"It was one of the great advantages of the West, I think—and particularly of Chicago at that time—that it gave opportunity for friendships of that sort," Sherrill said. "Corvet was a man of a sort I would have been far less likely ever to have known intimately in the East. He was both what the lakes had made him and what he had made of himself; a great reader—wholly self-educated; he had, I think, many of the attributes of a great man—at least, they were those of a man who should have become great; he had imagination and vision. His whole thought and effort, at that time, were absorbed in furthering and developing the traffic on the lakes, and not at all from mere desire for personal success. I met him for the first time one day when I went to his office on some business. He had just opened an office at that time in one of the old ramshackle rows along the river front; there was nothing at all pretentious about it—the contrary, in fact; but as I went in and waited with the others who were there to see him, I had the sense of being in the ante-room of a great man. I do not mean there was any idiotic pomp or lackyism or red tape about it; I mean that the others who were waiting to see him, and who knew him, were keyed up by the anticipation and keyed me up....
"I saw as much as I could of him after that, and our friendship became very close.
"In 1892, when I married and took my residence here on the lake shore—the house stood where this one stands now—Corvet bought the house on Astor Street. His only reason for doing it was, I believe, his desire to be near me. The neighborhood was what they call fashionable; neither Corvet nor Mrs. Corvet—he had married in 1889—had social ambitions of that sort. Mrs. Corvet came from Detroit; she was of good family there—a strain of French blood in the family; she was a schoolteacher when he married her, and she had made a wonderful wife for him—a good woman, a woman of very high ideals; it was great grief to both of them that they had no children.
"Between 1886, when I first met him, and 1895, Corvet laid the foundation of great success; his boats seemed lucky, men liked to work for him, and he got the best skippers and crews. A Corvet captain boasted of it and, if he had had bad luck on another line, believed his luck changed when he took a Corvet ship; cargoes in Corvet bottoms somehow always reached port; there was a saying that in storm a Corvet ship never asked help; it gave it; certainly in twenty years no Corvet ship had suffered serious disaster. Corvet was not yet rich, but unless accident or undue competition intervened, he was certain to become so. Then something happened."
Sherrill looked away at evident loss how to describe it.
"To the ships?" Alan asked him.
"No; to him. In 1896, for no apparent reason, a great change came over him."
"In 1896!"
"That was the year."
Alan bent forward, his heart throbbing in his throat. "That was also the year when I was brought and left with the Weltons in Kansas," he said.