Conrad of Blue Rapids, Kansas. Who was
this Alan Conrad, and what could his connection be with Uncle Benny so
to precipitate disaster upon him?

CHAPTER II

WHO IS ALAN CONRAD?

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