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248 Anyway it’s a story, and once in a while even a newspaper man likes to tell a story straight out, without putting in any newspaper jargon about beautiful heiresses, cold-blooded murderers, and all that sort of tommyrot.

As I picked the story up the sense of it was something like this—

The man's name was Wilson, Edgar Wilson—and he had come to Chicago from some place to the westward, perhaps from the mountains. He might once have been a sheep herder or something of the sort as he had the peculiar abstract air acquired only by being a good deal alone. About himself and his past he told a good many conflicting stories, and so after being with him for a time one instinctively discarded the past.

"The devil—it doesn't matter—the man can't tell the truth in that direction. Let it go," one said to oneself. What was known was that he had come to Chicago from a town in Kansas and that he had run away from the Kansas town with another man's wife.

As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one time I imagine a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding kind of way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather messy. In those dead flat Kansas towns, lives have a way of getting ugly and messy without anything very definite having happened to make them so. One can't imagine the reasons. Let it go. It just is so and one can't at all believe the Kansas writers about the life out there.

To be a little more definite about this particular woman—in her young girlhood her father had got into trouble. He had been some sort of small official, a travelling agent or something of the sort for an express company, and got arrested in connexion with the disappearance of some money. And then, when he was in jail and before his trial, he shot and killed himself. The girl's mother was already dead.

Within a year or two she married a man, an honest enough fellow, but from all accounts rather uninteresting. He was a drug clerk and a frugal man, after a short time managed to buy a drug store of his own.

The woman had, as I have said, been strong and well built, but now grew thin and nervous. Still she carried herself well, with a sort of air as it were, and there was something about her that appealed strongly to men. Several men of the seedy little town were