y, "why are you here?"

"I decided to come up last night."

"Obviously." He uttered the word slowly and with care. "Unless you
came in a flying machine. Who came with you?"

"No one; I came alone. I expected to find father at Petoskey; he
hadn't been there, so I came on here."

"After him?"

"No; after you, Henry."

"After me?" She had increased the apprehension in him, and he
considered and scrutinized her before he ventured to go on. "Because
you wanted to be up here with me, eh, Connie?"

"Of course not!"

"What's that?"

"Of course not!"

"I knew it!" he moved menacingly. She watched him quite without fear;
fear was for him, she felt, not her. Often she had wished that she
might have known him when he was a young man; now, she was aware that,
in a way, she was having that wish. Under the surface of the man whose
strength and determination she had admired, all the time had been this
terror--this guilt. If Uncle Benny had carried it for a score of
years, Henry had had it within him too. This had been within him all
the time!

"You came up here about Ben Corvet?" he challenged.

"Yes--no!"

"Which do you mean?"

"No."

"I know then. For him, then--eh. For him!"

"For Alan Conrad? Yes," she said.

"I knew it!" he repeated. "He's been the trouble between you and me
all the time!"

She made no denial of that; she had begun to know during the last two
days that it was so.

"So you came to find him?" Henry went on.

"Yes, Henry. Have you any news?"

"News?"

"News of the boats?"

"News!" he iterated. "News to-night! No one'll have more'n one news
to-night!"

From his slow, heavy utterance, a timbre of terrible satisfaction
betrayed itself; his eyes widened a little as he saw it strike
Constance, then his lids narrowed again. He had not meant to say it
that way; yet, for an instant, satisfaction to him had become
inseparable from the saying, before that was followed by fright--the
fright of examination of just what he had said or of what she had made
of it.

"He'll be found!" she defied him.

"Be found?"

"Some are dead," she admitted, "but not all. Twenty are dead; but
seven are not!"

She looked for confirmation to the Indian woman, who nodded: "Yes." He
moved his head to face the woman, but his eyes, unmoving, remained
fixed on Constance.

"Seven?" he echoed. "You say seven are not! How do you know?"

"The Drum has been beating for twenty, but not for mo