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 him-
