THE DEED IN TRUST
Her little gasoline-driven car--delicate as though a jeweler had made
it--was waiting for them under the canopy beside the house, when they
went out. She delayed a moment to ask Alan to let down the windows;
the sky was still clear, and the sunshine had become almost warm,
though the breeze was sharp and cold. As the car rolled down the
drive, and he turned for a long look past her toward the lake, she
watched his expression.
"It's like a great shuttle, the ice there," she commented, "a monster
shuttle nearly three hundred miles long. All winter it moves back and
forth across the lake, from east to west and from west to east as the
winds change, blocking each shore half the time and forcing the winter
boats to fight it always."
"The gulls go opposite to it, I suppose, sticking to open water."
"The gulls? That depends upon the weather. 'Sea-gull, sea-gull,'" she
quoted, "'sit on the sand; It's never fair weather when you're on the
land.'"
Alan started a little. "What was that?" he asked.
"That rhyme? One which the wives of the lake men teach their children.
Did you remember that too?"
"After you said it."
"Can you remember the rest of it?"
"'Green to Green--Red to Red,'" Alan repeated to himself. "'Green to
green' and then something about--how is it, 'Back her--back and
stopper.'"
"That's from a lake rhyme too, but another one!" she cried. "And
that's quite a good one. It's one of the pilot rules that every lake
person knows. Some skipper and wheelsman set them to rhyme years ago,
and the lake men teach the rhymes to their children so that they'll
never go wrong with a ship. It keeps them clearer in their heads than
any amount of government printing. Uncle Benny used to say they've
saved any number of collisions.
"Meeting steamers do not dread,"
she recited,
"When you see three lights ahead!
Port your helm and show your red.
For passing steamers you should try
To keep this maxim in your eye,
Green to Green--or Red to Red--
Perfect safety--go ahead.
Both in safety and in doubt,
Always keep a good lookout;
Should there be no room to turn,
Stop your ship and go astern."
"Now we're coming to your 'back and stopper':
"If to starboard Red appear,
'Tis your duty to keep clear;
Act as judgment says is proper.
Port or starboard--back or stop her!
But when on your port is seen
A steamer with a light of Green,
There's not much for you to do--
The Green light must look out for you."
She had driven the car swiftly on the boulevard to the turn where the
motorway makes west to Rush Street, then it turned south again toward
the bridge. As they reached the approach to the bridge and the cars
congested there, Constance was required to give all her attention to
the steering; not until they were crossing the bridge was she able to
glance at her companion's face.
To westward, on both sides of the river, summer boats were laid up,
their decks covered with snow. On the other side, still nearer to the
bridge, were some of the winter vessels; and, while the motor was on
the span, the bells began ringing the alarm to clear the bridge so it
could turn to let through a great steamer just in from the lake, the
sun glistening on the ice covering its bows and sides back as far as
Alan could see.
Forward of the big, black, red-banded funnel, a cloud of steam bellowed
up and floated back, followed by another, and two deep, reverberating
blasts rumbled up the river majestically, imperiously. The shrill
little alarm bells on the bridge jangled more nervously and excitedly,
and the policeman at the south end hastily signalled the motor cars
from the city to stop, while he motioned those still on the bridge to
scurry off; for a ship desired to pass.
"Can we stop and see it?" Alan appealed, as Constance ran the car from
the bridge just before it began to turn.
She swung the car to the side of the street and stopped; as he gazed
back, he was--she knew--seeing not only his first great ship close by,
but having his first view of his people--the lake men from whom now he
knew from the feeling he had found within himself, and not only from
what had been told him, that he had come.
The ship was sheathed in ice from stem to stern; tons of the gleaming,
crystal metal weighed the forecastle; the rail all round had become a
frozen bulwark; the boats were mere hummocks of ice; the bridge was
encased, and from the top of the pilot house hung down giant
stalactites which an axeman was chopping away. Alan could see the
officers on the bridge, the wheelsman, the lookout; he could see the
spurt of water from the ship's side as it expelled with each thrust of
the pumps; he could see the whirlpool about the screw, as slowly,
steadily, with signals clanging clearly somewhere below, the steamer
went through the draw. From up the river ahead of it came the jangling
of bells and the blowing of alarm whistles as the other bridges were
cleared to let the vessel through. It showed its stern now; Alan read
the name and registry aloud: "'_Groton of Escanaba_!' Is that one of
yours, Miss Sherrill; is that one of yours and my--Mr. Corvet's?"
She shook her head, sorry that she had to say no. "Shall we go on now?"
The bridge was swinging shut again; the long line of motor cars, which
had accumulated from the boulevard from the city, began slowly to move.
Constance turned the car down the narrow street, fronted by warehouses
which Alan had passed the morning before, to Michigan Avenue, with the
park and harbor to the left. When she glanced now at Alan, she saw
that a reaction of depression had followed excitement at seeing the
steamer pass close by.
Memory, if he could call it that, had given him a feeling for ships and
for the lake; a single word--_Miwaka_--a childish rhyme and story,
which he might have heard repeated and have asked for a hundred times
in babyhood. But these recollections were only what those of a
three-years' child might have been. Not only did they refuse to
connect themselves with anything else, but by the very finality of
their isolation, they warned him that they--and perhaps a few more
vague memories of similar sort--were all that recollection ever would
give him. He caught himself together and turned his thoughts to the
approaching visit to Sherrill--and his father's offices.
Observing the towering buildings to his right, he was able to identify
some of the more prominent structures, familiar from photographs of the
city. Constance drove swiftly a few blocks down this boulevard; then,
with a sudden, "Here we are!" she shot the car to the curb and stopped.
She led Alan into one of the tallest and best-looking of the buildings,
where they took an elevator placarded "Express" to the fifteenth floor.
On several of the doors opening upon the wide marble hall where the
elevator left them, Alan saw the names, "Corvet, Sherrill and
Spearman." As they passed, without entering, one of these doors which
stood propped open, and he looked in, he got his first realization of
the comparatively small land accommodations which a great business
conducted upon the water requires. What he saw within was only one
large room, with hardly more than a dozen, certainly not a score of
desks in it; nearly all the desks were closed, and there were not more
than three or four people in the room, and these apparently
stenographers. Doors of several smaller offices, opening upon the
larger room, bore names, among which he saw "Mr. Corvet" and "Mr.
Spearman."
"It won't look like that a month from now," Constance said, catching
his expression. "Just now, you know, the straits and all the northern
lakes are locked fast with ice. There's nothing going on now except
the winter traffic on Lake Michigan and, to a much smaller extent, on
Ontario and Erie; we have an interest in some winter boats, but we
don't operate them from here. Next month we will be busy fitting out,
and the month after that all the ships we have will be upon the water."
She led the way on past to a door farther down the corridor, which bore
merely the name, "Lawrence Sherrill"; evidently Sherrill, who had
interests aside from the shipping business, had offices connected with
but not actually a part of the offices of Corvet, Sherrill, and
Spearman. A girl was on guard on the other side of the door; she
recognized Constance Sherrill at once and, saying that Mr. Sherrill had
been awaiting Mr. Conrad, she opened an inner door and led Alan into a
large, many-windowed room, where Sherrill was sitting alone before a
table-desk. He arose, a moment after the door opened, and spoke a word
to his daughter, who had followed Alan and the girl to the door, but
who had halted there. Constance withdrew, and the girl from the outer
office also went away, closing the door behind her. Sherrill pulled
the "visitor's chair" rather close to his desk and to his own big
leather chair before asking Alan to seat himself.
"You wanted to tell me, or ask me, something last night, my daughter
has told me," Sherrill said cordially. "I'm sorry I wasn't home when
you came back."
"I wanted to ask you, Mr. Sherrill," Alan said, "about those facts in
regard to Mr. Corvet which you mentioned to me yesterday but did not
explain. You said it would not aid me to know them; but I found
certain things in Mr. Corvet's house last night which made me want to
know, if I could, everything you could tell me."
Sherrill opened a drawer and took out a large, plain envelope.
"I did not tell you about these yesterday, Alan," he said, "not only
because I had not decided how to act in regard to these matters, but
because I had not said anything to Mr. Spearman about them previously,
because I expected to get some additional information from you. After
seeing you, I was obliged to wait for Spearman to get back to town.
The circumstances are such that I felt myself obliged to talk them over
first with him; I have done that this morning; so I was going to send
for you, if you had not come down."
Sherrill thought a minute, still holding the envelope closed in his
hand.
"On the day after your father disappeared," he went on, "but before I
knew he was gone--or before any one except my daughter felt any alarm
about him--I received a short note from him. I will show it to you
later, if you wish; its exact wording, however, is unimportant. It had
been mailed very late the night before and apparently at the mail box
near his house or at least, by the postmark, somewhere in the
neighborhood; and for that reason had not been taken up before the
morning collection and did not reach the office until I had been here
and gone away again about eleven o'clock. I did not get it, therefore,
until after lunch. The note was agitated, almost incoherent. It told
me he had sent for you--Alan Conrad, of Blue Rapids, Kansas--but spoke
of you as though you were some one I ought to have known about, and
commended you to my care. The remainder of it was merely an agitated,
almost indecipherable farewell to me. When I opened the envelope, a
key had fallen out. The note made no reference to the key, but
comparing it with one I had in my pocket, I saw that it appeared to be
a key to a safety deposit box in the vaults of a company where we both
had boxes.
"The note, taken in connection with my daughter's alarm about him, made
it so plain that something serious had happened to Corvet, that my
first thought was merely for him. Corvet was not a man with whom one
could readily connect the thought of suicide; but, Alan, that was the
idea I had. I hurried at once to his house, but the bell was not
answered, and I could not get in. His servant, Wassaquam, has very few
friends, and the few times he has been away from home of recent years
have been when he visited an acquaintance of his--the head porter in a
South Side hotel. I went to the telephone in the house next door and
called the hotel and found Wassaquam there. I asked Wassaquam about
the letter to 'Alan Conrad,' and Wassaquam said Corvet had given it to
him to post early in the evening. Several hours later, Corvet had sent
him out to wait at the mail box for the mail collector to get the
letter back. Wassaquam went out to the mail box, and Corvet came out
there too, almost at once. The mail collector, when he came, told
them, of course, that he could not return the letter; but Corvet
himself had taken the letters and looked them through. Corvet seemed
very much excited when he discovered the letter was not there; and when
the mail man remembered that he had been late on his previous trip and
so must have taken up the letter almost at once after it was mailed,
Corvet's excitement increased on learning that it was already probably
on the train on its way west. He controlled himself later enough at
least to reassure Wassaquam; for an hour or so after, when Corvet sent
Wassaquam away from the house, Wassaquam had gone without feeling any
anxiety about him.
"I told Wassaquam over the telephone only that something was wrong, and
hurried to my own home to get the key, which I had, to the Corvet
house; but when I came back and let myself into the house, I found it
empty and with no sign of anything having happened.
"The next morning, Alan, I went to the safe deposit vaults as soon as
they were open. I presented the numbered key and was told that it
belonged to a box rented by Corvet, and that Corvet had arranged about
three days before for me to have access to the box if I presented the
key. I had only to sign my name in their book and open the box. In
it, Alan, I found the pictures of you which I showed you yesterday and
the very strange communications that I am going to show you now."
Sherrill opened the long envelope from which several thin, folded
papers fell. He picked up the largest of these, which consisted of
several sheets fastened together with a clip, and handed it to Alan
without comment. Alan, as he looked at it and turned the pages, saw
that it contained two columns of typewriting carried from page to page
after the manner of an account.
The column to the left was an inventory of property and profits and
income by months and years, and the one to the right was a list of
losses and expenditures. Beginning at an indefinite day or month in
the year 1895, there was set down in a lump sum what was indicated as
the total of Benjamin Corvet's holdings at that time. To this, in
sometimes undated items, the increase had been added. In the opposite
column, beginning apparently from the same date in 1895, were the
missing man's expenditures. The painstaking exactness of these left no
doubt of their correctness; they included items for natural
depreciation of perishable properties and, evidently, had been worked
over very recently. Upon the last sheet, the second column had been
deducted from the first, and an apparently purely arbitrary sum of two
hundred thousand dollars had been taken away. From the remainder there
had been taken away approximately one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars more.
Alan having ascertained that the papers contained only this account,
looked up questioningly to Sherrill; but Sherrill, without speaking,
merely handed him the second of the papers.... This, Alan saw, had
evidently been folded to fit a smaller envelope. Alan unfolded it and
saw that it was a letter written in the same hand which had written the
summons he had received in Blue Rapids and had made the entries in the
little memorandum book of the remittances that had been sent to John
Welton.
It began simply:
Lawrence--
This will come to you in the event that I am not able to carry out the
plan upon which I am now, at last, determined. You will find with this
a list of my possessions which, except for two hundred thousand dollars
settled upon my wife which was hers absolutely to dispose of as she
desired and a further sum of approximately one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars presented in memory of her to the Hospital Service in
France, have been transferred to you without legal reservation.
You will find deeds for all real estate executed and complete except
for recording of the transfer at the county office; bonds,
certificates, and other documents representing my ownership of
properties, together with signed forms for their legal transfer to you,
are in this box. These properties, in their entirety, I give to you in
trust to hold for the young man now known as Alan Conrad of Blue
Rapids, Kansas, to deliver any part or all over to him or to continue
to hold it all in trust for him as you shall consider to be to his
greatest advantage.
This for the reasons which I shall have told to you or him--I cannot
know which one of you now, nor do I know how I shall tell it. But when
you learn, Lawrence, think as well of me as you can and help him to be
charitable to me.
With the greatest affection,
BENJAMIN CORVET.
Alan, as he finished reading, looked up to Sherrill, bewildered and
dazed.
"What does it mean, Mr. Sherrill?-- Does it mean that he has gone away
and left everything he had--everything to me?"
"The properties listed here," Sherrill touched the pages Alan first had
looked at, "are in the box at the vault with the executed forms of
their transfer to me. If Mr. Corvet does not return, and I do not
receive any other instructions, I shall take over his estate as he has
instructed for your advantage."
"And, Mr. Sherrill, he didn't tell you why? This is all you know?"
"Yes; you have everything now. The fact that he did not give his
reasons for this, either to you or me, made me think at first that he
might have made his plan known to some one else, and that he had been
opposed--to the extent even of violence done upon him--to prevent his
carrying it out. But the more I have considered this, the less likely
it has seemed to me. Whatever had happened to Corvet that had so much
disturbed and excited him lately, seems rather to have precipitated his
plan than deterred him in it. He may have determined after he had
written this that his actions and the plain indication of his
relationship to you, gave all the explanation he wanted to make. All
we can do, Alan, is to search for him in every way we can. There will
be others searching for him too now; for information of his
disappearance has got out. There have been reporters at the office
this morning making inquiries, and his disappearance will be in the
afternoon papers."
Sherrill put the papers back in their envelope, and the envelope back
into the drawer, which he relocked.
"I went over all this with Mr. Spearman this morning," he said. "He is
as much at a loss to explain it as I am."
He was silent for a few moments.
"The transfer of Mr. Corvet's properties to me for you," he said
suddenly, "includes, as you have seen, Corvet's interest in the firm of
'Corvet, Sherrill and Spearman.' I went very carefully through the
deeds and transfers in the deposit box, and it was plain that, while he
had taken great care with the forms of transfer for all the properties,
he had taken particular pains with whatever related to his holdings in
this company and to his shipping interests. If I make over the
properties to you, Alan, I shall begin with those; for it seems to me
that your father was particularly anxious that you should take a
personal as well as a financial place among the men who control the
traffic of the lakes. I have told Spearman that this is my intention.
He has not been able to see it my way as yet; but he may change his
views, I think, after meeting you."
Sherrill got up. Alan arose a little unsteadily. The list of
properties he had read and the letter and Sherrill's statement
portended so much that its meaning could not all come to him at once.
He followed Sherrill through a short private corridor, flanked with
files lettered "Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman," into the large room he
had seen when he came in with Constance. They crossed this, and
Sherrill, without knocking, opened the door of the office marked, "Mr.
Spearman." Alan, looking on past Sherrill as the door opened, saw that
there were some half dozen men in the room, smoking and talking. They
were big men mostly, ruddy-skinned and weather-beaten in look, and he
judged from their appearance, and from the pile of their hats and coats
upon a chair, that they were officers of the company's ships, idle
while the ships were laid up, but reporting now at the offices and
receiving instructions as the time for fitting out approached.
His gaze went swiftly on past these men to the one who, half seated on
the top of the flat desk, had been talking to them; and his pulse
closed upon his heart with a shock; he started, choked with
astonishment, then swiftly forced himself under control. For this was
the man whom he had met and whom he had fought in Benjamin Corvet's
house the night before--the big man surprised in his blasphemy of
Corvet and of souls "in Hell" who, at sight of an apparition with a
bullet hole above its eye, had cried out in his fright, "You got Ben!
But you won't get me--damn you! Damn you!"
Alan's shoulders drew up slightly, and the muscles of his hands
tightened, as Sherrill led him to this man. Sherrill put his hand on
the man's shoulder; his other hand was still on Alan's arm.
"Henry," he said to the man, "this is Alan Conrad. Alan, I want you to
know my partner, Mr. Spearman."
Spearman nodded an acknowledgment, but did not put out his hand; his
eyes--steady, bold, watchful eyes--seemed measuring Alan attentively;
and in return Alan, with his gaze, was measuring him.