s?"

Sharlee said nothing. To tell the truth, she thought the behavior of
Queed Senior puzzling in the last degree.

"You grasp the situation? He knows exactly where I am; evidently he has
known it all along. He could come to see me to-night; he could have come
as soon as I arrived here three months ago; he could have come five,
ten, twenty years ago, when I was in New York. But instead he elects to
write these curious letters, apparently seeking to make a mystery, and
throwing the burden of finding him on me. Why should I become excited
over the prospect? If he would promise to endow me now, to support or
pension me off, if I found him, that would be one thing. But I submit to
you that no man can be expected to interrupt a most important life-work
in consideration of a single twenty-dollar bill. And that is the only
proof of interest I ever had from him. No--" he broke off suddenly--"no,
that's hardly true after all. I suppose it was he who sent the money to
Tim."

"To Tim?"

"Tim Queed."

Presently she gently prodded him. "And do you want to tell me who Tim
Queed is?"

He eyed her thoughtfully. If the ground of his talk appeared somewhat
delicate, nothing could have been more matter-of-fact than the way he
tramped it. Yet now he palpably paused to ask himself whether it was
worth his while to go more into detail. Yes; clearly it was. If it ever
became necessary to ask the boarding-house agent to find his father for
him, she would have to know what the situation was, and now was the time
to make it plain to her once and for all.

"He is the man I lived with till I was fourteen; one of my friends, a
policeman. For a long time I supposed, of course, that Tim was my
father, but when I was ten or twelve, he told me, first that I was an
orphan who had been left with him to bring up, and later on, that I had
a father somewhere who was not in a position to bring up children. That
was all he would ever say about it. I became a student while still a
little boy, having educated myself practically without instruction of
any sort, and when I was fourteen I left Tim because he married at that
time, and, with the quarreling and drinking that followed, the house
became unbearable. Tim then told me for the first time that he had, from
some source, funds equivalent to twenty-five dollars a month for my
board, and that he would allow me fifteen of that, keeping ten dollars a
month for his services as agent. You follow all this