e
50's but who later married an English girl at Mackinac and settled down
to become a trader in the woods of the North Peninsula, where Benjamin
Corvet was born.

During his boyhood, men came to the peninsula to cut timber; young
Corvet worked with them and began building ships. Thirty-five years
ago, he had been only one of the hundreds with his fortune in the fate
of a single bottom; but to-day in Cleveland, in Duluth, in Chicago,
more than a score of great steamers under the names of various
interdependent companies were owned or controlled by him and his two
partners, Sherrill and young Spearman.

He was a quiet, gentle-mannered man. At times, however, he suffered
from fits of intense irritability, and these of late had increased in
frequency and violence. It had been noticed that these outbursts
occurred generally at times of storm upon the lake, but the mere threat
of financial loss through the destruction of one or even more of his
ships was not now enough to cause them; it was believed that they were
the result of some obscure physical reaction to the storm, and that
this had grown upon him as he grew older.

To-day his irritability was so marked, his uneasiness so much greater
than any one had seen it before, that the attendant whom Corvet had
sent, a half hour earlier, to reserve his usual table for him in the
grill--"the table by the second window"--had started away without
daring to ask whether the table was to be set for one or more. Corvet
himself had corrected the omission: "For two," he had shot after the
man. Now, as his uneven footsteps carried him to the door of the
grill, and he went in, the steward, who had started forward at sight of
him, suddenly stopped, and the waiter assigned to his table stood
nervously uncertain, not knowing whether to give his customary greeting
or to efface himself as much as possible.

The tables, at this hour, were all unoccupied. Corvet crossed to the
one he had reserved and sat down; he turned immediately to the window
at his side and scraped on it a little clear opening through which he
could see the storm outside. Ten minutes later he looked up sharply
but did not rise, as the man he had been awaiting--Spearman, the
younger of his two partners--came in.

Spearman's first words, audible through the big room, made plain that
he was late to an appointment asked by Corvet; his acknowledgment of
this took the form of an apology, but one which, in tone differen