Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/63

Rh first information of her death come to him through a paragraph in a newspaper."

Alan had started; Sherrill looked at him questioningly.

"The spring of 1910," Alan explained, "was when I received the bank draft for fifteen hundred dollars."

Sherrill nodded; he did not seem surprised to hear this; rather it appeared to be confirmation of something in his own thought.

"Following his wife's leaving him," Sherrill went on, "Corvet saw very little of any one. He spent most of his time in his own house; occasionally he lunched at his club; at rare intervals, and always unexpectedly, he appeared at his office. I remember that summer he was terribly disturbed because one of his ships was lost. It was not a bad disaster, for every one on the ship was saved, and hull and cargo were fully covered by insurance; but the Corvet record was broken; a Corvet ship had appealed for help; a Corvet vessel had not reached port. . . . And later in the fall, when two deckhands were washed from another of his vessels and drowned, he was again greatly wrought up, though his ships still had a most favorable record. In 1902 I proposed to him that I buy full ownership in the vessels I partly controlled and ally them with those he and Spearman operated. It was a time of combination—the railroads and the steel interests were acquiring the lake vessels; and though I believed in this, I was not willing to enter any combination which would take the name of Sherrill off the list of American shipowners. I did not give Corvet this as my reason; and he made me at that time a very strange counter-proposition—which I have never been able to understand, and which entailed the