“I was a reporter like you here,” Doctor Parcival began.  “It was in a town in Iowa—­or was it in Illinois?  I don’t remember and anyway it makes no difference.  Perhaps I am trying to conceal my identity and don’t want to be very definite.  Have you ever thought it strange that I have money for my needs although I do nothing?  I may have stolen a great sum of money or been involved in a murder before I came here.  There is food for thought in that, eh?  If you were a really smart newspaper reporter you would look me up.  In Chicago there was a Doctor Cronin who was murdered.  Have you heard of that?  Some men murdered him and put him in a trunk.  In the early morning they hauled the trunk across the city.  It sat on the back of an express wagon and they were on the seat as unconcerned as anything.  Along they went through quiet streets where everyone was asleep.  The sun was just coming up over the lake.  Funny, eh—­just to think of them smoking pipes and chattering as they drove along as unconcerned as I am now.  Perhaps I was one of those men.  That would be a strange turn of things, now wouldn’t it, eh?” Again Doctor Parcival began his tale:  “Well, anyway there I was, a reporter on a paper just as you are here, running about and getting little items to print.  My mother was poor.  She took in washing.  Her dream was to make me a Presbyterian minister and I was studying with that end in view.

“My father had been insane for a number of years.  He was in an asylum over at Dayton, Ohio.  There you see I have let it slip out!  All of this took place in Ohio, right here in Ohio.  There is a clew if you ever get the notion of looking me up.

“I was going to tell you of my brother.  That’s the object of all this.  That’s what I’m getting at.  My brother was a railroad painter and had a job on the Big Four.  You know that road runs through Ohio here.  With other men he lived in a box car and away they went from town to town painting the railroad property-switches, crossing gates, bridges, and stations.

“The Big Four paints its stations a nasty orange color.  How I hated that color!  My brother was always covered with it.  On pay days he used to get drunk and come home wearing his paint-covered clothes and bringing his money with him.  He did not give it to mother but laid it in a pile on our kitchen table.

“About the house he went in the clothes covered with the nasty orange colored paint.  I can see the picture.  My mother, who was small and had red, sad-looking eyes, would come into the house from a little shed at the back.  That’s where she spent her time over the washtub scrubbing people’s dirty clothes.  In she would come and stand by the table, rubbing her eyes with her apron that was covered with soap-suds.

“‘Don’t touch it!  Don’t you dare touch that money,’ my brother roared, and then he himself took five or ten dollars and went tramping off to the saloons.  When he had spent what he had taken he came back for more.  He never gave my mother any money at all but stayed about until he had spent it all, a little at a time.  Then he went back to his job with the painting crew on the railroad.  After he had gone things began to arrive at our house, groceries and such things.  Sometimes there would be a dress for mother or a pair of shoes for me.