seem, as he looked through these notes, to be
refreshing his memory; rather he seemed to be seeking something which
the notes did not supply; for he put them back and reclosed the desk.

"What I have," he said, speaking more particularly to Sherrill, "is the
terrible, not fully coherent statement of a dying man. It has given me
names--also it has given me facts. But isolated. It does not give
what came before or what came after; therefore, it does not make plain.
I hope that, as Benjamin Corvet's partner, you can furnish what I lack."

"What is it you want to know?" Sherrill asked.

"What were the relations between Benjamin Corvet and Captain Stafford?"

Sherrill thought a moment.

"Corvet," he replied, "was a very able man; he had insight and mental
grasp--and he had the fault which sometimes goes with those, a
hesitancy of action. Stafford was an able man too, considerably
younger than Corvet. We, ship owners of the lakes, have not the world
to trade in, Father Perron, as they have upon the sea; if you observe
our great shipping lines you will find that they have, it would seem,
apportioned among themselves the traffic of the lakes; each line has
its own connections and its own ports. But this did not come through
agreement, but through conflict; the strong have survived and made a
division of the traffic; the weak have died. Twenty years ago, when
this conflict of competing interests was at its height, Corvet was the
head of one line, Stafford was head of another, and the two lines had
very much the same connections and competed for the same cargoes."

"I begin to see!" Father Perron exclaimed. "Please go on."

"In the early nineties both lines still were young; Stafford had, I
believe, two ships; Corvet had three."

"So few? Yes; it grows plainer!"

"In 1894, Stafford managed a stroke which, if fate had not intervened,
must have assured the ultimate extinction of Corvet's line or its
absorption into Stafford's. Stafford gained as his partner Franklin
Ramsdell, a wealthy man whom he had convinced that the lake traffic
offered chances of great profit; and this connection supplied him with
the capital whose lack had been hampering him, as it was still
hampering Corvet. The new firm--Stafford and Ramsdell--projected the
construction, with Ramsdell's money, of a number of great steel
freighters. The first of these--the _Miwaka_, a test ship whose
experience was to guide them in the construction of th