George for everyday expenses. Gaines quit the job at the gas station when he discovered the owner was purposely mislabeling low-grade fuel as high-grade. He feared getting caught in the legal consequences should the fraud be discovered. After taking a train across the state to Kansas City to give a speech to the local NAACP chapter and look, unsuccessfully, for work, he boarded another train for Chicago. There he reunited with the Page family, friends and neighbors from his youth in the Central West End. He stayed at a local YMCA. Disappearance Over the next several weeks, Gaines looked for work and visited with the Pages. While he maintained at public appearances that he was determined to continue his court case until its end and to attend the University of Missouri School of Law, in private he was becoming increasingly ambivalent. His mother later said that he had decided not to go, as they both believed it was "too dangerous." Nancy Page later recalled asking Gaines directly about this. "His answer wasn't straightforward, and if I remember correctly, he said something like this: 'If I don't go, I will have at least made it possible for some other boy or girl to go.'" In his last letter to his mother, dated March 3, Gaines wrote: Gaines had begun his letter by telling his mother that he had gone to Chicago "hoping to find it possible to make my own way." He ended with "Should I forget to write for a time, don't worry about it. I can look after myself OK." Gaines also wrote that his accommodations at the YMCA were paid through March 7, and that if he stayed in Chicago beyond that date, he would have to make "other arrangements". After that, brothers at an Alpha Phi Alpha house took him in. He continued to have dinner at the Pages' home. Nancy Page said that Gaines had told her he had taken a job at a department store. A reporter later found that although he had been hired, Gaines never reported for what would have been his first day of work. In the last days that she had contact with Gaines, Page said he seemed "to be running away from something". Gaines's family members and descendants believe he—and possibly the family as a whole—had received death threats. Given their background in rural Mississippi, where they knew of lynchings,