Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1281

I had had my name taken out of the telephone book, and this was partly because of a convict who had been discharged from Sing Sing and who called me night after night.

He said he was a friend of Heywood Broun who had run a free employment bureau for several months during the depression, but the generous Broun to whom I wrote did not know his name and I somehow conceived the morbid notion that the man in question was prowling round the house.

But one day came the voice of a man I had known when he was a boy, and I later remembered that this boy, thirty years before, had struck me as coming to no good.

There had been something sinister about him that warned me against him, -- I had never felt that way about any other boy, -- but when he uttered his name on the telephone I had forgotten this and I was glad to do what he asked of me.

He was a captain, he said, in the army, and on the train to New York his purse and all his money had been stolen, and would I lend him twenty-five dollars to be given him at the General Delivery window??

Never hearing from him again, I remembered the little boy of whom I had had such doubts when he was ten years old.

We lived for a while in a movie melodrama with a German cook and her son who turned out to be Nazis.

Finally we got them out of the house, after the boy had run away four times looking for other Nazis, threatening to murder village schoolchildren and bragging that he was to be the next Fuhrer.

Then he began to have epileptic fits.

We found that a charitable society in New York had a long case-history of the two ; ;

and they agreed to see that the tragic pair would not put poison in anybody else's soup.