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 perfectly? So
matters went along for ten years, Tim bringing me the fifteen dollars
every month and coming frequently to see me in between, often bringing
along his brother Murphy, who is a yeggman. Last fall came this letter,
purporting to be from my father. Absurd as it appeared to me, I decided
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