Lennox rose and went to his desk. "It's what I've always said," he threw back over his shoulder. "Get Menning, and you get the root of all this mystery." I sat pondering his story. It was not long before my ears caught the sound of a motor cycle along the road, and a few minutes after Herrick appeared. He looked as if he had ridden far and fast; his clothes were covered with dust and there were grimy circles round his eyes. "No, I don't want to eat," he said. "I got a sandwich coming along. Just let me get this dirt off, that's all." He went through to the kitchen, and we could hear him splashing at the sink. When he came back, still vigorously towelling his face, Lennox had already mixed him a drink at the sideboard. "Well," Herrick said, settling himself in the chair Lennox had vacated, "let's begin at the beginning. When I left this morning, Austin, I couldn't tell you where I was going, because I didn't know myself. I had to pick up my information on the way. I was on the track of something which, it seems to me, none of us has so far taken into account, and that is, Jakey Menning's early life." "He was born right in this county," said Lennox. "He was not. That's where you make your mistake. He was between eight and nine years old when he first came here. His mother, when we first hear of her, was employed with a travelling show, owned by a German Jew called Goldstein, a sort of fourth rate circus that used to do one-night stands in the small towns and villages. She cooked for the men and looked after the wardrobe. While she was working with them Jakey was born. No one seems to have known just who his father was. The mother passed as a kind of half-wit. She was cunning under an appearance of heavy stupidity, spoke a poor English, was easily teased and enraged, and seems to have been treated as the butt of the company. They wintered usually in Pottsville, where the proprietor's brother kept a saloon. The proprietor's wife took rather a fancy to Jakey, and later on, when Jakey's mother, during the slack season, took a job as cook in a cheap eating-joint there, she simply abandoned the baby to the circus people. While she was employed there she met Menning, married him, and doesn't seem to have troubled about Jakey for several years. Probably she never told Menning of his existence.