“Twice have I breasted the stormy seas of matrimony, and some fatality seemed to follow me. Both ventures ended in my being bereft. My first wife was a Kentucky girl. I have sealed that book so long ago that it may not be torn open now if I can help it. The boy who came to me as the fruits of that unhappy union resembled his mother so closely in features that I could not bear to look upon him. He was at school, a military academy, until seventeen. Then something like remorse came upon me. I had married again, and my little Dorothy was more than twelve. I believe she influenced me—God bless the sunbeam! At any rate I sent for the lad, and started him in life.
“All went well for a short time. Then another blow fell upon me. I was being systematically robbed. In my office was a safe. I had numerous clerks, and John was one. Never dreaming of the truth I set a detective on the watch, and one day he brought me his report. It incriminated my own son. At first I was amazed, horror-stricken. Then my anger arose. I sent for John. He came in smiling, for he was light of heart. I told him deliberately what I had found out. He turned very pale and trembled. Fool that I was, I believed these were evidences of guilt. Then he looked at me proudly and denied it all. I have a furious temper, Heaven forgive me! I upbraided him, called him names, and even coupled his mother’s disgrace with his downfall; declaring that her treacherous nature had descended to him. Then I told him to go. I remember how proudly he drew himself up and said:
“'You are my father—you send me from you without a hearing. I will go—I will change my name and never see you again until this blot is removed from my character.’
“I have never seen him from that time, but he is in the city to-day—he will be at my house to-night. Dorothy did it all. Through some woman who was nursing a poor sick man, she received word to come to the Hahnemann hospital, where he had been taken. She went, and found a dying man with a confession written and witnessed—a wretched man who claimed to be the detective I employed. He had found no trouble in locating the guilty party, but being eager to make more money had compromised with the thief and agreed to implicate John.
“It seems Dorothy and John have corresponded all this while, and she wrote him to come on at once, telling him of his vindication. An agreement was made to meet in the shadow of the Ferris wheel, and hence she has haunted that place of late.
“I am a stern man, but I hope a just one. Feeling that I have wronged my boy, I am eager to apologize, to make amends. Unfitted for business, even on this day when of all others I should be at my office, for I have momentous deals on foot, I decided to step in here and meet you, for I can assure you, Mr. Craig, I take a deep interest in your welfare. Perhaps you are not aware of it, but I know several of your people up in Montreal and Toronto, and can remember nothing but kindness received at their hands.”
“I am glad to hear it, sir. On my part I feel it my duty to inform you that one whom you have looked upon as dead is in Chicago,” says Aleck, while Wycherley chuckles as he wonders which one is meant, and then fearing lest his ill-timed merriment may cause the great operator to look upon him with suspicion, he turns it off into a cough.
Samson Cereal fastens his eyes upon Craig, as though he would read his soul.
“You refer to whom?”
“The lady you ran away with twenty years ago, near the Bosphorus—the mother of Dorothy.”