David was enjoying his holiday. He lay in bed most of the morning, making the most of his one after-breakfast cigar and surrounded by newspaper and magazines. He had made friends of the waiter who brought his breakfast, and of the little chambermaid who looked after his room, and such conversations as this would follow:
“Well, Nellie,” he would say, “and did you go to the dance on the pier last night?”
“Oh, yes, doctor.”
“Your gentleman friend showed up all right, then?”
“Oh, yes. He didn't telephone because he was on a job out of town.”
Here perhaps David would lower his voice, for Lucy was never far away.
“Did you wear the flowers?”
“Yes, violets. I put one away to remember you by. It was funny at first. I wouldn't tell him who gave them to me.”
David would chuckle delightedly.
“That's right,” he would say. “Keep him guessing, the young rascal. We men are kittle cattle, Nellie, kittle cattle!”
Even the valet unbent to him, and inquired if the doctor needed a man at home to look after him and his clothes. David was enormously tickled.
“Well,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. “I'll tell you how I manage now, and then you'll see. When I want my trousers pressed I send them downstairs and then I wait in my bathrobe until they come back. I'm a trifle better off for boots, but you'd have to knock Mike, my hired man, unconscious before he'd let you touch them.”
The valet grinned understandingly.
“Of course, there's my nephew,” David went on, a little note of pride in his voice. “He's become engaged recently, and I notice he's bought some clothes. But still I don't think even he will want anybody to hold his trousers while he gets into them.”
David chuckled over that for a long time after the valet had gone.
He was quite happy and contented. He spent all afternoon in a roller chair, conversing affably with the man who pushed him, and now and then when Lucy was out of sight getting out and stretching his legs. He picked up lost children and lonely dogs, and tried his eye in a shooting gallery, and had hard work keeping off the roller coasters and out of the sea.
Then, one day, when he had been gone some time, he was astonished on entering his hotel to find Harrison Miller sitting in the lobby. David beamed with surprise and pleasure.
“You old humbug!” he said. “Off on a jaunt after all! And the contempt of you when I was shipped here!”
Harrison Miller was constrained and uncomfortable. He had meant to see Lucy first. She was a sensible woman, and she would know just what David could stand, or could not. But David did not notice his constraint; took him to his room, made him admire the ocean view, gave him a cigar, and then sat down across from him, beaming and hospitable.
“Suffering Crimus, Miller,” he said. “I didn't know I was homesick until I saw you. Well, how's everything? Dick's letters haven't been much, and we haven't had any for several days.”
Harrison Miller cleared his throat. He knew that David had not been told of Jim Wheeler's death, but that Lucy knew. He knew too from Walter Wheeler that David did not know that Dick had gone west. Did Lucy know that, or not? Probably yes. But he considered the entire benevolent conspiracy an absurdity and a mistake. It was making him uncomfortable, and most of his life had been devoted to being comfortable.
He decided to temporize.
“Things are about the same,” he said. “They're going to pave Chisholm Street. And your Mike knocked down the night watchman last week. I got him off with a fine.”
“I hope he hasn't been in my cellar. He's got a weakness, but then—How's Dick? Not overworking?”
“No. He's all right.”
But David was no man's fool. He began to see something strange in Harrison's manner, and he bent forward in his chair.
“Look here, Harrison,” he said, “there's something the matter with you. You've got something on your mind.”
“Well, I have and I haven't. I'd like to see Lucy, David, if she's about.”
“Lucy's gadding. You can tell me if you can her. What is it? Is it about Dick?”
“In a way, yes.”
“He's not sick?”
“No. He's all right, as far as I know. I guess I'd better tell you, David. Walter Wheeler has got some sort of bee in his bonnet, and he got me to come on. Dick was pretty tired and—well, one or two things happened to worry him. One was that Jim Wheeler—you'll get this sooner or later—was in an automobile accident, and it did for him.”
David had lost some of his ruddy color. It was a moment before he spoke.
“Poor Jim,” he said hoarsely. “He was a good boy, only full of life. It will be hard on the family.”
“Yes,” Harrison Miller said simply.
But David was resentful, too. When his friends were in trouble he wanted to know about it. He was somewhat indignant and not a little hurt. But he soon reverted to Dick.
“I'll go back and send him off for a rest,” he said. “I'm as good as I'll ever be, and the boy's tired. What's the bee in Wheeler's bonnet?”
“Look here, David, you know your own business best, and Wheeler didn't feel at liberty to tell me very much. But he seemed to think you were the only one who could tell us certain things. He'd have come himself, but it's not easy for him to leave the family just now. Dick went away just after Jim's funeral. He left a young chap named Reynolds in his place, and, I believe, in order not to worry you, some letters to be mailed at intervals.”
“Went where?” David asked, in a terrible voice.
“To a town called Norada, in Wyoming. Near his old home somewhere. And the Wheelers haven't heard anything from him since the day he got there. That's three weeks ago. He wrote Elizabeth the night he got there, and wired her at the same time. There's been nothing since.”
David was gripping the arms of his chair with both hands, but he forced himself to calmness.
“I'll go to Norada at once,” he said. “Get a time-table, Harrison, and ring for the valet.”
“Not on your life you won't. I'm here to do that, when I've got something to go on. Wheeler thought you might have heard from him. If you hadn't, I was to get all the information I could and then start. Elizabeth's almost crazy. We wired the chief of police of Norada yesterday.”
“Yes!” David said thickly. “Trust your friends to make every damned mistake possible! You've set the whole pack on his trail.” And then he fell back in his chair, and gasped, “Open the window!”
When Lucy came in, a half hour later, she found David on his bed with the hotel doctor beside him, and Harrison Miller in the room. David was fighting for breath, but he was conscious and very calm. He looked up at her and spoke slowly and distinctly.
“They've got Dick, Lucy,” he said.
He looked aged and pinched, and entirely hopeless. Even after his heart had quieted down and he lay still among his pillows, he gave no evidence of his old fighting spirit. He lay with his eyes shut, relaxed and passive. He had done his best, and he had failed. It was out of his hands now, and in the hands of God. Once, as he lay there, he prayed. He said that he had failed, and that now he was too old and weak to fight. That God would have to take it on, and do the best He could. But he added that if God did not save Dick and bring him back to happiness, that he, David, was through.
Toward morning he wakened from a light sleep. The door into Lucy's room was open and a dim light was burning beyond it. David called her, and by her immediate response he knew she had not been sleeping.
“Yes, David,” she said, and came padding in in her bedroom slippers and wadded dressing-gown, a tragic figure of apprehension, determinedly smiling. “What do you want?”
“Sit down, Lucy.”
When she had done so he put out his hand, fumbling for hers. She was touched and alarmed, for it was a long while since there had been any open demonstration of affection between them. David was silent for a time, absorbed in thought. Then:
“I'm not in very good shape, Lucy. I suppose you know that. This old pump of mine has sprung a leak or something. I don't want you to worry if anything happens. I've come to the time when I've got a good many over there, and it will be like going home.”
Lucy nodded. Her chin quivered. She smoothed his hand, with its high twisted veins.
“I know, David,” she said. “Mother and father, and Henry, and a good many friends. But I need you, too. You're all I have, now that Dick—”
“That's why I called you. If I can get out there, I'll go. And I'll put up a fight that will make them wish they'd never started anything. But if I can't, if I—” She felt his fingers tighten on her hand. “If Hattie Thorwald is still living, we'll put her on the stand. If I can't go, for any reason, I want you to see that she is called. And you know where Henry's statement is?”
“In your box, isn't it?”
“Yes. Have the statement read first, and then have her called to corroborate it. Tell the story I have told you—or no, I'll dictate it to you in the morning, and sign it before witnesses. Jake and Bill will testify too.”
He felt easier in his mind after that. He had marshalled his forces and begun his preparations for battle. He felt less apprehension now in case he fell asleep, to waken among those he had loved long since and lost awhile. After a few moments his eyes closed, and Lucy went back to her bed and crawled into it.
It was, however, Harrison Miller who took the statement that morning. Lucy's cramped old hand wrote too slowly for David's impatience. Harrison Miller took it, on hotel stationery, covering the carefully numbered pages with his neat, copper-plate writing. He wrote with an impassive face, but with intense interest, for by that time he knew Dick's story.
Never, in his orderly bachelor life, of daily papers and a flower garden and political economy at night, had he been so close to the passions of men to love and hate and the disorder they brought with them.
“My brother, Henry Livingstone, was not a strong man,” David dictated. “He had the same heart condition I have, but it developed earlier. After he left college he went to Arizona and bought a ranch, and there he met and chummed with Elihu Clark, who had bought an old mine and was reworking it. Henry loaned him a small amount of money at that time, and a number of years later in return for that, when Henry's health failed, Clark, who had grown wealthy, bought him a ranch in Wyoming at Dry River, not far from Clark's own property.
“Henry had been teaching in an Eastern university, and then taken up tutoring. We saw little of him. He was a student, and he became almost a recluse. I saw less of him than ever after Clark gave him the ranch.
“In the spring of 1910 Henry wrote me that he was not well, and I went out to see him. He seemed worried and was in bad shape physically. Elihu Clark had died five years before, and left him a fair sum of money, fifty thousand dollars, but he was living in a way which made me think he was not using it. The ranch buildings were dilapidated, and there was nothing but the barest necessities in the house.
“I taxed Henry with miserliness, and he then told me that the money was not his, but left to him to be used for an illegitimate son of Clark's, born before his marriage, the child of a small rancher's daughter named Hattie Burgess. The Burgess girl had gone to Omaha for its birth, and the story was not known. In early years Clark had paid the child's board through his lawyer to an Omaha woman named Hines, and had later sent him to college. The Burgess girl married a Swede named Thorwald. The boy was eight years older than Judson, Clark's legitimate son.
“After the death of his wife Elihu Clark began to think about the child, especially after Judson became a fair-sized boy. He had the older boy, who went by the name of Hines, sent to college, and in summer he stayed at Henry's tutoring school. Henry said the boy was like the Burgess family, blonde and excitable and rather commonplace. He did not get on well at college, and did not graduate. So far as he knew, Clark never saw him.
“The boy himself believed that he was an orphan, and that the Hines woman had adopted him as a foundling. But on the death of the woman he found that she had no estate, and that a firm of New York attorneys had been paying his college bills.
“He had spent considerable time with Henry, one way and another, and he began to think that Henry knew who he was. He thought at first that Henry was his father, and there was some trouble. In order to end it Henry finally acknowledged that he knew who the father was, and after that he had no peace. Clifton—his name was Clifton Hines—attacked Henry once, and if it had not been for the two men on the place he would have hurt him.
“Henry began to give him money. Clark had left the fifty thousand for the boy with the idea that Henry should start him in business with it. But he only turned up wild-cat schemes that Henry would not listen to. He did not know how Henry got the money, or from where. He thought for a long time that Henry had saved it.
“I'd better say here that Henry was fond of Clifton, although he didn't approve of him. He'd never married, and the boy was like a son to him for a good many years. He didn't have him at the ranch much, however, for he was a Burgess through and through and looked like them. And he was always afraid that somehow the story would get out.
“Then Clifton learned, somehow or other, of Clark's legacy to Henry, and he put two and two together. There was a bad time, but Henry denied it and they went upstairs to bed. That night Clifton broke into Henry's desk and found some letters from Elihu Clark that told the story.
“He almost went crazy. He took the papers up to Henry's and wakened him, standing over Henry with them in hand, and shaking all over. I think they had a struggle, too. All Henry told me was that he took them from him and threw them in the fire.
“That was a year before Henry died, and at the time young Jud Clark's name was in all the newspapers. He had left college after a wild career there, and although Elihu had tied up the property until Jud was twenty-one, Jud had his mother's estate and a big allowance. Then, too, he borrowed on his prospects, and he lost a hundred thousand dollars at Monte Carlo within six weeks after he graduated.
“One way and another he was always in the newspapers, and when he saw how Jud was throwing money away Clifton went wild.
“As Henry had burned the letters he had no proofs. He didn't know who his mother was, but he set to work to find out. He ferreted into Elihu's past life, and he learned something about Hattie Burgess, or Thorwald. She was married by that time, and lived on a little ranch near Norada. He went to see her, and he accused her downright of being his mother. It must have been a bad time for her, for after all he was her son, and she had to disclaim him. She had a husband and a boy by that husband, however, by that time, and she was desperate. She threw him off the track somehow, lied and talked him down, and then went to bed in collapse. She sent for Henry later and told him.
“The queer thing was that as soon as she saw him she wanted him. He was her son. She went to Henry one night, and said she had perjured her soul, and that she wanted him back. She wasn't in love with Thorwald. I think she'd always cared for Clark. She went away finally, however, after promising Henry she would keep Clark's secret. But I have a suspicion that later on she acknowledged the truth to the boy.
“What he wanted, of course, was a share of the Clark estate. Of course he hadn't a chance in law, but he saw a chance to blackmail young Jud Clark and he tried it. Not personally, for he hadn't any real courage, but by mail. Clark's attorneys wrote back saying they would jail him if he tried it again, and he went back to Dry River and after Henry again.
“That was in the spring of 1911. Henry was uneasy, for Clifton was not like himself. He had spells of brooding, and he took to making long trips on his horse into the mountains, and coming in with the animal run to death. Henry thought, too, that he was seeing the Thorwald woman, the mother. Thorwald had died, and she was living with the son on their ranch and trying to sell it. He thought Hines was trying to have her make a confession which would give him a hold on Jud Clark.
“Henry was not well, and in the early fall he knew he hadn't long to live. He wrote out the story and left it in his desk for me to read after he had gone, and as he added to it from time to time, when I got it it was almost up to date.
“Judson came back to the Clark ranch in September, bringing along an actress named Beverly Carlysle, and her husband, Howard Lucas. There was considerable talk, because it was known Jud had been infatuated with the woman. But no one saw much of the party, outside of the ranch. The Carlysle woman seemed to be a lady, but the story was that both men were drinking a good bit, especially Jud.
“Henry wrote that Hines had been in the East for some months at that time, and that he had not heard from him. But he felt that it was only a truce, and that he would turn up again, hell bent for trouble. He made a will and left the money to me, with instructions to turn it over to Hines. It is still in the bank, and amounts to about thirty-five thousand dollars. It is not mine, and I will not touch it. But I have never located Clifton Hines.
“In the last entry in his record I call attention to my brother's statement that he did not regard Clifton Hines as entirely sane on this one matter, and to his conviction that the hatred Hines then bore him, amounting to a delusion of persecution, might on his death turn against Judson Clark. He instructed me to go to Clark, tell him the story, and put him on his guard.
“Clark and his party had been at the ranch only a day or two when one night Hines turned up at Dry River. He wanted the fifty thousand, or what was left of it, and when he failed to move Henry he attacked him. The two men on the place heard the noise and ran in, but Hines got away. Henry swore them to secrecy, and told them the story. He felt he might need help.
“From what the two men at the ranch told me when I got there, I think Hines stayed somewhere in the mountains for the next day or two, and that he came down for food the night Henry died.
“Just what he contributed to Henry's death I do not know. Henry fell in one room, and was found in bed in another when the hands had been taking the cattle to the winter range, and he'd been alone in the house.
“When I got there the funeral was over. I read the letter he had left, and then I talked to the two hands, Bill Ardary and Jake Mazetti. They would not talk at first, but I showed them Henry's record and then they were free enough. The autopsy had shown that Henry died from heart disease, but he had a cut on his head also, and they believed that Hines had come back, had quarreled with him again, and had knocked him down.
“As Henry had in a way handed over to me his responsibility for the boy, and as I wanted to transfer the money, I waited for three weeks at the ranch, hoping he would turn up again. I saw the Thorwald woman, but she protested that she did not know where he was. And I made two attempts to see and warn Jud Clark, but failed both times. Then one night the Thorwald woman came in, looking like a ghost, and admitted that Hines had been hiding in the mountains since Henry's death, that he insisted he had killed him, and that he blamed Jud Clark for that, and for all the rest of his troubles. She was afraid he would kill Clark. The three of us, the two men at the ranch and myself, prepared to go into the mountains and hunt for him, before he got snowed in.
“Then came the shooting at the Clark place, and I rode over that night in a howling storm and helped the coroner and a Norada doctor in the examination. All the evidence was against Clark, especially his running away. But I happened on Hattie Thorwald outside on a verandah—she'd been working at the house—and I didn't need any conversation to tell me what she thought. All she said was:
“He didn't do it, doctor. He's still in the mountains.”
“He's been here to-night, Hattie, and you know it. He shot the wrong man.”
“But she swore he hadn't been, and at the end I didn't know. I'll say right now that I don't know. But I'll say, too, that I believe that is what happened, and that Hines probably stayed hidden that night on Hattie Thorwald's place. I went there the next day, but she denied it all, and said he was still in the mountains. She carried on about the blizzard and his being frozen to death, until I began to think she was telling the truth.
“The next day I did what only a tenderfoot would do, started into the mountains alone. Bill and Jake were out with a posse after Clark, and I packed up some food and started. I'll not go into the details of that trip. I went in from the Dry River Canyon, and I guess I faced death a dozen times the first day. I had a map, but I lost myself in six hours. I had food and blankets and an axe along, and I built a shelter and stayed there overnight. I had to cut up one of my blankets the next morning and tie up the horse's feet, so he wouldn't sink too deep in the snow. But it stayed cold and the snow hardened, and we got along better after that.
“I'd have turned back more than once, but I thought I'd meet up with some of the sheriff's party. I didn't do that, but I stumbled on a trail on the third day, toward evening. It was the trail made by John Donaldson, as I learned later. I followed it, but I concluded after a while that whoever made it was lost, too. It seemed to be going in a circle. I was in bad shape and had frozen a part of my right hand, when I saw a cabin, and there was smoke coming out of the chimney.”
From that time on David's statement dealt with the situation in the cabin; with Jud Clark and the Donaldsons, and with the snow storm, which began again and lasted for days. He spoke at length of his discovery of Clark's identity, and of the fact that the boy had lost all memory of what had happened, and even of who he was. He went into that in detail; the peculiar effect of fear and mental shock on a high-strung nature, especially where the physical condition was lowered by excess and wrong-living; his early attempts, as the boy improved, to pierce the veil, and then his slow-growing conviction that it were an act of mercy not to do so. The Donaldsons' faithfulness, the cessation of the search under the conviction that Clark was dead, both were there, and also David's growing liking for Judson himself. But David's own psychology was interesting and clearly put.
“First of all,” he dictated, in his careful old voice, “it must be remembered that I was not certain that the boy had committed the crime. I believed, and I still believe, that Lucas was shot by Clifton Hines, probably through an open window. There were no powder marks on the body. I believed, too, and still believe, that Hines had fled after the crime, either to Hattie Thorwald's house or to the mountains. In one case he had escaped and could not be brought to justice, and in the other he was dead, and beyond conviction.
“But there is another element which I urge, not in defense but in explanation. The boy Judson Clark was a new slate to write on. He had never had a chance. He had had too much money, too much liberty, too little responsibility. His errors had been wiped away by the loss of his memory, and he had, I felt, a chance for a new and useful life.
“I did not come to my decision quickly. It was a long fight for his life, for he had contracted pneumonia, and he had the drinker's heart. But in the long days of his convalescence while Maggie worked in the lean-to, I had time to see what might be done. If in making an experiment with a man's soul I usurped the authority of my Lord and Master, I am sorry. But he knows that I did it for the best.
“I deliberately built up for Judson Clark a new identity. He was my nephew, my brother Henry's son. He had the traditions of an honorable family to carry on, and those traditions were honor, integrity, clean living and work. I did not stress love, for that I felt must be experienced, not talked about. But love was to be the foundation on which I built. The boy had had no love in his life.
“It has worked out. I may not live to see it at its fullest, but I defy the world to produce today a finer or more honorable gentleman, a more useful member of the community. And it will last. The time may come when Judson Clark will again be Judson Clark. I have expected it for many years. But he will never again be the Judson Clark of ten years ago. He may even will to return to the old reckless ways, but as I lie here, perhaps never to see him, I say this: he cannot go back. His character and habits of thought are established.
“To convict Judson Clark of the murder of Howard Lucas is to convict a probably or at least possibly innocent man. To convict Richard Livingstone of that crime is to convict a different man, innocent of the crime, innocent of its memory, innocent of any single impulse to lift his hand against a law of God or the state.”
For a month Haverly had buzzed with whispered conjectures. It knew nothing, and yet somehow it knew everything. Doctor David was ill at the seashore, and Dick was not with him. Harrison Miller, who was never known to depart farther from his comfortable hearth than the railway station in one direction and the Sayre house in the other, had made a trip East and was now in the far West. Doctor Reynolds, who might or might not know something, had joined the country club and sent for his golf bag.
And Elizabeth Wheeler was going around with a drawn white face and a determined smile that faded the moment one looked away.
The village was hurt and suspicious. It resented its lack of knowledge, and turned cynical where, had it been taken into confidence, it would have been solicitous. It believed that Elizabeth had been jilted, for it knew, via Annie and the Oglethorpe's laundress, that no letters came from Dick. And against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot flame of mainly feminine anger.
But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt it loved a mystery.
Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed chin held high, and angrily she demanded that Elizabeth do the same.
“You know what they are saying, and yet you go about looking crushed.”
“I can't act, Nina. I do go about.”
And Nina had a softened moment.
“Don't think about him,” she said. “He isn't sick, or he would have had some one wire or write, and he isn't dead, or they'd have found his papers and let us know.”
“Then he's in some sort of trouble. I want to go out there. I want to go out there!”
That, indeed, had been her constant cry for the last two weeks. She would have done it probably, packed her bag and slipped away, but she had no money of her own, and even Leslie, to whom she appealed, had refused her when he knew her purpose.
“We're following him up, little sister,” he said. “Harrison Miller has gone out, and there's enough talk as it is.”
She thought, lying in her bed at night, that they were all too afraid of what people might say. It seemed so unimportant to her. And she could not understand the conspiracy of silence. Other men went away and were not heard from, and the police were notified and the papers told. It seemed to her, too, that every one, her father and Nina and Leslie and even Harrison Miller, knew more than she did.
There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when Harrison Miller came back from seeing David, and before he went west. Leslie had been there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut her out. And her father had not been the same since.
He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger. Not at her, however. He was very gentle with her.
And here was a curious thing. She had always felt that she knew when Dick was thinking of her. All at once, and without any warning, there would come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of surrounding and encircling sense of protection. Rather like what she had felt as a little girl when she had run home through the terrors of twilight, and closed the house door behind her. She was in the warm and lighted house, safe and cared for.
That was completely gone. It was as though the warm and lighted house of her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she was alone outside, cold and frightened.
She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her alone. The small gaieties of the summer were on, dinners, dances and picnics, but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous. She could not, however, avoid Mrs. Sayre. She tried to, at first, but that lady's insistence and her own apathy made it easier to accept than to refuse. Then, after a time, she found the house rather a refuge. She seldom saw Wallie, and she found her hostess tactful, kindly and uninquisitive.
“Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,” she would say. Or they would loot the green houses and, going in the car to the cemetery, make of Jim's grave a thing of beauty and remembrance.
Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to the day she had told him of her engagement. Mother and son, she began to feel that only with them could she be herself. For the village, her chin high as Nina had said. At home, assumed cheerfulness. Only at the house on the hill could she drop her pose.
She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison Miller. What she wanted that word to be she did not know. There were, of course, times when she had to face the possibility that Dick had deliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there had never been any real reason why he should care for her. She was not clever and not beautiful. Perhaps he had been disappointed in her, and this was the thing they were concealing. Perhaps he had gone back to Wyoming and had there found some one more worthy of him, some one who understood when he talked about the things he did in his laboratory, and did not just sit and listen with loving, rather bewildered eyes.
Then, one night at dinner, a telegram was brought in, and she knew it was the expected word. She felt her mother's eyes on her, and she sat very still with her hands clenched in her lap. But her father did not read it at the table; he got up and went out, and some time later he came to the door. The telegram was not in sight.
“That was from Harrison Miller,” he said. “He has traced Dick to a hotel at Norada, but he had left the hotel, and he hasn't got in touch with him yet.”
He went away then, and they heard the house door close.
Then, some days later, she learned that Harrison Miller was coming home, and that David was being brought back. She saw that telegram from Mr. Miller, and read into it failure and discouragement, and something more ominous than either.
“Reach home Tuesday night. Nothing definite. Think safe.”
“Think safe?” she asked, breathlessly. “Then he has been in danger? What are you keeping from me?” And when no one spoke: “Oh, don't you see how cruel it is? You are all trying to protect me, and you are killing me instead.”
“Not danger,” her father said, slowly. “So far as we know, he is well. Is all right.” And seeing her face: “It is nothing that affects his feeling for you, dear. He is thinking of you and loving you, wherever he is. Only, we don't know where he is.”
But when he came back on Tuesday, after seeing Harrison Miller, he was discouraged and sick at heart. He went directly upstairs to his wife, and shut the bedroom door.
“Not a trace,” he said, in reply to the question in her eyes. “The situation is as he outlined it in the letter. He elaborated, of course. The fact is, and David will have to see it, that that statement of his doesn't help at all, unless he can prove there is a Clifton Hines. And even then it's all supposition. There's a strong sentiment out there that Dick either killed himself or met with an accident and died in the mountains. The horse wandered into town last week. I'll have to tell her.”
Over this possibility they faced each other, a tragic middle-aged pair, helpless as is the way of middle-age before the attacks of life on their young.
“It will kill her, Walter.”
“She's young,” he said sturdily. “She'll get over it.”
But he did not think so, and she knew it.
“There is a rather queer element in it,” he observed, after a time. “Another man, named Bassett, disappeared the same night. His stuff is at the hotel, but no papers to identify him. He had looked after Dick that day when he was sick, and he simply vanished. He didn't take the train. He was under suspicion for being with Dick, and the station was being watched.” But she was not interested in Bassett. The name meant nothing to her. She harked back to the question that had been in both their minds since they had read, in stupefied amazement, David's statement.
“In a way, Walter, it would be better, if he...”
“Why?”
“My little girl, and—Judson Clark!”
But he fought that sturdily. They had ten years of knowledge and respect to build on. The past was past. All he prayed for was Dick's return, an end to this long waiting. There would be no reservations in his welcome, if only—
Some time later he went downstairs, to where Elizabeth sat waiting in the library. He went like a man to his execution, and his resolution nearly gave way when he saw her, small in her big chair and pathetically patient. He told her the story as guardedly as he could. He began with Dick's story to him, about his forgotten youth, and went on carefully to Dick's own feeling that he must clear up that past before he married. She followed him carefully, bewildered a little and very tense.
“But why didn't he tell me?”
“He saw it as a sort of weakness. He meant to when he came back.”
He fought Dick's fight for him valiantly, stressing certain points that were to prepare her for others to come. He plunged, indeed, rather recklessly into the psychology of the situation, and only got out of the unconscious mind with an effort. But behind it all was his overwhelming desire to save her pain.
“You must remember,” he said, “that Dick's life before this happened, and since, are two different things. Whatever he did then should not count against him now.”
“Of course not,” she said. “Then he—had done something?”
“Yes. Something that brought him into conflict with the authorities.”
She did not shrink from that, and he was encouraged to go on.
“He was young then, remember. Only twenty-one or so. And there was a quarrel with another man. The other man was shot.”
“You mean Dick shot him?”
“Yes. You understand, don't you,” he added anxiously, “that he doesn't remember doing it?”
In spite of his anxiety he was forced to marvel at the sublime faith with which she made her comment, through lips that had gone white.
“Then it was either an accident, or he deserved shooting,” she said. But she inquired, he thought with difficulty, “Did he die?”
He could not lie to her. “Yes,” he said.
She closed her eyes, but a moment later she was fighting her valiant fight again for Dick.
“But they let him go,” she protested. “Men do shoot in the West, don't they? There must have been a reason for it. You know Dick as well as I do. He couldn't do a wrong thing.”
He let that pass. “Nothing was done about it at the time,” he said. “And Dick came here and lived his useful life among us. He wouldn't have known the man's name if he heard it. But do you see, sweetheart, where this is taking us? He went back, and they tried to get him, for a thing he didn't remember doing.”
“Father!” she said, and went very white. “Is that where he is? In prison?”
He tried to steady his voice.
“No, dear. He escaped into the mountains. But you can understand his silence. You can understand, too, that he may feel he cannot come back to us, with this thing hanging over him. What we have to do now is to find him, and to tell him that it makes no difference. That he has his place in the world waiting for him, and that we are waiting too.”
When it was all over, her questions and his sometimes stumbling replies, he saw that out of it all the one thing that mattered vitally to her was that Dick was only a fugitive, and not dead. But she said, just before they went, arm in arm, up the stairs:
“It is queer in one way, father. It isn't like him to run away.”
He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.
“Then you didn't tell her about the woman in the case?”
“Certainly not. Why should I?”
Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at the lack of masculine understanding.
“Because, whether you think it or not, she will resent and hate that as she hates nothing else. Murder will be nothing, to that. And she will have to know it some time.”
He pondered her flat statement unhappily, standing by the window and looking out into the shaded street, and a man who had been standing, cigar in mouth, on a pavement across withdrew into the shadow of a tree box.
“It's all a puzzle to me,” he said, at last. “God alone knows how it will turn out. Harrison Miller seems to think this Bassett, whoever he is, could tell us something. I don't know.”
He drew the shade and wound his watch. “I don't know,” he repeated.
Outside, on the street, the man with the cigar struck a match and looked at his watch. Then he walked briskly toward the railway station. A half hour later he walked into the offices of the Times-Republican and to the night editor's desk.
“Hello, Bassett,” said that gentleman. “We thought you were dead. Well, how about the sister in California? It was the Clark story, wasn't it?”
“Yes,” said Bassett, noncommittally.
“And it blew up on you! Well, there were others who were fooled, too. You had a holiday, anyhow.”
“Yes, I had a holiday,” said Bassett, and going over to his own desk began to sort his vast accumulation of mail. Sometime later he found the night editor at his elbow.
“Did you get anything on the Clark business at all?” he asked. “Williams thinks there's a page in it for Sunday, anyhow. You've been on the ground, and there's a human interest element in it. The last man who talked to Clark; the ranch to-day. That sort of thing.”
Bassett went on doggedly sorting his mail.
“You take it from me,” he said, “the story's dead, and so is Clark. The Donaldson woman was crazy. That's all.”