is his name? You see, I know quite a lot of them."

"Jo Papo."

She shook her head. "No; I don't know him."

She had drawn him a little away from the crowd about the meeting. His blood was beating hard with recognition of her manner toward him.

Whatever he was, whatever the disgrace might be that his father had left to him, she was still resolute to share in it. He had known she would be so. She found a spot where the moss was covered with dry pine needles and sat down upon the ground.

"Sit down," she invited; "I want you to tell me what you have been doing."

"I've been on the boats." He dropped down upon the moss beside her.

"It's a--wonderful business, Miss Sherrill; I'll never be able to go away from the water again. I've been working rather hard at my new profession--studying it, I mean. Until yesterday I was a not very highly honored member of the crew of the package freighter _Oscoda_; I left her at Frankfort and came up here."

"Is Wa.s.saquam with you?"

"He wasn't on the _Oscoda_; but he was with me at first. Now, I believe, he has gone back to his own people--to Middle Village."

"You mean you've been looking for Mr. Corvet in that way?"

"Not exactly that." He hesitated; but he could see no reason for not telling what he had been doing. He had not so much hidden from her and her father what he had found in Benjamin Corvet's house; rather, he had refrained from mentioning it in his notes to them when he left Chicago because he had thought that the lists would lead to an immediate explanation; they had not led to that, but only to a suggestion, indefinite as jet. He had known that, if his search finally developed nothing more than it had, he must at last consult Sherrill and get Sherrill's aid.

"We found some writing, Miss Sherrill," he said, "in the house on Astor Street that night after Luke came."