"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 the rest—was launched in the fall of 1895, and was lost on its maiden trip with both Stafford and Ramsdell aboard. The Stafford and Ramsdell interests could not survive the death of both owners and disappeared from the lakes. Is this what you wanted to know?"
The priest nodded. Alan leaned tensely forward, watching; what he had heard seemed to have increased and deepened the priest's feeling over what he had to tell and to have aided his comprehension of it.
"His name was Caleb Stafford," Father Perron began. "(This is what Benjamin Corvet told to me, when he was dying under the wreckage on the ferry.) 'He was as fair and able a man as the lakes ever knew. I had my will of most men in the lake trade in those days; but I could not have my will of him. With all the lakes to trade in, he had to pick out for his that traffic which I already had chosen for my own. But I fought him fair, Father—I fought him fair, and I would have continued to do that to the end.
"'I was at Manistee, Father, in the end of the season—December fifth of 1895. The ice had begun to form very early that year and was already bad; there was cold and a high gale. I had laid up one of my ships at Manistee, and I was crossing that night upon a tug to Manitowoc, where another was to be laid up. I had still a third one lading upon the northern peninsula at Manistique for a last trip which, if it could be made, would mean a good profit from a season which so far, because of Stafford's competition, had been only fair. After leaving Manistee, it grew still more cold, and I was afraid the ice would close in on her and keep her where she was, so I determined to go north that night and see that she got out. None knew, Father, except those aboard the tug, that I had made that change.
"'At midnight, Father, to westward of the Foxes, we heard the four blasts of a steamer in distress—the four long blasts which have sounded in my soul ever since! We turned toward where we saw the steamer's lights; we went nearer and, Father, it was his great, new ship—the Miwaka! We had heard two days before that she had passed the Soo; we had not known more than that of where she was. She had broken her new shaft, Father, and was intact except for that, but helpless in the rising sea...'"
The priest broke off. "The Miwaka! I did not understand all that that had meant to him until just now—the new ship of the rival line, whose building meant for him failure and defeat!
"There is no higher duty than the rescue of those in peril at sea. He—Benjamin Corvet, who told me this—swore to me that, at the beginning none upon the tug had any thought except to give aid. A small line was drifted down to the tug and to this a hawser was attached which they hauled aboard. There happened then the first of those events which led those upon the tug into doing a great wrong. He—Benjamin Corvet—had taken charge of the wheel of the tug; three men were handling the hawser in ice and washing water at the stern. The whistle accidentally blew, which those on the Miwaka understood to mean that the hawser had been secured, so they drew in the slack; the hawser, tightened unexpectedly by the pitching of the sea, caught and crushed the captain and deckhand of the tug and threw them into the sea.