cago, 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 repetition 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