The Indian Drum by William MacHarg (classic english novels txt) 📕

answered it to the office of the newspaper which printed it. In response to their letter a man called upon them and, after seeing them and going around to see their friends, had made arrangements with them to take a boy of three, who was in good health and came of good people. He paid in advance board for a year and agreed to send a certain amount every two months after that time. The man brought the boy, whom he called Alan Conrad, and left him. For seven years the money agreed upon came; now it had ceased, and papa had no way of finding the man—the name given by him appeared to be fictitious, and he had left no address except "general delivery, Chicago"—Papa knew nothing more than that. He had advertised in the Chicago papers after the money stopped coming, and he had communicated with every one named Conrad in or near Chicago, but he had learned nothing. Thus, at the age of thirteen, Alan definitely knew that what he already had guessed—the fact that he belonged somewhere else than in the little brown house—was all that any one there could tell him; and the knowledge gave persistence to many internal questionings. Where did he belong? Who was he? Who was the man who had brought him here? Had the money ceased coming because the person who sent it was dead? In that case, connection of Alan with the place where he belonged was permanently broken. Or would some other communication from that source reach him some time—if not money, then something else? Would he be sent for some day? He did not resent "papa and mamma's" new attitude of benefactors toward him; instead, loving them both because he had no one else to love, he sympathized with it. They had struggled hard to keep the farm. They had ambitions for Jim; they were scrimping and sparing now so that Jim could go to college, and whatever was given to Alan was taken away from Jim and diminished by just that much his opportunity.

But when Alan asked papa to get him a job in the woolen mill at the other side of town where papa himself worked in some humble and indefinite capacity, the request was refused. Thus, externally at least, Alan's learning the little that was known about himself made no change in his way of living; he went, as did Jim, to the town school, which combined grammar and high schools under one roof; and, as he grew older, he clerked—as Jim also did—in one of the town stores during vacations and in the evenings; the only difference was this: that Jim's money, so earned, was his own, but Alan carried his home as part payment of those arrears which had mounted up against him since the letters ceased coming. At seventeen, having finished high school, he was clerking officially in Merrill's general store, when the next letter came.

It was addressed this time not to papa, but to Alan Conrad. He seized it, tore it open, and a bank draft for fifteen hundred dollars fell out. There was no letter with the enclosure, no word of communication; just the draft to the order of Alan Conrad. Alan wrote the Chicago bank by which the draft had been issued; their reply showed that the draft had been purchased with currency, so there was no record of the identity of the person who had sent it. More than that amount was due for arrears for the seven years during which no money was sent, even when the total which Alan had earned was deducted. So Alan merely endorsed the draft over to "father"; and that fall Jim went to college. But, when Jim discovered that it not only was possible but planned at the university for a boy to work his way through, Alan went also.

Four wonderful years followed. The family of a professor of physics, with whom he was brought in contact by his work outside of college, liked him and "took him up." He lodged finally in their house and became one of them. In companionship with these educated people, ideas and manners came to him which he could not have acquired at home; athletics straightened and added bearing to his muscular, well-formed body; his pleasant, strong young face acquired self-reliance and self-control. Life became filled with possibilities for himself which it had never held before.

But on his day of graduation he had to put away the enterprises he had planned and the dreams he dreamed and, conscious that his debt to father and mother still remained unpaid, he had returned to care for them; for father's health had failed and Jim who had opened a law office in Kansas City, could do nothing to help.

No more money had followed the draft from Chicago and there had been no communication of any kind; but the receipt of so considerable a sum had revived and intensified all Alan's speculations about himself. The vague expectation of his childhood that sometime, in some way, he would be "sent for" had grown during the last six years to a definite belief. And now—on the afternoon before—the summons had come.

This time, as he tore open the envelope, he saw that besides a check, there was writing within—an uneven and nervous-looking but plainly legible communication in longhand. The letter made no explanation. It told him, rather than asked him, to come to Chicago, gave minute instructions for the journey, and advised him to telegraph when he started. The check was for a hundred dollars to pay his expenses. Check and letter were signed by a name completely strange to him.

He was a distinctly attractive looking lad, as he stood now on the station platform of the little town, while the eastbound train rumbled in, and he fingered in his pocket the letter from Chicago.

As the train came to a stop, he pushed his suitcase up on to a car platform and stood on the bottom step, looking back at the little town standing away from its railroad station among brown, treeless hills, now scantily snow-covered—the town which was the only home he ever consciously had known. His eyes dampened and he choked, as he looked at it and at the people on the station platform—the station-master, the drayman, the man from the post office who would receive the mail bag, people who called him by his first name, as he called them by theirs. He did not doubt at all that he would see the town and them again. The question was what he would be when he did see them. They and it would not be changed, but he would. As the train started, he picked up the suitcase and carried it into the second day-coach.

Finding a seat, at once he took the letter from his pocket and for the dozenth time reread it. Was Corvet a relative? Was he the man who had sent the remittances when Alan was a little boy, and the one who later had sent the fifteen hundred dollars? Or was he merely a go-between, perhaps a lawyer? There was no letterhead to give aid in these speculations. The address to which Alan was to come was in Astor Street. He had never heard the name of the street before. Was it a business street, Corvet's address in some great office building, perhaps?

He tried by repeating both names over and over to himself to arouse any obscure, obliterated childhood memory he might have had of then; but the repetition brought no result. Memory, when he stretched it back to its furthest, showed him only the Kansas prairie.

Late that afternoon he reached Kansas City, designated in the letter as the point where he would change cars. That night saw him in his train—a transcontinental with berths nearly all made up and people sleeping behind the curtains. Alan undressed and got into his berth, but he lay awake most of the night, excited and expectant. The late February dawn showed him the rolling lands of Iowa which changed, while he was at breakfast in the dining car, to the snow-covered fields and farms of northern Illinois. Toward noon, he could see, as the train rounded curves, that the horizon to the east had taken on a murky look. Vast, vague, the shadow—the emanation of hundreds of thousands of chimneys—thickened and grew more definite as the train sped on; suburban villages began supplanting country towns; stations became more pretentious. They passed factories; then hundreds of acres of little houses of the factory workers in long rows; swiftly the buildings became larger, closer together; he had a vision of miles upon miles of streets, and the train rolled slowly into a long trainshed and stopped.

Alan, following the porter with his suitcase from the car, stepped down among the crowds hurrying to and from the trains. He was not confused, he was only intensely excited. Acting in implicit accord with the instructions of the letter, which he knew by heart, he went to the uniformed attendant and engaged a taxicab—itself no small experience; there would be no one at the station to meet him, the letter had said. He gave the Astor Street address and got into the cab. Leaning forward in his seat, looking to the right and then to the left as he was driven through the city, his first sensation was only disappointment.

Except that it was larger, with more and bigger buildings and with more people upon its streets, Chicago apparently did not differ from Kansas City. If it was, in reality, the city of his birth, or if ever he had seen these streets before, they now aroused no memories in him.

It had begun to snow again. For a few blocks the taxicab drove north past more or less ordinary buildings, then turned east on a broad boulevard where tall tile and brick and stone structures towered till their roofs were hidden in the snowfall. The large, light flakes, falling lazily, were thick enough so that, when the taxicab swung to the north again, there seemed to Alan only a great vague void to his right. For the hundred yards which he could view clearly, the space appeared to be a park; now a huge granite building, guarded by stone lions, went by; then more park; but beyond— A strange stir and tingle, quite distinct from the excitement of the arrival at the station, pricked in Alan's veins, and hastily he dropped the window to his right and gazed out again. The lake, as he had known since his geography days, lay to the east of Chicago; therefore that void out there beyond the park was the lake or, at least, the harbor. A different air seemed to come from it; sounds... Suddenly it all was shut off; the taxicab, swerving a little, was dashing between business blocks; a row of buildings had risen again upon the right; they broke abruptly to show him a wooden-walled chasm in which flowed a river full of ice with a tug dropping its smokestack as it went below the bridge which the cab crossed; buildings on both sides again; then, to the right, a roaring, heaving, crashing expanse.

The sound, Alan knew, had been coming to him as an undertone for many minutes; now it overwhelmed, swallowed all other sound. It was great, not loud; all sound which Alan had heard before, except the soughing of the wind over his prairies, came from one point; even the monstrous city murmur was centered in comparison with this. Alan could see only a few hundred yards out over the water as the taxicab ran along the lake drive, but what was before him was the surf of a sea; that constant, never diminishing, never increasing roar came from far beyond the shore; the surge and rise and fall and surge again were of a sea in motion. Floes floated, tossed up, tumbled,