At Kansas City I prowled about the neighborhood I had lived and worked in, but asked no questions. The crabbed, cranky widow’s boarding house was closed. Tex of the larcenous eye was gone, and so were the card and dice sharks. Cocky McAllister, the hack driver that helped me rescue Julia, was not around his old stand. The milkman I worked for, collecting bills from “them women,” was not at his place. The theater where Julia worked was still going, but she was not there. I passed Madam Singleton’s old place, but there was another name on the red-lighted pane of glass above the door. Still I asked no questions; they were all nothing to me. I could easily have found somebody to tell me what became of them all except, perhaps, Julia, but I was a stranger in my own town and preferred to remain one. My father was the only one I asked about. At the railroad offices, in the department where he had worked, I learned that he was dead.

A talkative old pensioner on the company who tended a door told me he had been dead three years; that he died after a long siege of sickness and had barely enough money left to bury him decently in the village graveyard beside my mother. I was not shocked to learn of his death; we had been too far apart for that. I wondered if my long silence and absence mightn’t have aggravated his illness and hastened his end. I was sorry not to have been with him when he was sick and needed me. I was glad he died without knowing what I had done to my life.

That was many years ago, but I wasn’t thoughtless even then, and I recall now, distinctly, how I realized with shame and regret that I had never done one thing to repay him for caring for me till I was able to shift, no matter how lamely, for myself. Looking back now, as I did then, I am forced to admit that the only consideration I ever showed for him was this: I never put his name, which is my name, on a police blotter or a prison register while he was alive, or after his death.