Bassett was astounded when he saw Dick's signature on the hotel register. It destroyed, in one line, every theory he held. That Judson Clark should return to Norada after his flight was incredible. Ten years was only ten years after all. It was not a lifetime. There were men in the town who had known Clark well.
Nevertheless for a time he held to his earlier conviction, even fought for it. He went so far as to wonder if Clark had come back for a tardy surrender. Men had done that before this, had carried a burden for years, had reached the breaking point, had broken. But he dismissed that. There had been no evidence of breaking in the young man in the office chair. He found himself thrown back, finally, on the story of the Wasson woman, and wondering if he would have to accept it after all.
The reaction from his certainty in the cabin to uncertainty again made him fretful and sleepless. It was almost morning before he relaxed on his hard hotel bed enough to sleep.
He wakened late, and telephoned down for breakfast. His confusion had not decreased with the night, and while he got painfully out of bed and prepared to shave and dress, his thoughts were busy. There was no doubt in his mind that, in spite of the growth of the town, the newcomer would be under arrest almost as soon as he made his appearance. A resemblance that could deceive Beverly Carlysle's brother could deceive others, and would. That he had escaped so long amazed him.
By the time he had bathed he had developed a sort of philosophic acceptance of the new situation. There would be no exclusive story now, no scoop. The events of the next few hours were for every man to read. He shrugged his shoulders as, partially dressed, he carried his shaving materials into the better light of his bedroom.
With his face partially lathered he heard a knock at the door, and sang out a not uncheerful “Come in.” It happened, then, that it was in his mirror that he learned that his visitor was not the waiter, but Livingstone himself. He had an instant of stunned amazement before he turned.
“I beg your pardon,” Dick said. “I was afraid you'd get out before I saw you. My name's Livingstone, and I want to talk to you, if you don't mind. If you like I'll come back later.”
Bassett perceived two things simultaneously; that owing probably to the lather on his face he had not been recognized, and that the face of the man inside the door was haggard and strained.
“That's all right. Come in and sit down. I'll get this stuff off my face and be with you in a jiffy.”
But he was very deliberate in the bathroom. His astonishment grew, rather than decreased. Clearly Livingstone had not known him. How, then, had he known that he was in Norada? And when he recognized him, as he would in a moment, what then? He put on his collar and tied his tie slowly. Gregory might be the key. Gregory might have found out that he had started for Norada and warned him. Then, if that were true, this man was Clark after all. But if he were Clark he wouldn't be there. It was like a kitten after its tail. It whirled in a circle and got nowhere.
The waiter had laid his breakfast and gone when he emerged from the bathroom, and Dick was standing by the window looking out. He turned.
“I'm here, Mr. Bassett, on rather a peculiar—” He stopped and looked at Bassett. “I see. You were in my office about a month ago, weren't you?”
“For a headache, yes.” Bassett was very wary and watchful, but there was no particular unfriendliness in his visitor's eyes.
“It never occurred to me that you might be Bassett,” Dick said gravely. “Never mind about that. Eat your breakfast. Do you mind if I talk while you do it?”
“Will you have some coffee? I can get a glass from the bathroom. It takes a week to get a waiter here.”
“Thanks. Yes.”
The feeling of unreality grew in the reporter's mind. It increased still further when they sat opposite each other, the small table with its Bible on the lower shelf between them, while he made a pretense at breakfasting.
“First of all,” Dick said, at last, “I was not sure I had found the right man. You are the only Bassett in the place, however, and you're registered from my town. So I took a chance. I suppose that headache was not genuine.”
Bassett hesitated.
“No” he said at last.
“What you really wanted to do was to see me, then?”
“In a way, yes.”
“I'll ask you one more question. It may clear the air. Does this mean anything to you? I'll tell you now that it doesn't, to me.”
From his pocketbook he took the note addressed to David, and passed it over the table. Bassett looked at him quickly and took it.
“Before you read it, I'll explain something. It was not sent to me. It was sent to my—to Doctor David Livingstone. It happened to fall into my hands. I've come a long way to find out what it means.”
He paused, and looked the reporter straight in the eyes. “I am laying my cards on the table, Bassett. This 'G,' whoever he is, is clearly warning my uncle against you. I want to know what he is warning him about.”
Bassett read the note carefully, and looked up.
“I suppose you know who 'G' is?”
“I do not. Do you?”
“I'll give you another name, and maybe you'll get it. A name that I think will mean something to you. Beverly Carlysle.”
“The actress?”
Bassett had an extraordinary feeling of unreality, followed by one of doubt. Either the fellow was a very good actor, or—
“Sorry,” Dick said slowly. “I don't seem to get it. I don't know that 'G' is as important as his warning. That note's a warning.”
“Yes. It's a warning. And I don't think you need me to tell you what about.”
“Concerning my uncle, or myself?”
“Are you trying to put it over on me that you don't know?”
“That's what I'm trying to do,” Dick said, with a sort of grave patience.
The reporter liked courage when he saw it, and he was compelled to a sort of reluctant admiration.
“You've got your courage with you,” he observed. “How long do you suppose it will be after you set foot on the streets of this town before you're arrested? How do you know I won't send for the police myself?”
“I know damned well you won't,” Dick said grimly. “Not before I'm through with you. You've chosen to interest yourself in me. I suppose you don't deny the imputation in that letter. You'll grant that I have a right to know who and what you are, and just what you are interested in.”
“Right-o,” the reporter said cheerfully, glad to get to grips; and to stop a fencing that was getting nowhere. “I'm connected with the Times-Republican, in your own fair city. I was in the theater the night Gregory recognized you. Verbum sap.”
“This Gregory is the 'G'?”
“Oh, quit it, Clark,” Bassett said, suddenly impatient. “That letter's the last proof I needed. Gregory wrote it after he'd seen David Livingstone. He wouldn't have written it if he and the old man hadn't come to an understanding. I've been to the cabin. My God, man, I've even got the parts of your clothing that wouldn't burn! You can thank Maggie Donaldson for that.”
“Donaldson,” Dick repeated. “That was it. I couldn't remember her name. The woman in the cabin. Maggie. And Jack. Jack Donaldson.”
He got up, and was apparently dizzy, for he caught at the table.
“Look here,” Bassett said, “let me give you a drink. You look all in.”
But Dick shook his head.
“No, thanks just the same. I'll ask you to be plain with me, Bassett. I am—I have become engaged to a girl, and—well, I want the story. That's all.”
And, when Bassett only continued to stare at him:
“I suppose I've begun wrong end first. I forgot about how it must seem to you. I dropped a block out of my life about ten years ago. Can't remember it. I'm not proud of it, but it's the fact. What I'm trying to do now is to fill in the gap. But I've got to, somehow. I owe it to the girl.”
When Bassett could apparently find nothing to say he went on:
“You say I may be arrested if I go out on the street. And you rather more than intimate that a woman named Beverly Carlysle is mixed up in it somehow. I take it that I knew her.”
“Yes. You knew her,” Bassett said slowly. At the intimation in his tone Dick surveyed him for a moment without speaking. His face, pale before, took on a grayish tinge.
“I wasn't—married to her?”
“No. You didn't marry her. See here, Clark, this is straight goods, is it? You're not trying to put something over on me? Because if you are, you needn't. I'd about made up my mind to follow the story through for my own satisfaction, and then quit cold on it. When a man's pulled himself out of the mud as you have it's not my business to pull him down. But I don't want you to pull any bunk.”
Dick winced.
“Out of the mud!” he said. “No. I'm telling you the truth, Bassett. I have some fragmentary memories, places and people, but no names, and all of them, I imagine from my childhood. I pick up at a cabin in the mountains, with snow around, and David Livingstone feeding me soup with a tin spoon.” He tried to smile and failed. His face twitched. “I could stand it for myself,” he said, “but I've tied another life to mine, like a cursed fool, and now you speak of a woman, and of arrest. Arrest! For what?”
“Suppose,” Bassett said after a moment, “suppose you let that go just now, and tell me more about this—this gap. You're a medical man. You've probably gone into your own case pretty thoroughly. I'm accepting your statement, you see. As a matter of fact it must be true, or you wouldn't be here. But I've got to know what I'm doing before I lay my cards on the table. Make it simple, if you can. I don't know your medical jargon.”
Dick did his best. The mind closed down now and then, mainly from a shock. No, there was no injury required. He didn't think he had had an injury. A mental shock would do it, if it were strong enough. And fear. It was generally fear. He had never considered himself braver than the other fellow, but no man liked to think that he had a cowardly mind. Even if things hadn't broken as they had, he'd have come back before he went to the length of marriage, to find out what it was he had been afraid of. He paused then, to give Bassett a chance to tell him, but the reporter only said: “Go on, you put your cards on the table, and then I'll lay mine out.”
Dick went on. He didn't blame Bassett. If there was something that was in his line of work, he understood. At the same time he wanted to save David anything unpleasant. (The word “unpleasant” startled Bassett, by its very inadequacy.) He knew now that David had built up for him an identity that probably did not exist, but he wanted Bassett to know that there could never be doubt of David's high purpose and his essential fineness.
“Whatever I was before.” he finished simply, “and I'll get that from you now, if I am any sort of a man at all it is his work.”
He stood up and braced himself. It had been clear to Bassett for ten minutes that Dick was talking against time, against the period of revelation. He would have it, but he was mentally bracing himself against it.
“I think,” he said, “I'll have that whisky now.”
Bassett poured him a small drink, and took a turn about the room while he drank it. He was perplexed and apprehensive. Strange as the story was, he was convinced that he had heard the truth. He had, now and then, run across men who came back after a brief disappearance, with a cock and bull story of forgetting who they were, and because nearly always these men vanished at the peak of some crisis they had always been open to suspicion. Perhaps, poor devils, they had been telling the truth after all. So the mind shut down, eh? Closed like a grave over the unbearable!
His own part in the threatening catastrophe began to obsess him. Without the warning from Gregory there would have been no return to Norada, no arrest. It had all been dead and buried, until he himself had revived it. And a girl, too! The girl in the blue dress at the theater, of course.
Dick put down the glass.
“I'm ready, if you are.”
“Does the name of Clark recall anything to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Judson Clark? Jud Clark?”
Dick passed his hand over his forehead wearily.
“I'm not sure,” he said. “It sounds familiar, and then it doesn't. It doesn't mean anything to me, if you get that. If it's a key, it doesn't unlock. That's all. Am I Judson Clark?”
Oddly enough, Bassett found himself now seeking for hope of escape in the very situation that had previously irritated him, in the story he had heard at Wasson's. He considered, and said, almost violently:
“Look here, I may have made a mistake. I came out here pretty well convinced I'd found the solution to an old mystery, and for that matter I think I have. But there's a twist in it that isn't clear, and until it is clear I'm not going to saddle you with an identity that may not belong to you. You are one of two men. One of them is Judson Clark, and I'll be honest with you; I'm pretty sure you're Clark. The other I don't know, but I have reason to believe that he spent part of his time with Henry Livingstone at Dry River.”
“I went to the Livingstone ranch yesterday. I remember my early home. That wasn't it. Which one of these two men will be arrested if he is recognized?”
“Clark.”
“For what?”
“I'm coming to that. I suppose you'll have to know. Another drink? No? All right. About ten years ago, or a little less, a young chap called Judson Clark got into trouble here, and headed into the mountains in a blizzard. He was supposed to have frozen to death. But recently a woman named Donaldson made a confession on her deathbed. She said that she had helped to nurse Clark in a mountain cabin, and that with the aid of some one unnamed he had got away.”
“Then I'm Clark. I remember her, and the cabin.”
There was a short silence following that admission. To Dick, it was filled with the thought of Elizabeth, and of her relation to what he was about to hear. Again he braced himself for what was coming.
“I suppose,” he said at last, “that if I ran away I was in pretty serious trouble. What was it?”
“We've got no absolute proof that you are Clark, remember. You don't know, and Maggie Donaldson was considered not quite sane before she died. I've told you there's a chance you are the other man.”
“All right. What had Clark done?”
“He had shot a man.”
The reporter was instantly alarmed. If Dick had been haggard before, he was ghastly now. He got up slowly and held to the back of his chair.
“Not—murder?” he asked, with stiff lips.
“No,” Bassett said quickly. “Not at all. See here, you've had about all you can stand. Remember, we don't even know you are Clark. All I said was—”
“I understand that. It was murder, wasn't it?”
“Well, there had been a quarrel, I understand. The law allows for that, I think.”
Dick went slowly to the window, and stood with his back to Bassett. For a long time the room was quiet. In the street below long lines of cars in front of the hotel denoted the luncheon hour. An Indian woman with a child in the shawl on her back stopped in the street, looked up at Dick and extended a beaded belt. With it still extended she continued to stare at his white face.
“The man died, of course?” he asked at last, without turning.
“Yes. I knew him. He wasn't any great loss. It was at the Clark ranch. I don't believe a conviction would be possible, although they would try for one. It was circumstantial evidence.”
“And I ran away?”
“Clark ran away,” Bassett corrected him. “As I've told you, the authorities here believe he is dead.”
After an even longer silence Dick turned.
“I told you there was a girl. I'd like to think out some way to keep the thing from her, before I surrender myself. If I can protect her, and David—”
“I tell you, you don't even know you are Clark.”
“All right. If I'm not, they'll know. If I am—I tell you I'm not going through the rest of my life with a thing like that hanging over me. Maggie Donaldson was sane enough. Why, when I look back, I know our leaving the cabin was a flight. I'm not Henry Livingstone's son, because he never had a son. I can tell you what the Clark ranch house looks like.” And after a pause: “Can you imagine the reverse of a dream when you've dreamed you are guilty of something and wake up to find you are innocent? Who was the man?”
Bassett watched him narrowly.
“His name was Lucas. Howard Lucas.”
“All right. Now we have that, where does Beverly Carlysle come in?”
“Clark was infatuated with her. The man he shot was the man she had married.”
Shortly after that Dick said he would go to his room. He was still pale, but his eyes looked bright and feverish, and Bassett went with him, uneasily conscious that something was not quite right. Dick spoke only once on the way.
“My head aches like the mischief,” he said, and his voice was dull and lifeless.
He did not want Bassett to go with him, but Bassett went, nevertheless. Dick's statement, that he meant to surrender himself, had filled him with uneasiness. He determined, following him along the hall, to keep a close guard on him for the next few hours, but beyond that, just then, he did not try to go. If it were humanly possible he meant to smuggle him out of the town and take him East. But he had an uneasy conviction that Dick was going to be ill. The mind did strange things with the body.
Dick sat down on the edge of the bed.
“My head aches like the mischief,” he repeated. “Look in that grip and find me some tablets, will you? I'm dizzy.”
He made an effort and stretched out on the bed. “Good Lord,” he muttered, “I haven't had such a headache since—”
His voice trailed off. Bassett, bending over the army kit bag in the corner, straightened and looked around. Dick was suddenly asleep and breathing heavily.
For a long time the reporter sat by the side of the bed, watching him and trying to plan some course of action. He was overcome by his own responsibility, and by the prospect of tragedy that threatened. That Livingstone was Clark, and that he would insist on surrendering himself when he wakened, he could no longer doubt. His mind wandered back to that day when he had visited the old house as a patient, and from that along the strange road they had both come since then. He reflected, not exactly in those terms, that life, any man's life, was only one thread in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle the one thread was to interfere with all the others. David Livingstone, the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed, Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell how many others, all threads.
He swore in a whisper.
The maid tapped at the door. He opened it an inch or so and sent her off. In view of his new determination even the maid had become a danger. She was the same elderly woman who looked after his own bedroom, and she might have known Clark. Just what Providence had kept him from recognition before this he did not know, but it could not go on indefinitely.
After an hour or so Bassett locked the door behind him and went down to lunch. He was not hungry, but he wanted to get out of the room, to think without that quiet figure before him. Over the pretence of food he faced the situation. Lying ready to his hand was the biggest story of his career, but he could not carry it through. It was characteristic of him that, before abandoning it, he should follow through to the end the result of its publication. He did not believe, for instance, that either Dick's voluntary surrender or his own disclosure of the situation necessarily meant a conviction for murder. To convict a man of a crime he did not know he had committed would be difficult. But, with his customary thoroughness he followed that through also. Livingstone acquitted was once again Clark, would be known to the world as Clark. The new place he had so painfully made for himself would be gone. The story would follow him, never to be lived down. And in his particular profession confidence and respect were half the game. All that would be gone.
Thus by gradual stages he got back to David, and he struggled for the motive which lay behind every decisive human act. A man who followed a course by which he had nothing to gain and everything to lose was either a fool or was actuated by some profound unselfishness. To save a life? But with all the resources Clark could have commanded, added to his personal popularity, a first degree sentence would have been unlikely. Not a life, then, but perhaps something greater than a life. A man's soul.
It came to him, then, in a great light of comprehension, the thing David had tried to do; to take this waster and fugitive, the slate of his mind wiped clean by shock and illness, only his childish memories remaining, and on it to lead him to write a new record. To take the body he had found, and the always untouched soul, and from them to make a man.
And with that comprehension came the conviction, too, that David had succeeded. He had indeed made a man.
He ate absently, consulting his railroad schedule and formulating the arguments he meant to use against Dick's determination to give himself up. He foresaw a struggle there, but he himself held one or two strong cards—the ruthless undoing of David's work, the involving of David for conspiring against the law. And Dick's own obligation to the girl at home.
He was more at ease in the practical arrangements. An express went through on the main line at midnight, and there was a local on the branch line at eight. But the local train, the railway station, too, were full of possible dangers. After some thought he decided to get a car, drive down to the main line with Dick, and then send the car back.
He went out at once and made an arrangement for a car, and on returning notified the clerk that he was going to leave, and asked to have his bill made out. After some hesitation he said: “I'll pay three-twenty too, while I'm at it. Friend of mine there, going with me. Yes, up to to-night.”
As he turned away he saw the short, heavy figure of Wilkins coming in. He stood back and watched. The sheriff went to the desk, pulled the register toward him and ran over several pages of it. Then he shoved it away, turned and saw him.
“Been away, haven't you?” he asked.
“Yes. I took a little horseback trip into the mountains. My knees are still not on speaking terms.”
The sheriff chuckled. Then he sobered.
“Come and sit down,” he said. “I'm going to watch who goes in and out of here for a while.”
Bassett followed him unwillingly to two chairs that faced the desk and the lobby. He had the key of Dick's room in his pocket, but he knew that if he wakened he could easily telephone and have his door unlocked. But that was not his only anxiety. He had a sudden conviction that the sheriff's watch was connected with Dick himself. Wilkins, from a friendly and gregarious fellow-being, had suddenly grown to sinister proportions in his mind.
And, as the minutes went by, with the sheriff sitting forward and watching the lobby and staircase with intent, unblinking eyes, Bassett's anxiety turned to fear. He found his heart leaping when the room bells rang, and the clerk, with a glance at the annunciator, sent boys hurrying off. His hands shook, and he felt them cold and moist. And all the time Wilkins was holding him with a flow of unimportant chatter.
“Watching for any one in particular?” he managed, after five minutes or so.
“Yes. I'll tell you about it as soon as—Bill! Is Alex outside?”
Bill stopped in front of them, and nodded.
“All right. Now get this—I want everything decent and in order. No excitement. I'll come out behind him, and you and Bill stand by. Outside I'll speak to him, and when we walk off, just fall in behind. But keep close.”
Bill wandered off, to take up a stand of extreme nonchalance inside the entrance. When Wilkins turned to him again Bassett had had a moment to adjust himself, and more or less to plan his own campaign.
“Somebody's out of luck,” he commented. “And speaking of being out of luck, I've got a sick man on my hands. Friend of mine from home. We've got to catch the midnight, too.”
“Too bad,” Wilkins commented rather absently. Then, perhaps feeling that he had not shown proper interest, “Tell you what I'll do. I've got some business on hand now, but it'll be cleared up one way or another pretty soon. I'll bring my car around and take him to the station. These hacks are the limit to ride in.”
The disaster to his plans thus threatened steadied the reporter, and he managed to keep his face impassive.
“Thanks,” he said. “I'll let you know if he's able to travel. Is this—is this business you're on confidential?”
“Well, it is and it isn't. I've talked some to you, and as you're leaving anyhow—it's the Jud Clark case again.”
“Sort of hysteria, I suppose. He'll be seen all over the country for the next six months.”
“Yes. But I never saw a hysterical Indian. Well, a little while ago an Indian woman named Lizzie Lazarus blew into my office. She's a smart woman. Her husband was a breed, dairy hand on the Clark ranch for years. Lizzie was the first Indian woman in these parts to go to school, and besides being smart, she's got Indian sight. You know these Indians. When they aren't blind with trachoma they can see further and better than a telescope.”
Bassett made an effort.
“What's that got to do with Jud Clark?” he asked.
“Well, she blew in. You know there was a reward out for him, and I guess it still stands. I'll have to look it up, for if Maggie Donaldson wasn't crazy some one will turn him up some day, probably. Well, Lizzie blew in, and she said she'd seen Jud Clark. Saw him standing at a second story window of this hotel. Can you beat that?”
“Not for pure invention. Hardly.”
“That's what I said at first. But I don't know. In some ways it would be like him. He wouldn't mind coming back and giving us the laugh, if he thought he could get away with it. He didn't know fear. Only time he ever showed funk was when he beat it after the shooting, and then he was full of hootch, and on the edge of D.T.'s.”
“A man doesn't play jokes with the hangman's rope,” Bassett commented, dryly. He looked at his watch and rose. “It's a good story, but I wouldn't wear out any trouser-seats sitting here watching for him. If he's living he's taken pretty good care for ten years not to put his head in the noose; and I'd remember this, too. Wherever he is, if he is anywhere, he's probably so changed his appearance that Telescope Lizzie wouldn't know him. Or you either.”
“Probably,” the sheriff said, comfortably. “Still I'm not taking any chances. I'm up for reelection this fall, and that Donaldson woman's story nearly queered me. I've got a fellow at the railroad station, just for luck.”
Bassett went up the stairs and along the corridor, deep in dejected thought. The trap of his own making was closing, and his active mind was busy with schemes for getting Dick away before it shut entirely.
It might be better, in one way, to keep Livingstone there in his room until the alarm blew over. On the other hand, Livingstone himself had to be dealt with, and that he would remain quiescent under the circumstances was unlikely. The motor to the main line seemed to be the best thing. True, he would have first to get Livingstone to agree to go. That done, and he did not underestimate its difficulty, there was the question of getting him out of the hotel, now that the alarm had been given.
When he found Dick still sleeping he made a careful survey of the second floor. There was a second staircase, but investigation showed that it led into the kitchens. He decided finally on a fire-escape from a rear hall window, which led into a courtyard littered with the untidy rubbish of an overcrowded and undermanned hotel, and where now two or three saddled horses waited while their riders ate within.
When he had made certain that he was not observed he unlocked and opened the window, and removed the wire screen. There was a red fire-exit lamp in the ceiling nearby, but he could not reach it, nor could he find any wall switch. Nevertheless he knew by that time that through the window lay Dick's only chance of escape. He cleared the grating of a broken box and an empty flower pot, stood the screen outside the wall, and then, still unobserved, made his way back to his own bedroom and packed his belongings.
Dick was still sleeping, stretched on his bed, when he returned to three-twenty. And here Bassett's careful plans began to go awry, for Dick's body was twitching, and his face was pale and covered with a cold sweat. From wondering how they could get away, Bassett began to wonder whether they would get away at all. The sleep was more like a stupor than sleep. He sat down by the bed, closer to sheer fright than he had ever been before, and wretched with the miserable knowledge of his own responsibility.
As the afternoon wore on, it became increasingly evident that somehow or other he must get a doctor. He turned the subject over in his mind, pro and con. If he could get a new man, one who did not remember Jud Clark, it might do. But he hesitated until, at seven, Dick opened his eyes and clearly did not know him. Then he knew that the matter was out of his hands, and that from now on whatever it was that controlled the affairs of men, David's God or his own vague Providence, was in charge.
He got his hat and went out, and down the stairs again. Wilkins had disappeared, but Bill still stood by the entrance, watching the crowd that drifted in and out. In his state of tension he felt that the hotel clerk's eyes were suspicious as he retained the two rooms for another day, and that Bill watched him out with more than casual interest. Even the matter of cancelling the order for the car loomed large and suspicion-breeding before him, but he accomplished it, and then set out to find medical assistance.
There, however, chance favored him. The first doctor's sign led him to a young man, new to the town, and obviously at leisure. Not that he found that out at once. He invented a condition for himself, as he had done once before, got a prescription and paid for it, learned what he wanted, and then mentioned Dick. He was careful to emphasize his name and profession, and his standing “back home.”
“I'll admit he's got me worried,” he finished. “He saw me registered and came to my room this morning to see me, and got sick there. That is, he said he had a violent headache and was dizzy. I got him to his room and on the bed, and he's been sleeping ever since. He looks pretty sick to me.”
He was conscious of Bill's eyes on him as they went through the lobby again, but he realized now that they were unsuspicious. Bassett himself was in a hot sweat. He stopped outside the room and mopped his face.
“Look kind of shot up yourself,” the doctor commented. “Watch this sun out here. Because it's dry here you Eastern people don't notice the heat until it plays the deuce with you.”
He made a careful examination of the sleeping man, while Bassett watched his face.
“Been a drinking man? Or do you know?”
“No. But I think not. I gave him a small drink this morning, when he seemed to need it.”
“Been like this all day?”
“Since noon. Yes.”
Once more the medical man stooped. When he straightened it was to deliver Bassett a body blow.
“I don't like his condition, or that twitching. If these were the good old days in Wyoming I'd say he is on the verge of delirium tremens. But that's only snap judgment. He might be on the verge of a good many things. Anyhow, he'd better be moved to the hospital. This is no place for him.”
And against this common-sense suggestion Bassett had nothing to offer. If the doctor had been looking he would have seen him make a gesture of despair.
“I suppose so,” he said, dully. “Is it near? I'll go myself and get a room.”
“That's my advice. I'll look in later, and if the stupor continues I'll have in a consultant.” He picked up his bag and stood looking down at the bed. “Big fine-looking chap, isn't he?” he commented. “Married?”
“No.”
“Well, we'll get the ambulance, and later on we'll go over him properly. I'd call a maid to sit with him, if I were you.” In the grip of a situation that was too much for him, Bassett rang the bell. It was answered by the elderly maid who took care of his own bedroom.
Months later, puzzling over the situation, Bassett was to wonder, and not to know, whether chance or design brought the Thorwald woman to the door that night. At the time, and for weeks, he laid it to tragic chance, the same chance which had placed in Dick's hand the warning letter that had brought him West. But as months went on, the part played in the tragedy by that faded woman with her tired dispirited voice and her ash colored hair streaked with gray, assumed other proportions, loomed large and mysterious.
There were times when he wished that some prescience of danger had made him throttle her then and there, so she could not have raised her shrill, alarming voice! But he had no warning. All he saw was a woman in a washed-out blue calico dress and a fresh white apron, raising incurious eyes to his.
“I suppose it's all right if she sits in the hall?” Bassett inquired, still fighting his losing fight. “She can go in if he stirs.”
“Right-o,” said the doctor, who had been to France and had brought home some British phrases.
Bassett walked back from the hospital alone. The game was up and he knew it. Sooner or later—In a way he tried to defend himself to himself. He had done his best. Two or three days ago he would have been exultant over the developments. After all, mince things as one would, Clark was a murderer. Other men killed and paid the penalty. And the game was not up entirely, at that. The providence which had watched over him for so long might continue to. The hospital was new. (It was, ironically enough, the Clark Memorial hospital.) There was still a chance.
He was conscious of something strange as he entered the lobby. The constable was gone, and there was no clerk behind the desk. At the foot of the stairs stood a group of guests and loungers, looking up, while a bell-boy barred the way.
Even then Bassett's first thought was of fire. He elbowed his way to the foot of the stairs, and demanded to be allowed to go up, but he was refused.
“In a few minutes,” said the boy. “No need of excitement.”
“Is it a fire?”
“I don't know myself. I've got my orders. That's all.” Wilkins came hurrying in. The crowd, silent and respectful before the law, opened to let him through and closed behind him.
Bassett stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up.
To Elizabeth the first days of Dick's absence were unbelievably dreary. She seemed to live only from one visit of the postman to the next. She felt sometimes that only part of her was at home in the Wheeler house, slept at night in her white bed, donned its black frocks and took them off, and made those sad daily pilgrimages to the cemetery above the town, where her mother tidied with tender hands the long narrow mound, so fearfully remindful of Jim's tall slim body.
That part of her grieved sorely, and spent itself in small comforting actions and little caressing touches on bowed heads and grief-stooped shoulders. It put away Jim's clothing, and kept immaculate the room where now her mother spent most of her waking hours. It sent her on her knees at night to pray for Jim's happiness in some young-man heaven which would please him. But the other part of her was not there at all. It was off with Dick in some mysterious place of mountains and vast distance called Wyoming.
And because of this division in herself, because she felt that her loyalty to her people had wavered, because she knew that already she had forsaken her father and her mother and would follow her love through the rest of her life, she was touchingly anxious to comfort and to please them.
“She's taking Dick's absence very hard,” Mrs. Wheeler said one night, when she had kissed them and gone upstairs to bed. “She worries me sometimes.”
Mr. Wheeler sighed. Why was it that a man could not tell his children what he had learned,—that nothing was so great as one expected; that love was worth living for, but not dying for. The impatience of youth for life! It had killed Jim. It was hurting Nina. It would all come, all come, in God's good time. The young did not live to-day, but always to-morrow. There seemed no time to live to-day, for any one. First one looked ahead and said, “I will be so happy.” And before one knew it one was looking back and saying: “I was so happy.”
“She'll be all right,” he said aloud.
He got up and whistled for the dog.
“I'll take him around the block before I lock up,” he said heavily. He bent over and kissed his wife. She was a sad figure to him in her black dress. He did not say to her what he thought sometimes; that Jim had been saved a great deal. That to live on, and to lose the things one loved, one by one, was harder than to go quickly, from a joyous youth.
He had not told her what he knew about Jim's companion that night. She would never have understood. In her simple and child-like faith she knew that her boy sat that day among the blessed company of heaven. He himself believed that Jim had gone forgiven into whatever lay behind the veil we call death, had gone shriven and clean before the Judge who knew the urge of youth and life. He did not fear for Jim. He only missed him.
He walked around the block that night, a stooped commonplace figure, the dog at his heels. Now and then he spoke to him, for companionship. At the corner he stopped and looked along the side street toward the Livingstone house. And as he looked he sighed. Jim and Nina, and now Elizabeth. Jim and Nina were beyond his care now. He could do no more. But what could he do for Elizabeth? That, too, wasn't that beyond him? He stood still, facing the tragedy of his helplessness, beset by vague apprehensions. Then he went on doggedly, his hands clasped behind him, his head sunk on his breast.
He lay awake for a long time that night, wondering whether he and Dick had been quite fair to Elizabeth. She should, he thought, have been told. Then, if Dick's apprehensions were justified, she would have had some preparation. As it was—Suppose something turned up out there, something that would break her heart?
He had thought Margaret was sleeping, but after a time she moved and slipped her hand into his. It comforted him. That, too, was life. Very soon now they would be alone together again, as in the early days before the children came. All the years and the struggle, and then back where they started. But still, thank God, hand in hand.
Ever since the night of Jim's death Mrs. Sayre had been a constant visitor to the house. She came in, solid, practical, and with an everyday manner neither forcedly cheerful nor too decorously mournful, which made her very welcome. After the three first days, when she had practically lived at the house, there was no necessity for small pretensions with her. She knew the china closet and the pantry, and the kitchen. She had even penetrated to Mr. Wheeler's shabby old den on the second floor, and had slept a part of the first night there on the leather couch with broken springs which he kept because it fitted his body.
She was a kindly woman, and she had ached with pity. And, because of her usual detachment from the town and its affairs, the feeling that she was being of service gave her a little glow of content. She liked the family, too, and particularly she liked Elizabeth. But after she had seen Dick and Elizabeth together once or twice she felt that no plan she might make for Wallace could possibly succeed. Lying on the old leather couch that first night, between her frequent excursions among the waking family, she had thought that out and abandoned it.
But, during the days that followed the funeral, she was increasingly anxious about Wallace. She knew that rumors of the engagement had reached him, for he was restless and irritable. He did not care to go out, but wandered about the house or until late at night sat smoking alone on the terrace, looking down at the town with sunken, unhappy eyes. Once or twice in the evening he had taken his car and started out, and lying awake in her French bed she would hear him coming hours later. In the mornings his eyes were suffused and his color bad, and she knew that he was drinking in order to get to sleep.
On the third day after Dick's departure for the West she got up when she heard him coming in, and putting on her dressing gown and slippers, knocked at his door.
“Come in,” he called ungraciously.
She found him with his coat off, standing half defiantly with a glass of whisky and soda in his hand. She went up to him and took it from him.
“We've had enough of that in the family, Wallie,” she said. “And it's a pretty poor resource in time of trouble.”
“I'll have that back, if you don't mind.”
“Nonsense,” she said briskly, and flung it, glass and all, out of the window. She was rather impressive when she turned.
“I've been a fairly indulgent mother,” she said. “I've let you alone, because it's a Sayre trait to run away when they feel a pull on the bit. But there's a limit to my patience, and it is reached when my son drinks to forget a girl.”
He flushed and glowered at her in somber silence, but she moved about the room calmly, giving it a housekeeper's critical inspection, and apparently unconscious of his anger.
“I don't believe you ever cared for any one in all your life,” he said roughly. “If you had, you would know.”
She was straightening a picture over the mantel, and she completed her work before she turned.
“I care for you.”
“That's different.”
“Very well, then. I cared for your father. I cared terribly. And he killed my love.”
She padded out of the room, her heavy square body in its blazing kimono a trifle rigid, but her face still and calm. He remained staring at the door when she had closed it, and for some time after. He knew what message for him had lain behind that emotionless speech of hers, not only understanding, but a warning. She had cared terribly, and his father had killed that love. He had drunk and played through his gay young life, and then he had died, and no one had greatly mourned him.
She had left the decanter on its stand, and he made a movement toward it. Then, with a half smile, he picked it up and walked to the window with it. He was still smiling, half boyishly, as he put out his light and got into bed. It had occurred to him that the milkman's flivver, driving in at the break of dawn, would encounter considerable glass.
By morning, after a bad night, he had made a sort of double-headed resolution, that he was through with booze, as he termed it, and that he would find out how he stood with Elizabeth. But for a day or two no opportunity presented itself. When he called there was always present some grave-faced sympathizing visitor, dark clad and low of voice, and over the drawing-room would hang the indescribable hush of a house in mourning. It seemed to touch Elizabeth, too, making her remote and beyond earthly things. He would go in, burning with impatience, hungry for the mere sight of her, fairly overcharged with emotion, only to face that strange new spirituality that made him ashamed of the fleshly urge in him.
Once he found Clare Rossiter there, and was aware of something electric in the air. After a time he identified it. Behind the Rossiter girl's soft voice and sympathetic words, there was a veiled hostility. She was watching Elizabeth, was overconscious of her. And she was, for some reason, playing up to himself. He thought he saw a faint look of relief on Elizabeth's face when Clare at last rose to go.
“I'm on my way to see the man Dick Livingstone left in his place,” Clare said, adjusting her veil at the mirror. “I've got a cold. Isn't it queer, the way the whole Livingstone connection is broken up?”
“Hardly queer. And it's only temporary.”
“Possibly. But if you ask me, I don't believe Dick will come back. Mind, I don't defend the town, but it doesn't like to be fooled. And he's fooled it for years. I know a lot of people who'd quit going to him.” She turned to Wallie.
“He isn't David's nephew, you know. The question is, who is he? Of course I don't say it, but a good many are saying that when a man takes a false identity he has something to hide.”
She gave them no chance to reply, but sauntered out with her sex-conscious, half-sensuous walk. Outside the door her smile faded, and her face was hard and bitter. She might forget Dick Livingstone, but never would she forgive herself for her confession to Elizabeth, nor Elizabeth for having heard it.
Wallie turned to Elizabeth when she had gone, slightly bewildered.
“What's got into her?” he inquired. And then, seeing Elizabeth's white face, rather shrewdly: “That was one for him and two for you, was it?”
“I don't know. Probably.”
“I wonder if you would look like that if any one attacked me!”
“No one attacks you, Wallie.”
“That's not an answer. You wouldn't, would you? It's different, isn't it?”
“Yes. A little.”
He straightened, and looked past her, unseeing, at the wall. “I guess I've known it for quite a while,” he said at last. “I didn't want to believe it, so I wouldn't. Are you engaged to him?”
“Yes. It's not to be known just yet, Wallie.”
“He's a good fellow,” he said, after rather a long silence. “Not that that makes it easier,” he added with a twisted smile. Then, boyishly and unexpectedly he said, “Oh, my God!”
He sat down, and when the dog came and placed a head on his knee he patted it absently. He wanted to go, but he had a queer feeling that when he went he went for good.
“I've cared for you for years,” he said. “I've been a poor lot, but I'd have been a good bit worse, except for you.”
And again:
“Only last night I made up my mind that if you'd have me, I'd make something out of myself. I suppose a man's pretty weak when he puts a responsibility like that on a girl.”
She yearned over him, rather. She made little tentative overtures of friendship and affection. But he scarcely seemed to hear them, wrapped as he was in the selfish absorption of his disappointment. When she heard the postman outside and went to the door for the mail, she thought he had not noticed her going. But when she returned he was watching her with jealous, almost tragic eyes.
“I suppose you hear from him by every mail.”
“There has been nothing to-day.”
Something in her voice or her face made him look at her closely.
“Has he written at all?”
“The first day he got there. Not since.”
He went away soon, and not after all with the feeling of going for good. In his sceptical young mind, fed by Clare's malice, was growing a comforting doubt of Dick's good faith.