Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/262

 knows we're losing Alban so tries to scheme how we run without it. No chance; we can't; we've got to have more business; Howarth, of course you know," and sat down beside her and talked with her about Howarth until Ralph arrived and took him away.

She had him for a few minutes at the end of the day, almost as in Chicago. "I dropped in on Lyman Howarth," he told her, "and couldn't pretend I just happened to be in town and didn't care about his business. I didn't tell him we had to have it, either; I stayed somewhere between. There's a chance for us to take that business away from Slengels but never if Lew leaves us to go to Slengels first."

Ellen walked to her room in a clear, November coolness, with gusts of breeze at her cheek, the harbinger stirrings of a storm.

By morning, a storm—that completely capricious and relentless dealer in destinies—was spread over land and sea. It howled out to the ocean to strike the greatest ships and to make seasick, in his de luxe stateroom, Lew Alban. This was one of its countless consequences. Upon the western plains and especially upon the roaring reaches of the Great Lakes—that region where the wind had the water at its mercy in the middle of a continent—it struck with a suddenness and fury not known to the seas and dashed, like the hand of God, at its victims.

Against the package freighter Gideon Gant, out of Duluth with a crew of twenty-two officers and men, the gale beat; and the Gant flashed over the raging waves of