He was clear of the law after that but his manner in no way changed. There was, somewhere, a man or a woman who would understand just what he understood and it was important to find that person and talk things over. There was a time, during the trial and immediately afterward, when I saw a good deal of him, and I had this sharp sense of him, feeling about in the darkness trying to find something like a needle or a pin lost on the floor. Well, he was like an old man who cannot find his glasses. He feels in all his pockets and looks helplessly about. There was a question in my own mind too, in everyone’s mind—“Can a man be wholly casual and brutal, in every outward way, at a moment when the one nearest and dearest to him is dying, and at the same time, and with quite another part of himself, be altogether tender and sensitive?” * * * * * Anyway it’s a story, and once in a while a man likes to tell a story straight out, without putting in any newspaper jargon about beautiful heiresses, coldblooded murderers and all that sort of tommyrot. As I picked the story up the sense of it was something like this— The man’s name was Wilson,—Edgar Wilson—and he had come to Chicago from some place to the westward, perhaps from the mountains. He might once have been a sheep herder or something of the sort in the far west, as he had the peculiar abstract air, acquired only by being a good deal alone. About himself and his past he told a good many conflicting stories and so, after being with him for a time, one instinctively discarded the past. “The devil—it doesn’t matter—the man can’t tell the truth in that direction.—Let it go,” one said to oneself. What was known was that he had come to Chicago from a town in Kansas and that he had run away from the Kansas town with another man’s wife. As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one time, I imagine, a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding sort of way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather messy. In those dead flat Kansas towns lives have a way of getting ugly and messy without anything very definite having happened to make them so. One can’t imagine the reasons—Let it go. It just is so and one can’t at all believe the writers of Western tales about the life out there. To be a little more definite about this particular woman—in her young girlhood her father had got into trouble. He had been some sort of a small official, a travelling agent or something of the sort for an express company, and got arrested in connection with the disappearance of some money. And then, when he was in jail and before his trial, he shot and killed himself. The girl’s mother was already dead. Within a year or two she married a man, an honest enough fellow but from all accounts rather uninteresting. He was a drug clerk and a frugal man and after a short time managed to buy a drug store of his own.