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, and they must concern Alan's fate as well. But in their disconnection, their incoherence, he could discern no common thread. What conceivable bond could there have been uniting Benjamin Corvet at once with an old man dying upon a poor farm in Emmet County, wherever that might be, and with a baby girl, now some two years old, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin? He bent suddenly and swept the pages into the drawer of the table and reclosed the drawer, as he heard the doorbell ring and Wassaquam went to answer it. It was the police, Wassaquam came to tell him, who had come for Luke's body.
Alan went out into the hall to meet them. The coroner's man either had come with them or had arrived at the same time; he introduced himself to Alan, and his inquiries made plain that the young doctor whom Alan had called for Luke had fully carried out his offer to look after these things, for the coroner was already supplied with an account of what had taken place. A sailor formerly employed on the Corvet ships, the coroner's office had been told, had come to the Corvet house, ill and seeking aid; Mr. Corvet not being at home, the people of the house had taken the man in and called the doctor; but the man had been already beyond doctors' help and had died in a few hours of pneumonia and alcoholism; in Mr. Corvet's absence it had been impossible to learn the sailor's full name.
Alan left corroboration of this story mostly to Wassaquam, the servant's position in the house being more easily explicable than his own; but he found that his right there was not questioned, and that the police accepted him as a member of the household. He suspected that they did not think it necessary to push inquiry very actively in such a home as this.
After the police had gone, he called Wassaquam into the library and brought the lists and clippings out again.
"Do you know at all what these are, Judah?" he asked.
"No, Alan. I have seen Ben have them, and take them out and put them back. That is all I know."