The recipient of the letter which Benjamin Corvet had written and later so excitedly attempted to recover, was asking himself a question which was almost the same as the question which Constance Sherrill had asked.

He was, the second morning later, waiting for the first of the two daily eastbound trains which stopped at the little Kansas town of Blue Rapids which he called home. As long as he could look back into his life, the question, who is this person they call Alan Conrad, and what am I to the man who writes from Chicago, had been the paramount enigma of existence for him. Since he was now twenty-three, as nearly as he had been able to approximate it, and as distinct recollection of isolated, extraordinary events went back to the time when he was five, it was quite eighteen years since he had first noticed the question put to the people who had him in charge: "So this is little Alan Conrad.

Who is he?"

Undoubtedly the question had been asked in his presence before; certainly it was asked many times afterwards; but it was since that day when, on his noticing the absence of a birthday of his own, they had told him he was five, that he connected the evasion of the answer with the difference between himself and the other children he saw, and particularly between himself and the boy and girl in the same house with him. When visitors came from somewhere far off, no one of them ever looked surprised at seeing the other children or asked about them.

Always, when some one came, it was, "So this is little Jim!" and "This is Betty; she's more of a Welton every day!" Then, each time with that change in the voice and in the look of the eyes and in the feel of the arms about him--for though Alan could not feel how the arms hugged Jim and Betty, he knew that for him it was quite different--"So this is Alan Conrad," or, "So this is the child!" or, "This, I suppose, is the boy I've heard about!"

However, there was a quite definite, if puzzling, advantage at times in being Alan Conrad. Following the arrival of certain letters, which were distinguished from most others arriving at the house by having no ink writing on the envelope but just a sort of purple or black printing like newspapers, Alan invariably received a dollar to spend just as he liked. To be sure, unless "papa" took him to town, there was nothing for him to spend it upon; so, likely enough, it went into the square iron bank, of which the key was lost; but quite often he did spend it according to plans agreed upon among all his friends and, in memory of these occasions and in antic.i.p.ation of the next, "Alan's dollar" became a community inst.i.tution among the children.

But exhilarating and wonderful as it was to be able of one's self to take three friends to the circus, or to be the purveyor of twenty whole packages--not sticks--of gum, yet the dollar really made only more plain the boy's difference. The regularity and certainty of its arrival as Alan's share of some larger sum of money which came to "papa" in the letter, never served to make the event ordinary or accepted.

"Who gives it to you, Alan?" was a question more often asked, as time went on. The only answer Alan could give was, "It comes from Chicago."

The postmark on the envelope, Alan noticed, was always Chicago; that was all he ever could find out about his dollar. He was about ten years old when, for a reason as inexplicable as the dollar's coming, the letters with the typewritten addresses and the enclosed money ceased.

Except for the loss of the dollar at the end of every second month--a loss much discussed by all the children and not accepted as permanent till more than two years had pa.s.sed--Alan felt no immediate results from the cessation of the letters from Chicago; and when the first effects appeared, Jim and Betty felt them quite as much as he. Papa and mamma felt them, too, when the farm had to be given up, and the family moved to the town, and papa went to work in the woolen mill beside the river.

Papa and mamma, at first surprised and dismayed by the stopping of the letters, still clung to the hope of the familiar, typewritten addressed envelope appearing again; but when, after two years, no more money came, resentment which had been steadily growing against the person who had sent the money began to turn against Alan; and his "parents" told him all they knew about him.

In 1896 they had noticed an advertis.e.m.e.nt for persons to care for a child; they had answered it to the office of the newspaper which printed it. In response to their letter a man called upon them and, after seeing them and going around to see their friends, had made arrangements with them to take a boy of three, who was in good health and came of good people. He paid in advance board for a year and agreed to send a certain amount every two months after that time. The man brought the boy, whom he called Alan Conrad, and left him. For seven years the money agreed upon came; now it had ceased, and papa had no way of finding the man--the name given by him appeared to be fict.i.tious, and he had left no address except "general delivery, Chicago"--Papa knew nothing more than that. He had advertised in the Chicago papers after the money stopped coming, and he had communicated with every one named Conrad in or near Chicago, but he had learned nothing. Thus, at the age of thirteen, Alan definitely knew that what he already had guessed--the fact that he belonged somewhere else than in the little brown house--was all that any one there could tell him; and the knowledge gave persistence to many internal questionings.

Where did he belong? Who was he? Who was the man who had brought him here? Had the money ceased coming because the person who sent it was dead? In that case, connection of Alan with the place where he belonged was permanently broken. Or would some other communication from that source reach him some time--if not money, then something else? Would he be sent for some day? He did not resent "papa and mamma's" new att.i.tude of benefactors toward him; instead, loving them both because he had no one else to love, he sympathized with it. They had struggled hard to keep the farm. They had ambitions for Jim; they were scrimping and sparing now so that Jim could go to college, and whatever was given to Alan was taken away from Jim and diminished by just that much his opportunity.

But when Alan asked papa to get him a job in the woolen mill at the other side of town where papa himself worked in some humble and indefinite capacity, the request was refused. Thus, externally at least, Alan's learning the little that was known about himself made no change in his way of living; he went, as did Jim, to the town school, which combined grammar and high schools under one roof; and, as he grew older, he clerked--as Jim also did--in one of the town stores during vacations and in the evenings; the only difference was this: that Jim's money, so earned, was his own, but Alan carried his home as part payment of those arrears which had mounted up against him since the letters ceased coming. At seventeen, having finished high school, he was clerking officially in Merrill's general store, when the next letter came.

It was addressed this time not to papa, but to Alan Conrad. He seized it, tore it open, and a bank draft for fifteen hundred dollars fell out. There was no letter with the enclosure, no word of communication; just the draft to the order of Alan Conrad. Alan wrote the Chicago bank by which the draft had been issued; their reply showed that the draft had been purchased with currency, so there was no record of the ident.i.ty of the person who had sent it. More than that amount was due for arrears for the seven years during which no money was sent, even when the total which Alan had earned was deducted. So Alan merely endorsed the draft over to "father"; and that fall Jim went to college.

But, when Jim discovered that it not only was possible but planned at the university for a boy to work his way through, Alan went also.

Four wonderful years followed. The family of a professor of physics, with whom he was brought in contact by his work outside of college, liked him and "took him up." He lodged finally in their house and became one of them. In companionship with these educated people, ideas and manners came to him which he could not have acquired at home; athletics straightened and added bearing to his muscular, well-formed body; his pleasant, strong young face acquired self-reliance and self-control. Life became filled with possibilities for himself which it had never held before.

But on his day of graduation he had to put away the enterprises he had planned and the dreams he dreamed and, conscious that his debt to father and mother still remained unpaid, he had returned to care for them; for father's health had failed and Jim who had opened a law office in Kansas City, could do nothing to help.

No more money had followed the draft from Chicago and there had been no communication of any kind; but the receipt of so considerable a sum had revived and intensified all Alan's speculations about himself. The vague expectation of his childhood that sometime, in some way, he would be "sent for" had grown during the last six years to a definite belief.

And now--on the afternoon before--the summons had come.

This time, as he tore open the envelope, he saw that besides a check, there was writing within--an uneven and nervous-looking but plainly legible communication in longhand. The letter made no explanation. It told him, rather than asked him, to come to Chicago, gave minute instructions for the journey, and advised him to telegraph when he started. The check was for a hundred dollars to pay his expenses.

Check and letter were signed by a name completely strange to him.

He was a distinctly attractive looking lad, as he stood now on the station platform of the little town, while the eastbound train rumbled in, and he fingered in his pocket the letter from Chicago.

As the train came to a stop, he pushed his suitcase up on to a car platform and stood on the bottom step, looking back at the little town standing away from its railroad station among brown, treeless hills, now scantily snow-covered--the town which was the only home he ever consciously had known. His eyes dampened and he choked, as he looked at it and at the people on the station platform--the station-master, the drayman, the man from the post office who would receive the mail bag, people who called him by his first name, as he called them by theirs. He did not doubt at all that he would see the town and them again. The question was what he would be when he did see them. They and it would not be changed, but he would. As the train started, he picked up the suitcase and carried it into the second day-coach.

Finding a seat, at once he took the letter from his pocket and for the dozenth time reread it. Was Corvet a relative? Was he the man who had sent the remittances when Alan was a little boy, and the one who later had sent the fifteen hundred dollars? Or was he merely a go-between, perhaps a lawyer? There was no letterhead to give aid in these speculations. The address to which Alan was to come was in Astor Street. He had never heard the name of the street before. Was it a business street, Corvet's address in some great office building, perhaps?

He tried by repeating both names over and over to himself to arouse any obscure, obliterated childhood memory he might have had of then; but the repet.i.tion brought no result. Memory, when he stretched it back to its furthest, showed him only the Kansas prairie.

Late that afternoon he reached Kansas City, designated in the letter as the point where he would change cars. That night saw him in his train--a transcontinental with berths nearly all made up and people sleeping behind the curtains. Alan undressed and got into his berth, but he lay awake most of the night, excited and expectant. The late February dawn showed him the rolling lands of Iowa which changed, while he was at breakfast in the dining car, to the snow-covered fields and farms of northern Illinois. Toward noon, he could see, as the train rounded curves, that the horizon to the east had taken on a murky look.

Vast, vague, the shadow--the emanation of hundreds of thousands of chimneys--thickened and grew more definite as the train sped on; suburban villages began supplanting country towns; stations became more pretentious. They pa.s.sed factories; then hundreds of acres of little houses of the factory workers in long rows; swiftly the buildings became larger, closer together; he had a vision of miles upon miles of streets, and the train rolled slowly into a long trainshed and stopped.

Alan, following the porter with his suitcase from the car, stepped down among the crowds hurrying to and from the trains. He was not confused, he was only intensely excited. Acting in implicit accord with the instructions of the letter, which he knew by heart, he went to the uniformed attendant and engaged a taxicab--itself no small experience; there would be no one at the station to meet him, the letter had said.

He gave the Astor Street address and got into the cab. Leaning forward in his seat, looking to the right and then to the left as he was driven through the city, his first sensation was only disappointment.

Except that it was larger, with more and bigger buildings and with more people upon its streets, Chicago apparently did not differ from Kansas City. If it was, in reality, the city of his birth, or if ever he had seen these streets before, they now aroused no memories in him.

It had begun to snow again. For a few blocks the taxicab drove north past more or less ordinary buildings, then turned east on a broad boulevard where tall tile and brick and stone structures towered till their roofs were hidden in the snowfall. The large, light flakes, falling lazily, were thick enough so that, when the taxicab swung to the north again, there seemed to Alan only a great vague void to his right. For the hundred yards which he could view clearly, the s.p.a.ce appeared to be a park; now a huge granite building, guarded by stone lions, went by; then more park; but beyond-- A strange stir and tingle, quite distinct from the excitement of the arrival at the station, p.r.i.c.ked in Alan's veins, and hastily he dropped the window to his right and gazed out again. The lake, as he had known since his geography days, lay to the east of Chicago; therefore that void out there beyond the park was the lake or, at least, the harbor. A different air seemed to come from it; sounds... Suddenly it all was shut off; the taxicab, swerving a little, was dashing between business blocks; a row of buildings had risen again upon the right; they broke abruptly to show him a wooden-walled chasm in which flowed a river full of ice with a tug dropping its smokestack as it went below the bridge which the cab crossed; buildings on both sides again; then, to the right, a roaring, heaving, crashing expanse.

The sound, Alan knew, had been coming to him as an undertone for many minutes; now it overwhelmed, swallowed all other sound. It was great, not loud; all sound which Alan had heard before, except the soughing of the wind over his prairies, came from one point; even the monstrous city murmur was centered in comparison with this. Alan could see only a few hundred yards out over the water as the taxicab ran along the lake drive, but what was before him was the surf of a sea; that constant, never diminishing, never increasing roar came from far beyond the sh.o.r.e; the surge and rise and fall and surge again were of a sea in motion. Floes floated, tossed up, tumbled, broke, and rose again with the rush of the surf; spray flew up between the floes; geysers spurted high into the air as the pressure of the water, bearing up against the ice, burst between two great ice-cakes before the waves cracked them and tumbled them over. And all was without wind; over the lake, as over the land, the soft snowflakes lazily floated down, scarcely stirred by the slightest breeze; that roar was the voice of the water, that awful power its own.

Alan choked and gasped for breath, his pulses pounding in his throat; he had s.n.a.t.c.hed off his hat and, leaning out of the window sucked the lake air into his lungs. There had been nothing to make him expect this overwhelming crush of feeling. The lake--he had thought of it, of course, as a great body of water, an interesting sight for a prairie boy to see; that was all. No physical experience in all his memory had affected him like this; and it was without warning; the strange thing that had stirred within him as the car brought him to the drive down-town was strengthened now a thousand-fold; it amazed, half frightened, half dizzied him. Now, as the motor suddenly swung around a corner and shut the sight of the lake from him, Alan sat back breathless.

"Astor Street," he read the marker on the corner a block back from the lake, and he bent quickly forward to look, as the car swung to the right into Astor Street. It was--as in this neighborhood it must be--a residence street of handsome mansions built close together. The car swerved to the east curb about the middle of the block and came to a stop. The house before which it had halted was a large stone house of quiet, good design; it was some generation older, apparently, than the houses on each side of it which were brick and terra cotta of recent, fashionable architecture; Alan only glanced at them long enough to get that impression before he opened the cab door and got out; but as the cab drove away, he stood beside his suitcase looking up at the old house which bore the number given in Benjamin Corvet's letter, then around at the other houses and back to that again.

The neighborhood obviously precluded the probability of Corvet's being merely a lawyer--a go-between. He must be some relative; the question ever present in Alan's thought since the receipt of the letter, but held in abeyance, as to the possibility and nearness of Corvet's relation to him, took sharper and more exact form now than he had dared to let it take before. Was his relationship to Corvet, perhaps, the closest of all relationships? Was Corvet his ... father? He checked the question within himself, for the time had pa.s.sed for mere speculation upon it now. Alan was trembling excitedly; for--whoever Corvet might be--the enigma of Alan's existence was going to be answered when he had entered that house. He was going to know who he was. All the possibilities, the responsibilities, the attachments, the opportunities, perhaps, of that person whom he was--but whom, as yet, he did not know--were before him.

He half expected the heavy, gla.s.sless door at the top of the stone steps to be opened by some one coming out to greet him, as he took up his suitcase; but the gray house, like the brighter mansions on both sides of it, remained impa.s.sive. If any one in that house had observed his coming, no sign was given. He went up the steps and, with fingers excitedly unsteady, he pushed the bell beside the door.

The door opened almost instantly--so quickly after the ring, indeed, that Alan, with leaping throb of his heart, knew that some one must have been awaiting him. But the door opened only halfway, and the man who stood within, gazing out at Alan questioningly, was obviously a servant.

"What is it?" he asked, as Alan stood looking at him and past him to the narrow section of darkened hall which was in sight.

Alan put his hand over the letter in his pocket. "I've come to see Mr.

Corvet," he said--"Mr. Benjamin Corvet."

"What is your name?"

Alan gave his name; the man repeated it after him, in the manner of a trained servant, quite without inflection. Alan, not familiar with such tones, waited uncertainly. So far as he could tell, the name was entirely strange to the servant, awaking neither welcome nor opposition, but indifference. The man stepped back, but not in such a manner as to invite Alan in; on the contrary, he half closed the door as he stepped back, leaving it open only an inch or two; but it was enough so that Alan heard him say to some one within:

"He says he's him."

"Ask him in; I will speak to him." It was a girl's voice--this second one, a voice such as Alan never had heard before. It was low and soft but quite clear and distinct, with youthful, impulsive modulations and the manner of accent which Alan knew must go with the sort of people who lived in houses like those on this street.

The servant, obeying the voice, returned and opened wide the door.

"Will you come in, sir?"

Alan put down his suitcase on the stone porch; the man made no move to pick it up and bring it in. Then Alan stepped into the hall face to face with the girl who had come from the big room on the right.

She was quite a young girl--not over twenty-one or twenty-two, Alan judged; like girls brought up in wealthy families, she seemed to Alan to have gained young womanhood in far greater degree in some respects than the girls he knew, while, at the same time, in other ways, she retained more than they some characteristics of a child. Her slender figure had a woman's a.s.surance and grace; her soft brown hair was dressed like a woman's; her gray eyes had the open directness of the girl. Her face--smoothly oval, with straight brows and a skin so delicate that at the temples the veins showed dimly blue--was at once womanly and youthful; and there was something altogether likable and simple about her, as she studied Alan now. She had on a street dress and hat; whether it was this, or whether it was the contrast of her youth and vitality with this somber, darkened house that told him, Alan could not tell, but he felt instinctively that this house was not her home. More likely, it was some indefinable, yet convincing expression of her manner that gave him that impression. While he hazarded, with fast beating heart, what privilege of acquaintance with her Alan Conrad might have, she moved a little nearer to him. She was slightly pale, he noticed now, and there were lines of strain and trouble about her eyes.

"I am Constance Sherrill," she announced. Her tone implied quite evidently that she expected him to have some knowledge of her, and she seemed surprised to see that her name did not mean more to him.

"Mr. Corvet is not here this morning," she said.

He hesitated, but persisted: "I was to see him here to-day, Miss Sherrill. He wrote me, and I telegraphed him I would be here to-day."

"I know," she answered. "We had your telegram. Mr. Corvet was not here when it came, so my father opened it." Her voice broke oddly, and he studied her in indecision, wondering who that father might be that opened Mr. Corvet's telegrams.

"Mr. Corvet went away very suddenly," she explained. She seemed, he thought, to be trying to make something plain to him which might be a shock to him; yet herself to be uncertain what the nature of that shock might be. Her look was scrutinizing, questioning, anxious, but not unfriendly. "After he had written you and something else had happened--I think--to alarm my father about him, father came here to his house to look after him. He thought something might have ...

happened to Mr. Corvet here in his house. But Mr. Corvet was not here."

"You mean he has--disappeared?"