Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/218

202 He read another:

Born to Mr. and Mrs. Hal French, a daughter, Saturday afternoon last. Miss Vera Arabella French, at her arrival weighed seven and one-half pounds.

This clipping was dated, in Benjamin Corvet's hand, "Sturgeon Bay, Wis., Aug. 1914." Alan put it aside in bewilderment and amaze and took up again the sheets he first had looked at. The names and addresses on these oldest, yellowed pages had been first written, it was plain, all at the same time and with the same pen and ink, and each sheet in the beginning had contained seven or eight names. Some of these original names and even the addresses had been left unchanged, but most of them had been scratched out and altered many times—other and quite different names had been substituted; the pages had become finally almost illegible, crowded scrawls, rewritten again and again in Corvet's cramped hand. Alan strained forward, holding the first sheet to the light.

Alan seized the clippings he had looked at before and compared them swiftly with the page he had just read; two of the names—Westhouse and French—were the same as those upon this list. Suddenly he grasped the other pages of the list and looked them through for his own name; but it was not there. He dropped the sheets upon the table and got up and began to stride about the room.

He felt that in this list and in these clippings there must be, somehow, some one general meaning—they must relate in some way to one thing; they must have deeply, intensely concerned Benjamin Corvet's disappearance and his present fate, whatever that might be,