The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart (page 3)

Donaldson woman spent the winter following the murder, and there were the usual reports that he had been seen recently in spots as diverse as Seattle and New Orleans. But when the following Sunday brought nothing further he surmised that the pack, having lost the scent, had been called off.

He confirmed this before starting West by visiting some of the offices of the leading papers and looking up old friends. The Clark story was dead for the time. They had run a lot of pictures of him, however, and some one might turn him up eventually, but a scent was pretty cold in ten years. The place had changed, too. Oil had been discovered five years ago, and the old settlers had, a good many of them, cashed in and moved away. The town had grown like all oil towns.

Bassett was fairly content. He took the night train out of Chicago and spent the next day crossing Nebraska, fertile, rich and interesting. On the afternoon of the second day he left the train and took a branch line toward the mountains and Norada, and from that time on he became an urbane, interested and generally cigar-smoking interrogation point.

“Railroad been here long?” he asked the conductor.

“Four years.”

“Norada must have been pretty isolated before that.”

“Thirty miles in a coach or a Ford car.”

“I was reading the other day,” said Bassett, “about the Judson Clark case. Have a cigar? Got time to sit down?”

“You a newspaper man?”

“Oil well supplies,” said Bassett easily. “Well, in this article it seemed some woman or other had made a confession. It sounded fishy to me.”

“Well, I’ll tell you about that.” The conductor sat down and bit off the end of his cigar. “I knew the Donaldsons well, and Maggie Donaldson was an honest woman. But I’ll tell you how I explain the thing. Donaldson died, and that left her pretty much alone. The executors of the Clark estate kept her on the ranch, but when the estate was settled three years ago she had to move. That broke her all up. She’s always said he wasn’t dead. She kept the house just as it was, and my wife says she had his clothes all ready and everything.”

“That rather sounds as though the story is true, doesn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. It’s my idea she got from hoping to moping, so to speak. She went in to town regular for letters for ten years, and the postmaster says she never got any. She was hurt in front of the post office. The talk around here is that she’s been off her head for the last year or two.”

“But they found the cabin.”

“Sure they did,” said the conductor equably. “The cabin was no secret. It was an old fire station before they put the new one on Goat Mountain. I spent a month in it myself, once, with a dude who wanted to take pictures of bear. We found a bear, but it charged the camera and I’d be running yet if I hadn’t come to civilization.”

When he had gone Bassett fell into deep thought. So Maggie Donaldson had gone to the post office for ten years. He tried to visualize those faithful, wearisome journeys, through spring mud and winter snow, always futile and always hopeful. He did not for a moment believe that she had “gone off her head.” She had been faithful to the end, as some women were, and in the end, too, as had happened before, her faith had killed her.

And again he wondered at the curious ability of some men to secure loyalty. They might go through life, tearing down ideals and destroying illusions to the last, but always there was some faithful hand to rebuild, some faithful soul to worship.

He was somewhat daunted at the size and bustling activity of Norada. Its streets were paved and well-lighted, there were a park and a public library, and the clerk at the Commercial Hotel asked him if he wished a private bath! But the development was helpful in one way. In the old Norada a newcomer might have been subjected to a friendly but inquisitive interest. In this grown-up and self-centered community a man might come and go unnoticed.

And he had other advantages. The pack, as he cynically thought of them, would have started at the Clark ranch and the cabin. He would get to them, of course, but he meant to start on the outside of the circle and work in.

“Been here long?” he asked the clerk at the desk, after a leisurely meal.

The clerk grinned.

“I came here two years ago. I never saw Jud Clark. To get to the Clark place take the road north out of the town and keep straight about eight miles. The road’s good now. You fellows have worn it smooth.”

“Must have written that down and learned it off,” Bassett said admiringly. “What the devil’s the Clark place? And why should I go there? Unless,” he added, “they serve a decent meal.”

“Sorry.” The clerk looked at him sharply, was satisfied, and picked up a pen. “You’ll hear the story if you stay around here any time. Anything I can do for you?”

“Yes. Fire the cook,” Bassett said, and moved away.

He spent the evening in going over his notes and outlining a campaign, and the next day he stumbled on a bit of luck. His elderly chambermaid had lived in and around the town for years.

“Ever hear of any Livingstones in these parts?” he asked.

“Why, yes. There used to be a Livingstone ranch at Dry River,” she said, pausing with her carpet sweeper, and looking at him. “It wasn’t much of a place. Although you can’t tell these days. I sold sixty acres eight years ago for two thousand dollars, and the folks that bought it are getting a thousand a day out of it.”

She sighed. She had touched the hem of fortune’s garment and passed on; for some opportunity knocked but faintly, and for others it burst open the door and forced its way in.

“I’d be a millionaire now if I’d held on,” she said somberly. That day Bassett engaged a car by the day, he to drive it himself and return it in good condition, the garage to furnish tires.

“I’d just like to say one thing,” the owner said, as he tried the gears. “I don’t know where you’re going, and it’s not exactly my business. Here in the oil country, where they’re cutting each other’s throats for new leases, we let a man alone. But if you’ve any idea of taking that car by the back road to the old fire station where Jud Clark’s supposed to have spent the winter, I’ll just say this: we’ve had two stuck up there for a week, and the only way I see to get them back is a cyclone.”

“I’m going to Dry River,” Bassett said shortly.

“Dry River’s right, if you’re looking for oil! Go easy on the brakes, old man. We need ’em in our business.”

Dry River was a small settlement away from the railroad. It consisted of two intersecting unpaved streets, a dozen or so houses, a closed and empty saloon and two general stores. He chose one at random and found that the old Livingstone place had been sold ten years ago, on the death of its owner, Henry Livingstone.

“His brother from the East inherited it,” said the storekeeper. “He came and sold out, lock, stock and barrel. Not that there was much. A few cattle and horses, and the stuff in the ranch house, which wasn’t valuable. There were a lot of books, and the brother gave them for a library, but we haven’t any building. The railroad isn’t built this far yet, and unless we get oil here it won’t be.”

“The brother inherited it, eh? Do you know the brother’s name?”

“David, I think. He was a doctor back East somewhere.”

“Then this Henry Livingstone wasn’t married? Or at least had no children?”

“He wasn’t married. He was a sort of hermit. He’d been dead two days before any one knew it. My wife went out when they found him and got him ready for the funeral. He was buried before the brother got here.” He glanced at Bassett shrewdly. “The place has been prospected for oil, and there’s a dry hole on the next ranch. I tell my wife nature’s like the railroad. It quit before it got this far.”

Bassett’s last scruple had fled. The story was there, ready for the gathering. So ready, indeed, that he was almost suspicious of his luck.

And that conviction, that things were coming too easy, persisted through his interview with the storekeeper’s wife, in the small house behind the store. She was a talkative woman, eager to discuss the one drama in a drab life, and she showed no curiosity as to the reason for his question.

“Henry Livingstone !” she said. “Well, I should say so. I went out right away when we got the word he was dead, and there I stayed until it was all over. I guess I know as much about him as any one around here does, for I had to go over his papers to find out who his people were.”

The papers, it seemed, had not been very interesting; canceled checks and receipted bills, and a large bundle of letters, all of them from a brother named David and a sister who signed herself Lucy. There had been a sealed one, too, addressed to David Livingstone, and to be opened after his death. She had had her husband wire to “David” and he had come out, too late for the funeral.

“Do you remember when that was?”

“Let me see. Henry Livingstone died about a month before the murder at the Clark ranch. We date most things around here from that time.”

“How long did ‘David’ stay?” Bassett had tried to keep his tone carefully conversational, but he saw that it was not necessary. She was glad of a chance to talk.

“Well, I’d say about three or four weeks. He hadn’t seen his brother for years, and I guess there was no love lost. He sold everything as quick as he could, and went back East.” She glanced at the clock. “My husband will be in soon for dinner. I’d be glad to have you stay and take a meal with us.”

The reporter thanked her and declined.

“It’s an interesting story,” he said. “I didn’t tell your husband, for I wasn’t sure I was on the right trail. But the David and Lucy business eliminates this man. There’s a piece of property waiting in the East for a Henry Livingstone who came to this state in the 80’s, or for his heirs. You can say positively that this man was not married?”

“No. He didn’t like women. Never had one on the place. Two ranch hands that are still at the Wassons’ and himself, that was all. The Wassons are the folks who bought the ranch.”

No housekeeper then, and no son born out of wedlock, so far as any evidence went. All that glib lying in the doctor’s office, all that apparent openness and frankness, gone by the board! The man in the cabin, reported by Maggie Donaldson, had been David Livingstone. Somehow, some way, he had got Judson Clark out of the country and spirited him East. Not that the how mattered just yet. The essential fact was there, that David Livingstone had been in this part of the country at the time Maggie Donaldson had been nursing Judson Clark in the mountains.

Bassett sat back and chewed the end of his cigar thoughtfully. The sheer boldness of the scheme which had saved Judson Clark compelled his admiration, but the failure to cover the trail, the ease with which he had picked it up, made him suspicious.

He rose and threw away his cigar.

“You say this David went East, when he had sold out the place. Do you remember where he lived?”

“Some town in eastern Pennsylvania. I’ve forgotten the name.”

“I’ve got to be sure I’m wrong, and then go ahead,” he said, as he got his hat. “I’ll see those men at the ranch, I guess, and then be on my way. How far is it?”

It was about ten miles, along a bad road which kept him too much occupied for any connected thought. But his sense of exultation persisted. He had found Judson Clark.

XVI

Dick’s decision to cut himself off from Elizabeth was born of his certainty that he could not see her and keep his head. He was resolutely determined to keep his head, until he knew what he had to offer her. But he was very unhappy. He worked sturdily all day and slept at night out of sheer fatigue, only to rouse in the early morning to a conviction of something wrong before he was fully awake. Then would come the uncertainty and pain of full consciousness, and he would lie with his arms under his head, gazing unblinkingly at the ceiling and preparing to face another day.

There was no prospect of early relief, although David had not again referred to his going away. David was very feeble. The look of him sometimes sent an almost physical pain through Dick’s heart. But there were times when he roused to something like his old spirit, shouted for tobacco, frowned over his diet tray, and fought Harrison Miller when he came in to play cribbage in much his old tumultuous manner.

Then, one afternoon late in May, when for four days Dick had not seen Elizabeth, suddenly he found the decision as to their relation taken out of his hands, and by Elizabeth herself.

He opened the door one afternoon to find her sitting alone in the waiting-room, clearly very frightened and almost inarticulate. He could not speak at all at first, and when he did his voice, to his dismay, was distinctly husky.

“Is anything wrong?” he asked, in a tone which was fairly sepulchral.

“That’s what I want to know, Dick.”

Suddenly he found himself violently angry. Not at her, of course. At everything.

“Wrong?” he said, savagely. “Yes. Everything is wrong!”

Then he was angry! She went rather pale.

“What have I done, Dick?”

As suddenly as he had been fierce he was abject and ashamed. Startled, too.

“You?” he said. “What have you done? You’re the only thing that’s right in a wrong world. You – “

He checked himself, put down his bag – he had just come in – and closed the door into the hall. Then he stood at a safe distance from her, and folded his arms in order to be able to keep his head – which shows how strange the English language is.

“Elizabeth,” he said gravely. “I’ve been a self-centered fool. I stayed away because I’ve been in trouble. I’m still in trouble, for that matter. But it hasn’t anything to do with you. Not directly, anyhow.”

“Don’t you think it’s possible that I know what it is?”

“You do know.”

He was too absorbed to notice the new maturity in her face, the brooding maternity born of a profound passion. To Elizabeth just then he was not a man, her man, daily deciding matters of life and death, but a worried boy, magnifying a trifle into importance.

“There is always gossip,” she said, “and the only thing one can do is to forget it at once. You ought to be too big for that sort of thing.”

“But – suppose it is true?”

“What difference would it make?”

He made a quick movement toward her.

“There may be more than that. I don’t know, Elizabeth,” he said, his eyes on hers. “I have always thought – I can’t go to David now.”

He was moved to go on. To tell her of his lost youth, of that strange trick by which his mind had shut off those hidden years. But he could not. He had a perfectly human fear of being abnormal in her eyes, precisely but greatly magnified the same instinct which had made him inspect his new tie in daylight for fear it was too brilliant. But greater than that was his new fear that something neither happy nor right lay behind him under lock and key in his memory.

“I want you to know this, Dick,” she said. “That nothing, no gossip or anything, can make any difference to me. And I’ve been terribly hurt. We’ve been such friends. You – I’ve been lying awake at night, worrying.”

That went to his heart first, and then to his head. This might be all, all he was ever to have. This hour, and this precious and tender child, so brave in her declaration, so simple and direct; all his world in that imitation mahogany chair.

“You’re all I’ve got,” he said. “The one real thing in a world that’s going to smash. I think I love you more than God.”

The same mood, of accepting what he had without question and of refusing to look ahead, actuated him for the next few days. He was incredibly happy.

He went about his work with his customary care and thoroughness, for long practice had made it possible for him to go on as though nothing had happened, to listen to querulous complaints and long lists of symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled prescriptions which were, so hopefully, to cure. Not that Dick himself believed greatly in those empirical doses, but he considered that the expectation of relief was half the battle. But that was the mind of him, which went about clothed in flesh, of course, and did its daily and nightly work, and put up a very fair imitation of Doctor Richard Livingstone. But hidden away was a heart that behaved in a highly unprofessional manner, and sang and dreamed, and jumped at the sight of a certain small figure on the street, and generally played hob with systole and diastole, and the vagus and accelerator nerves. Which are all any doctor really knows about the heart, until he falls in love.

He even began to wonder if he had read into the situation something that was not there, and in this his consciousness of David’s essential rectitude helped him. David could not do a wrong thing, or an unworthy one. He wished he were more like David.

The new humility extended to his love for Elizabeth. Sometimes, in his room or shaving before the bathroom mirror, he wondered what she could see in him to care about. He shaved twice a day now, and his face was so sore that he had to put cream on it at night, to his secret humiliation. When he was dressed in the morning he found himself once or twice taking a final survey of the ensemble, and at those times he wished very earnestly that he had some outstanding quality of appearance that she might admire.

He refused to think. He was content for a time simply to feel, to be supremely happy, to live each day as it came and not to look ahead. And the old house seemed to brighten with him. Never had Lucy’s window boxes been so bright, or Minnie’s bread so light; the sun poured into David’s sick room and turned the nurse so dazzling white in her uniform that David declared he was suffering from snow-blindness.

And David himself was improving rapidly. With the passage of each day he felt more secure. The reporter from the Times-Republican -if he were really on the trail of Dick he would have come to see him, would have told him the story. No. That bridge was safely crossed. And Dick was happy. David, lying in his bed, would listen and smile faintly when Dick came whistling into the house or leaped up the stairs two at a time; when he sang in his shower, or tormented the nurse with high-spirited nonsense. The boy was very happy. He would marry Elizabeth Wheeler, and things would be as they should be; there would be the fullness of life, young voices in the house, toys on the lawn. He himself would pass on, in the fullness of time, but Dick –

On Decoration Day they got him out of bed, making a great ceremony of it, and when he was settled by the window in his big chair with a blanket over his knees, Dick came in with a great box. Unwrapping it he disclosed a mass of paper and a small box, and within that still another.

“What fol-de-rol is all this?” David demanded fiercely, with a childish look of expectation in his eyes. “Give me that box. Some more slippers, probably!”

He worked eagerly, and at last he came to the small core of the mass. It was a cigar!

It was somewhat later, when the peace of good tobacco had relaxed him into a sort of benignant drowsiness, and when Dick had started for his late afternoon calls, that Lucy came into the room.

“Elizabeth Wheeler’s downstairs,” she said. “I told her you wanted to see her. She’s brought some chicken jelly, too.”

She gathered up the tissue paper that surrounded him, and gave the room a critical survey. She often felt that the nurse was not as tidy as she might be. Then she went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t want to worry you, David. Not now. But if he’s going to marry her – “

“Well, why shouldn’t he?” he demanded truculently. “A good woman would be one more anchor to windward.”

She found that she could not go on. David was always incomprehensible to her when it came to Dick. Had been incomprehensible from the first. But she could not proceed without telling him that the village knew something, and what that something was; that already she felt a change in the local attitude toward Dick. He was, for one thing, not quite so busy as he had been.

She went out of the room, and sent Elizabeth to David.

In her love for Dick, Elizabeth now included everything that pertained to him, his shabby coats, his rattling car, and his people. She had an inarticulate desire for their endorsement, to be liked by them and wanted by them. Not that there could be any words, because both she and Dick were content just then with love, and were holding it very secret between them.

“Well, well!” said David. “And here we are reversed and I’m the patient and you’re the doctor! And good medicine you are, my dear.”

He looked her over with approval, and with speculation, too. She was a small and fragile vessel on which to embark all the hopes that, out of his own celibate and unfulfilled life, he had dreamed for Dick. She was even more than that. If Lucy was right, from now on she was a part of that experiment in a human soul which he had begun with only a professional interest, but which had ended by becoming a vital part of his own life.

She was a little shy with him, he saw; rather fluttered and nervous, yet radiantly happy. The combination of these mixed emotions, plus her best sick-room manner, made her slightly prim at first. But soon she was telling him the small news of the village, although David rather suspected her of listening for Dick’s car all the while. When she got up to go and held out her hand he kept it, between both of his.

“I haven’t been studying symptoms for all these years for nothing, my dear,” he said. “And it seems to me somebody is very happy.”

“I am, Doctor David.”

He patted her hand.

“Mind you,” he said, “I don’t know anything and I’m not asking any questions. But if the Board of Trade, or the Chief of Police, had come to me and said, ‘Who is the best wife for – well, for a young man who is an important part of this community?’ I’d have said in reply, ‘Gentlemen, there is a Miss Elizabeth Wheeler who – ‘”

Suddenly she bent down and kissed him.

“Oh, do you think so?” she asked, breathlessly. “I love him so much, Doctor David. And I feel so unworthy.”

“So you are,” he said. “So’s he. So are all of us, when it comes to a great love, child. That is, we are never quite what the other fellow thinks we are. It’s when we don’t allow for what the scientist folk call a margin of error that we come our croppers. I wonder” – he watched her closely – “if you young people ever allow for a margin of error?’

“I only know this,” she said steadily. “I can’t imagine ever caring any less. I’ve never thought about myself very much, but I do know that. You see, I think I’ve cared for a long time.”

When she had gone he sat in his chair staring ahead of him and thinking. Yes. She would stick. She had loyalty, loyalty and patience and a rare humility. It was up to Dick then. And again he faced the possibility of an opening door into the past, of crowding memories, of confusion and despair and even actual danger. And out of that, what?

Habit. That was all he had to depend on. The brain was a thing of habits, like the body; right could be a habit, and so could evil. As a man thought, so he was. For all of his childhood, and for the last ten years, Dick’s mental habits had been right; his environment had been love, his teaching responsibility. Even if the door opened, then, there was only the evil thinking of two or three reckless years to combat, and the door might never open. Happiness, Lauler had said, would keep it closed, and Dick was happy.

When at five o’clock the nurse came in with a thermometer he was asleep in his chair, his mouth slightly open, and snoring valiantly. Hearing Dick in the lower hall, she went to the head of the stairs, her finger to her lips.

Dick nodded and went into the office. The afternoon mail was lying there, and he began mechanically to open it. His thoughts were elsewhere.

Now that he had taken the step he had so firmly determined not to take, certain things, such as Clare Rossiter’s story, David’s uneasiness, his own doubts, no longer involved himself alone, nor even Elizabeth and himself. They had become of vital importance to her family.

There was no evading the issue. What had once been only his own misfortune, mischance, whatever it was, had now become of vital importance to an entire group of hitherto disinterested people. He would have to put his situation clearly before them and let them judge. And he would have to clarify that situation for them and for himself.

He had had a weak moment or two. He knew that some men, many men, went to marriage with certain reticences, meaning to wipe the slate clean and begin again. He had a man’s understanding of such concealments. But he did not for a moment compare his situation with theirs, even when the temptation to seize his happiness was strongest. No mere misconduct, but something hidden and perhaps terrible lay behind David’s strange new attitude. Lay, too, behind the break in his memory which he tried to analyze with professional detachment. The mind in such cases set up its defensive machinery of forgetfulness, not against the trivial but against the unbearable.

For the last day or two he had faced the fact that, not only must he use every endeavor to revive his past, but that such revival threatened with cruelty and finality to separate him from the present.

With an open and unread letter in his hand he stared about the office. This place was his; he had fought for it, worked for it. He had an almost physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to drag him away from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth. And of himself holding desperately to them all, and to the believed commonplaceness of his surroundings.

He shook himself and began to read the letter.

“Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you, but understand you are laid up. Burn this as soon as you’ve read it. Louis Bassett has started for Norada, and I advise your getting the person we discussed out of town as soon as possible. Bassett is up to mischief. I’m not signing this fully, for obvious reasons. G.”

XVII

The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town, a long, rather low white house on Italian lines. In summer, until the family exodus to the Maine Coast, the brilliant canopy which extended out over the terrace indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the family was “in residence.” Originally designed as a summer home, Mrs. Sayre now used it the year round. There was nothing there, as there was in the town house, to remind her of the bitter days before her widowhood.

She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her house and of no taste whatever in her clothing.

“I never know,” said Harrison Miller, “when I look up at the Sayre place, whether I’m seeing Ann Sayre or an awning.”

She was not a shrewd woman, nor a clever one, but she was kindly in the main, tolerant and maternal. She liked young people, gave gay little parties to which she wore her outlandish clothes of all colors and all cuts, lavished gifts on the girls she liked, and was anxious to see Wallie married to a good steady girl and settled down. Between her son and herself was a quiet but undemonstrative affection. She viewed him through eyes that had lost their illusion about all men years ago, and she had no delusions about him. She had no idea that she knew all that he did with his time, and no desire to penetrate the veil of his private life.

“He spends a great deal of money,” she said one day to her lawyer. “I suppose in the usual ways. But he is not quite like his father. He has real affections, which his father hadn’t. If he marries the right girl she can make him almost anything.”

She had her first inkling that he was interested in Elizabeth Wheeler one day when the head gardener reported that Mr. Wallace had ordered certain roses cut and sent to the Wheeler house. She was angry at first, for the roses were being saved for a dinner party. Then she considered.

“Very well, Phelps,” she said. “Do it. And I’ll select a plant also, to go to Mrs. Wheeler.”

After all, why not the Wheeler girl? She had been carefully reared, if the Wheeler house was rather awful in spots, and she was a gentle little thing; very attractive, too, especially in church. And certainly Wallie had been seeing a great deal of her.

She went to the greenhouses, and from there upstairs and into the rooms that she had planned for Wallie and his bride, when the time came. She was more content than she had been for a long time. She was a lonely woman, isolated by her very grandeur from the neighborliness she craved; when she wanted society she had to ask for it, by invitation. Standing inside the door of the boudoir, her thoughts already at work on draperies and furniture, she had a vague dream of new young life stirring in the big house, of no more lonely evenings, of the bustle and activity of a family again.

She wanted Wallie to settle down. She was tired of paying his bills at his clubs and at various hotels, tired and weary of the days he lay in bed all morning while his valet concocted various things to enable him to pull himself together. He had been four years sowing his wild oats, and now at twenty-five she felt he should be through with them.

The south room could be the nursery.

On Decoration Day, as usual, she did her dutiful best by the community, sent flowers to the cemetery and even stood through a chilly hour there while services were read and taps sounded over the graves of those who had died in three wars. She felt very grateful that Wallie had come back safely, and that if only now he would marry and settle down all would be well.

The service left her emotionally untouched. She was one of those women who saw in war, politics, even religion, only their reaction on herself and her affairs. She had taken the German deluge as a personal affliction. And she stood only stoically enduring while the village soprano sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” By the end of the service she had decided that Elizabeth Wheeler was the answer to her problem.

Rather under pressure, Wallie lunched with her at the country club, but she found him evasive and not particularly happy.

“You’re twenty-five, you know,” she said, toward the end of a discussion. “By thirty you’ll be too set in your habits, too hard to please.”

“I’m not going to marry for the sake of getting married, mother.”

“Of course not. But you have a good bit of money. You’ll have much more when I’m gone. And money carries responsibility with it.”

He glanced at her, looked away, rapped a fork on the table cloth.

“It takes two to make a marriage, mother.”

He closed up after that, but she had learned what she wanted.

At three o’clock that afternoon the Sayre limousine stopped in front of Nina’s house, and Mrs. Sayre, in brilliant pink and a purple hat, got out. Leslie, lounging in a window, made the announcement.

“Here’s the Queen of Sheba,” he said. “I’ll go upstairs and have a headache, if you don’t mind.”

He kissed Nina and departed hastily. He was feeling extremely gentle toward Nina those days and rather smugly virtuous. He considered that his conscience had brought him back and not a very bad fright, which was the fact, and he fairly exuded righteousness.

It was the great lady’s first call, and Nina was considerably uplifted. It was for such moments as this one trained servants and put Irish lace on their aprons, and had decorators who stood off with their heads a little awry and devised backgrounds for one’s personality.

“What a delightful room !” said Mrs. Sayre. “And how do you keep a maid as trim as that?”

“I must have service,” Nina replied. “The butler’s marching in a parade or something. How nice of you to come and see our little place. It’s a band-box, of course.”

Mrs. Sayre sat down, a gross disharmony in the room, but a solid and not unkindly woman for all that.

“My dear,” she said, “I am not paying a call. Or not only that. I came to talk to you about something. About Wallace and your sister.”

Nina was gratified and not a little triumphant.

“I see,” she said. “Do you mean that they are fond of one another?”

“Wallace is. Of course, this talk is between ourselves, but – I’m going to be frank, Nina. I want Wallie to marry, and I want him to marry soon. You and I know that the life of an unattached man about town is full of temptations. I want him to settle down. I’m lonely, too, but that’s not so important.”

Nina hesitated.

“I don’t know about Elizabeth. She’s fond of Wallie, as who isn’t? But lately – “

“Yes?”

“Well, for the last few days I have been wondering. She doesn’t talk, you know. But she has been seeing something of Dick Livingstone.”

“Doctor Livingstone! She’d be throwing herself away!”

“Yes, but she’s like that. I mean, she isn’t ambitious. We’ve always expected her to throw herself away; at least I have.”

A half hour later Leslie, upstairs, leaned over the railing to see if there were any indications of departure. The door was open, and Mrs. Sayre evidently about to take her leave. She was saying:

“It’s very close to my heart, Nina dear, and I know you will be tactful. I haven’t stressed the material advantages, but you might point them out to her.”

A few moments later Leslie came downstairs. Nina was sitting alone, thinking, with a not entire1y pleasant look of calculation on her face.

“Well?” he said. “What were you two plotting?”

“Plotting? Nothing, of course.”

He looked down at her. “Now see here, old girl,” he said, “you keep your hands off Elizabeth’s affairs. If I know anything she’s making a damn good choice, and don’t you forget it.”

XVIII

Dick stood with the letter in his hand, staring at it. Who was Bassett? Who was “G”? What had the departure of whoever Bassett might be for Norada to do with David? And who was the person who was to be got out of town?

He did not go upstairs. He took the letter into his private office, closed the door, and sitting down at his desk turned his reading lamp on it, as though that physical act might bring some mental light.

Reread, the cryptic sentences began to take on meaning. An unknown named Bassett, whoever he might be, was going to Norada bent on “mischief,” and another unknown who signed himself “G” was warning David of that fact. But the mischief was designed, not against David, but against a third unknown, some one who was to be got out of town.

David had been trying to get him out of town. – The warning referred to himself.

His first impulse was to go to David, and months later he was to wonder what would have happened had he done so. How far could Bassett have gone? What would have been his own decision when he learned the truth?

For a little while, then, the shuttle was in Dick’s own hand. He went up to David’s room, and with his hand on the letter in his pocket, carried on behind his casual talk the debate that was so vital. But David had a headache and a slightly faster pulse, and that portion of the pattern was never woven.

The association between anxiety and David’s illness had always been apparent in Dick’s mind, but now he began to surmise a concrete shock, a person, a telegram, or a telephone call. And after dinner that night he went back to the kitchen.

“Minnie,” he inquired, “do you remember the afternoon Doctor David was taken sick?”

“I’ll never forget it.”

“Did he receive a telegram that day?”

“Not that I know of. He often answers the bell himself.”

“Do you know whether he had a visitor, just before you heard him fall?”

“He had a patient, yes. A man.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. He was a stranger to me.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

Minnie reflected.

“He was a smallish man, maybe thirty-five or so,” she said. “I think he had gaiters over his shoes, or maybe light tops. He was a nice appearing person.”

“How soon after that did you hear Doctor David fall?”

“Right away. First the door slammed, and then he dropped.”

Poor old David! Dick had not the slightest doubt now that David had received some unfortunate news, and that up there in his bedroom ever since, alone and helpless, he had been struggling with some secret dread he could not share with any one. Not even with Lucy, probably.

Nevertheless, Dick made a try with Lucy that evening.

“Aunt Lucy,” he said, “do you know of anything that could have caused David’s collapse?”

“What sort of thing?” she asked guardedly.

“A letter, we’ll say, or a visitor?”

When he saw that she was only puzzled and thinking back, he knew she could not help him.

“Never mind,” he said. “I was feeling about for some cause. That’s all.”

He was satisfied that Lucy knew no more than he did of David’s visitor, and that David had kept his own counsel ever since. But the sense of impending disaster that had come with the letter did not leave him. He went through his evening office hours almost mechanically, with a part of his mind busy on the puzzle. How did it affect the course of action he had marked out? Wasn’t it even more necessary than ever now to go to Walter Wheeler and tell him how things stood? He hated mystery. He liked to walk in the middle of the road in the sunlight. But even stronger than that was a growing feeling that he needed a sane and normal judgment on his situation; a fresh viewpoint and some unprejudiced advice.

He visited David before he left, and he was very gentle with him. In view of this new development he saw David from a different angle, facing and dreading something imminent, and it came to him with a shock that he might have to clear things up to save David. The burden, whatever it was, was breaking him.

He had telephoned, and Mr. Wheeler was waiting for him. Walter Wheeler thought he knew what was coming, and he had well in mind what he was going to say. He had thought it over, pacing the floor alone, with the dog at his heels. He would say:

“I like and respect you, Livingstone. If you’re worrying about what these damned gossips say, let’s call it a day and forget it. I know a man when I see one, and if it’s all right with Elizabeth it’s all right with me.”

Things, however, did not turn out just that way. Dick came in, grave and clearly preoccupied, and the first thing he said was:

“I have a story to tell you, Mr. Wheeler. After you’ve heard it, and given me your opinion on it, I’ll come to a matter that – well, that I can’t talk about now.”

“If it’s the silly talk that I daresay you’ve heard – “

“No. I don’t give a damn for talk. But there is something else. Something I haven’t told Elizabeth, and that I’ll have to tell you.”

Walter Wheeler drew himself up rather stiffly. Leslie’s defection was still in his mind.

“Don’t tell me you’re tangled up with another woman.”

“No. At least I think not. I don’t know.”

It is doubtful if Walter Wheeler grasped many of the technicalities that followed. Dick talked and he listened, nodding now and then, and endeavoring very hard to get the gist of the matter. It seemed to him curious rather than serious. Certainly the mind was a strange thing. He must read up on it. Now and then he stopped Dick with a question, and Dick would break in on his narrative to reply. Thus, once:

“You’ve said nothing to Elizabeth at all? About the walling off, as you call it?”

“No. At first I was simply ashamed of it. I didn’t want her to get the idea that I wasn’t normal.”

“I see.”

“Now, as I tell you, I begin to think – I’ve told you that this walling off is an unconscious desire to forget something too painful to remember. It’s practically always that. I can’t go to her with just that, can I? I’ve got to know first what it is.”

“I’d begun to think there was an understanding between you.

Dick faced him squarely.

“There is. I didn’t intend it. In fact, I was trying to keep away from her. I didn’t mean to speak to her until I’d cleared things up. But it happened anyhow; I suppose the way those things always happen.”

It was Walter Wheeler’s own decision, finally, that he go to Norada with Dick as soon as David could be safely left. It was the letter which influenced him. Up to that he had viewed the situation with a certain detachment; now he saw that it threatened the peace of two households.

“It’s a warning, all right.”

“Yes. Undoubtedly.”

“You don’t recognize the name Bassett?”

“No. I’ve tried, of course.”

The result of some indecision was finally that Elizabeth should not be told anything until they were ready to tell it all. And in the end a certain resentment that she had become involved in an unhappy situation died in Walter Wheeler before Dick’s white face and sunken eyes.

At ten o’clock the house-door opened and closed, and Walter Wheeler got up and went out into the hall.

“Go on upstairs, Margaret,” he said to his wife. “I’ve got a visitor.” He did not look at Elizabeth. “You settle down and be comfortable,” he added, “and I’ll be up before long. Where’s Jim?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t go to Nina’s.”

“He started with you, didn’t he “

“Yes. But he left us at the corner.”

They exchanged glances. Jim had been worrying them lately. Strange how a man could go along for years, his only worries those of business, his track a single one through comfortable fields where he reaped only what he sowed. And then his family grew up, and involved him without warning in new perplexities and new troubles. Nina first, then Jim, and now this strange story which so inevitably involved Elizabeth.

He put his arm around his wife and held her to him.

“Don’t worry about Jim, mother,” he said. “He’s all right fundamentally. He’s going through the bad time between being a boy and being a man. He’s a good boy.”

He watched her moving up the stairs, his eyes tender and solicitous. To him she was just “mother.” He had never thought of another woman in all their twenty-four years together.

Elizabeth waited near him, her eyes on his face.

“Is it Dick?” she asked in a low tone.

“Yes.”

“You don’t mind, daddy, do you?”

“I only want you to be happy,” he said rather hoarsely. “You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded, and turned up her face to be kissed. He knew that she had no doubt whatever that this interview was to seal her to Dick Livingstone for ever and ever. She fairly radiated happiness and confidence. He left her standing there going back to the living-room closed the door.

XIX

Louis Bassett, when he started to the old Livingstone ranch, now the Wasson place, was carefully turning over in his mind David’s participation in the escape of Judson Clark. Certain phases of it were quite clear, provided one accepted the fact that, following a heavy snowfall, an Easterner and a tenderfoot had gone into the mountains alone, under conditions which had caused the posse after Judson Clark to turn back and give him up for dead.

Had Donaldson sent him there, knowing he was a medical man? If he had, would Maggie Donaldson not have said so? She had said “a man outside that she had at first thought was a member of the searching party.” Evidently, then, Donaldson had not prepared her to expect medical assistance.

Take the other angle. Say David Livingstone had not been sent for. Say he knew nothing of the cabin or its occupants until he stumbled on them. He had sold the ranch, distributed his brother’s books, and apparently the townspeople at Dry River believed that he had gone back home. Then what had taken him, clearly alone and having certainly given the impression of a departure for the East, into the mountains? To hunt? To hunt what, that he went about it secretly and alone?

Bassett was inclined to the Donaldson theory, finally. John Donaldson would have been wanting a doctor, and not wanting one from Norada. He might have heard of this Eastern medical man at Dry River, have gone to him with his story, even have taken him part of the way. The situation was one that would have a certain appeal. It was possible, anyhow:

But instead of clarifying the situation Bassett’s visit at the Wasson place brought forward new elements which fitted neither of the hypotheses in his mind.

To Wasson himself, whom he met on horseback on the road into the ranch, he gave the same explanation he had given to the store-keeper’s wife. Wasson was a tall man in chaps and a Stetson, and he was courteously interested.

“Bill and Jake are still here,” he said. “They’re probably in for dinner now, and I’ll see you get a chance to talk to them. I took them over with the ranch. Property, you say? Well, I hope it’s better land than he had here.”

He turned his horse and rode beside the car to the house.

“Comes a little late to do Henry Livingstone much good,” he said. “He’s been lying in the Dry River graveyard for about ten years. Not much mourned either. He was about as close-mouthed and uncompanionable as they make them.”

The description Wasson had applied to Henry Livingstone, Bassett himself applied to the two ranch hands later on, during their interview. It could hardly have been called an interview at all, indeed, and after a time Bassett realized that behind their taciturnity was suspicion. They were watching him, undoubtedly; he rather thought, when he looked away, that once or twice they exchanged glances. He was certain, too, that Wasson himself was puzzled.

“Speak up, Jake,” he said once, irritably. “This gentleman has come a long way. It’s a matter of some property.”

“What sort of property?” Jake demanded. Jake was the spokesman of the two.

“That’s not important,” Bassett observed, easily. “What we want to know is if Henry Livingstone had any family.”

“He had a brother.”

“No one else?”

“Then it’s up to me to trail the brother,” Bassett observed. “Either of you remember where he lived?”

“Somewhere in the East.”

Bassett laughed.

“That’s a trifle vague,” he commented good-humoredly. “Didn’t you boys ever mail any letters for him?”

He was certain again that they exchanged glances, but they continued to present an unbroken front of ignorance. Wasson was divided between irritation and amusement.

“What’d I tell you?” he asked. “Like master like man. I’ve been here ten years, and I’ve never got a word about the Livingstones out of either of them.”

“I’m a patient man.” Bassett grinned. “I suppose you’ll admit that one of you drove David Livingstone to the train, and that you had a fair idea then of where he was going?”

He looked directly at Jake, but Jake’s face was a solid mask. He made no reply whatever.

>From that moment on Bassett was certain that David had not been driven away from the ranch at all. What he did not know, and was in no way to find out, was whether the two ranch hands knew that he had gone into the mountains, or why. He surmised back of their taciturnity a small mystery of their own, and perhaps a fear. Possibly David’s going was as much a puzzle to them as to him. Conceivably, during the hours together on the range, or during the winter snows, for ten years they had wrangled and argued over a disappearance as mysterious in its way as Judson Clark’s.

He gave up at last, having learned certain unimportant facts: that the recluse had led a lonely life; that he had never tried to make the place more than carry itself; that he was a student, and that he had no other peculiarities.

“Did he ever say anything that would lead you to believe that he had any family, outside of his brother and sister? That is, any direct heir?” Bassett asked.

“He never talked about himself,” said Jake. “If that’s all, Mr. Wasson, I’ve got a steer bogged down in the north pasture and I’ll be going.”

On the Wassons’ invitation he remained to lunch, and when the ranch owner excused himself and rode away after the meal he sat for some time on the verandah, with Mrs. Wasson sewing and his own eyes fixed speculatively on the mountain range, close, bleak and mysterious.

“Strange thing,” he commented. “Here’s a man, a book-lover and student, who comes out here, not to make living and be a useful member of the community, but apparently to bury himself alive. I wonder, why.”

“A great many come out here to get away from something, Mr. Bassett.”

“Yes, to start again. But this man never started again. He apparently just quit.”

Mrs. Wasson put down her sewing and looked at him thoughtfully.

“Did the boys tell you anything about the young man who visited Henry Livingstone now and then?”

“No. They were not very communicative.”

“I suppose they wouldn’t tell. Yet I don’t see, unless – ” She stopped, lost in some field of speculation where he could not follow her. “You know, we haven’t much excitement here, and when this boy was first seen around the place – he was here mostly in the summer – we decided that he was a relative. I don’t know why we considered him mysterious, unless it was because he was hardly ever seen. I don’t even know that that was deliberate. For that matter Mr. Livingstone wasn’t much more than a name to us.”

“You mean, a son?”

“Nobody knew. He was here only now and then.”

Bassett moved in his chair and looked at her.

“How old do you suppose this boy was?” he asked.

“He was here at different times. When Mr. Livingstone died I suppose he was in his twenties. The thing that makes it seem odd to me is that the men didn’t mention him to you.”

“I didn’t ask about him, of course.”

She went on with her sewing, apparently intending to drop the matter; but the reporter felt that now and then she was subjecting him to a sharp scrutiny, and that, in some shrewd woman-fashion, she was trying to place him.

“You said it was a matter of some property?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s rather late, isn’t it? Ten years?”

“That’s what makes it difficult.”

There was another silence, during which she evidently made her decision.

“I have never said this before, except to Mr. Wasson. But I believe he was here when Henry Livingstone died.”

Her tone was mysterious, and Bassett stared at her.

“You don’t think Livingstone was murdered!”

“No. He died of heart failure. There was an autopsy. But he had a bad cut on his head. Of course, he may have fallen – Bill and Jake were away. They’d driven some cattle out on the range. It was two days before he was found, and it would have been longer if Mr. Wasson hadn’t ridden out to talk to him about buying. He found him dead in his bed, but there was blood on the floor in the next room. I washed it up myself.”

“Of course,” she added, when Bassett maintained a puzzled silence, “I may be all wrong. He might have fallen in the next room and dragged himself to bed. But he was very neatly covered up.”

“It’s your idea, then, that this boy put him into the bed?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t seen about the place. He’s never been here since. But the posse found a horse with the Livingstone brand, saddled, dead in Dry River Canyon when it was looking for Judson Clark. Of course, that was a month later. The men here, Bill and Jake, claimed it had wandered off, but I’ve often wondered.”

After a time Bassett got up and took his leave. He was confused and irritated. Here, whether creditably or not, was Dick Livingstone accounted for. There was a story there, probably, but not the story he was after. This unknown had been at the ranch when Henry Livingstone died, had perhaps been indirectly responsible for his death. He had, witness the horse, fled after the thing happened. Later on, then, David Livingstone had taken him into his family. That was all.

Except for that identification of Gregory’s, and for the photograph of Judson Clark…. For a moment he wondered if the two, Jud Clark and the unknown, could be the same. But Dry River would have known Clark. That couldn’t be.

He almost ditched the car on his way back to Norada, so deeply was he engrossed in thought.

XX

On the seventh of June David and Lucy went to the seashore, went by the order of various professional gentlemen who had differed violently during the course of David’s illness, but who now suddenly agreed with an almost startling unanimity. Which unanimity was the result of careful coaching by Dick.

He saw in David’s absence his only possible chance to go back to Norada without worry to the sick man, and he felt, too, that a change, getting away from the surcharged atmosphere of the old house, would be good for both David and Lucy.

For days before they started Lucy went about in a frenzy of nervous energy, writing out menus for Minnie for a month ahead, counting and recounting David’s collars and handkerchiefs, cleaning and pressing his neckties. In the harness room in the stable Mike polished boots until his arms ached, and at the last moment with trunks already bulging, came three gift dressing-gowns for David, none of which he would leave behind.

“I declare,” Lucy protested to Dick, “I don’t know what’s come over him. Every present he’s had since he was sick he’s taking along. You’d think he was going to be shut up on a desert island.”

But Dick thought he understood. In David’s life his friends had had to take the place of wife and children; he clung to them now, in his age and weakness, and Dick knew that he had a sense of deserting them, of abandoning them after many faithful years.

So David carried with him the calendars and slippers, dressing-gowns and bed-socks which were at once the tangible evidence of their friendliness and Lucy’s despair.

Watching him, Dick was certain nothing further had come to threaten his recovery. Dick carefully inspected the mail, but no suspicious letter had arrived, and as the days went on David’s peace seemed finally re-established. He made no more references to Johns Hopkins, slept like a child, and railed almost pettishly at his restricted diet.

“When we get away from Dick, Lucy,” he would say, “we’ll have beef again, and roast pork and sausage.”

Lucy would smile absently and shake her head.

“You’ll stick to your diet, David,” she would say. “David, it’s the strangest thing about your winter underwear. I’m sure you had five suits, and now there are only three.”

Or it was socks she missed, or night-clothing. And David, inwardly chuckling, would wonder with her, knowing all the while that they had clothed some needy body.

On the night before the departure David went out for his first short walk alone, and brought Elizabeth back with him.

“I found a rose walking up the street, Lucy,” he bellowed up the stairs, “and I brought it home for the dinner table.”

Lucy came down, flushed from her final effort over the trunks, but gently hospitable.

“It’s fish night, Elizabeth,” she said. “You know Minnie’s a Catholic, so we always have fish on Friday. I hope you eat it.” She put her hand on Elizabeth’s arm and gently patted it, and thus was Elizabeth taken into the old brick house as one of its own.

Elizabeth was finding this period of her tacit engagement rather puzzling. Her people puzzled her. Even Dick did, at times. And nobody seemed anxious to make plans for the future, or even to discuss the wedding. She was a little hurt about that, remembering the excitement over Nina’s.

But what chiefly bewildered her was the seeming necessity for secrecy. Even Nina had not been told, nor Jim. She did not resent that, although it bewildered her. Her own inclination was to shout it from the house-tops. Her father had simply said: “I’ve told your mother, honey, and we’d better let it go at that, for a while. There’s no hurry. And I don’t want to lose you yet.”

But there were other things. Dick himself varied. He was always gentle and very tender, but there were times when he seemed to hold himself away from her, would seem aloof and remote, but all the time watching her almost fiercely. But after that, as though he had tried an experiment in separation and failed with it, he would catch her to him savagely and hold her there. She tried, very meekly, to meet his mood; was submissive to his passion and acquiescent to those intervals when he withdrew himself and sat or stood near her, not touching her but watching her intently.

She thought men in love were very queer and quite incomprehensible. Because he varied in other ways, too. He was boyish and gay sometimes, and again silent and almost brooding. She thought at those times that perhaps he was tired, what with David’s work and his own, and sometimes she wondered if he were still worrying about that silly story. But once or twice, after he had gone, she went upstairs and looked carefully into her mirror. Perhaps she had not looked her best that day. Girl-like, she set great value on looks in love. She wanted frightfully to be beautiful to him. She wished she could look like Beverly Carlysle, for instance.

Two days before David and Lucy’s departure he had brought her her engagement ring, a square-cut diamond set in platinum. He kissed it first and then her finger, and slipped it into place. It became a rite, done as he did it, and she had a sense of something done that could never be undone. When she looked up at him he was very pale.

“Forsaking all others, so long as we both shall live,” he said, unsteadily.

“So long as we both shall live,” she repeated.

However she had to take it off later, for Mrs. Wheeler, it developed, had very pronounced ideas of engagement rings. They were put on the day the notices were sent to the newspapers, and not before. So Elizabeth wore her ring around her neck on a white ribbon, inside her camisole, until such time as her father would consent to announce that he was about to lose her.

Thus Elizabeth found her engagement full of unexpected turns and twists, and nothing precisely as she had expected. But she accepted things as they came, being of the type around which the dramas of life are enacted, while remaining totally undramatic herself. She lived her quiet days, worried about Jim on occasion, hemmed table napkins for her linen chest, and slept at night with her ring on her finger and a sense of being wrapped in protecting love that was no longer limited to the white Wheeler house, but now extended two blocks away and around the corner to a shabby old brick building in a more or less shabby yard.

They were very gay in the old brick house that night before the departure, very noisy over the fish and David’s broiled lamb chop. Dick demanded a bottle of Lucy’s home-made wine, and even David got a little of it. They toasted the seashore, and the departed nurse, and David quoted Robert Burns at some length and in a horrible Scotch accent. Then Dick had a trick by which one read the date on one of three pennies while he was not looking, and he could tell without failing which one it was. It was most mysterious. And after dinner Dick took her into his laboratory, and while she squinted one eye and looked into the finder of his microscope he kissed the white nape of her neck.

When they left the laboratory there were patients in the waiting-room, but he held her in his arms in the office for a moment or two, very quietly, and because the door was thin they made a sort of game of it, and pretended she was a patient.

“How did you sleep last night?” he said, in a highly professional and very distinct voice. Then he kissed her.

“Very badly, doctor,” she said, also very clearly, and whispered, “I lay awake and thought about you, dear.”

“I’d better give you this sleeping powder.” Oh, frightfully professional, but the powder turned out to be another kiss. It was a wonderful game.

When she slipped out into the hall she had to stop and smooth her hair, before she went to Lucy’s tidy sitting-room.

XXI

It was Jim Wheeler’s turn to take up the shuttle. A girl met in some casual fashion; his own youth and the urge of it, perhaps the unconscious family indulgence of an only son – and Jim wove his bit and passed on.

There had been mild contention in the Wheeler family during all the spring. Looking out from his quiet windows Walter Wheeler saw the young world going by a-wheel, and going fast. Much that legitimately belonged to it, and much that did not in the laxness of the new code, he laid to the automobile. And doggedly he refused to buy one.

“We can always get a taxicab,” was his imperturbable answer to Jim. “I pay pretty good-sized taxi bills without unpleasant discussion. I know you pretty well too, Jim. Better than you know yourself. And if you had a car, you’d try your best to break your neck in it.”

Now and then Jim got a car, however. Sometimes he rented one, sometimes he cajoled Nina into lending him hers.

“A fellow looks a fool without one,” he would say to her. “Girls expect to be taken out. It’s part of the game.”

And Nina, always reached by that argument of how things looked, now and then reluctantly acquiesced. But a night or two after David and Lucy had started for the seashore Nina came in like a whirlwind, and routed the family peace immediately.

“Father,” she said, “you just must speak to Jim. He’s taken our car twice at night without asking for it, and last night he broke a spring. Les is simply crazy.”

“Taken your car!” Mrs. Wheeler exclaimed.

“Yes. I hate telling on him, but I spoke to him after the first time, and he did it anyhow.”

Mrs. Wheeler glanced at her husband uneasily. She often felt he was too severe with Jim.

“Don’t worry,” he said grimly. “He’ll not do it again.”

“If we only had a car of our own ” Mrs. Wheeler protested.

“You know what I think about that, mother. I’m not going to have him joy-riding over the country, breaking his neck and getting into trouble. I’ve seen him driving Wallace Sayre’s car, and he drives like a fool or a madman.”

It was an old dispute and a bitter one. Mr. Wheeler got up, whistled for the dog, and went out. His wife turned on Nina.

“I wish you wouldn’t bring these things to your father, Nina,” she said. “He’s been very nervous lately, and he isn’t always fair to Jim.”

“Well, it’s time Jim was fair to Leslie,” Nina said, with family frankness. “I’ll tell you something, mother. Jim has a girl somewhere, in town probably. He takes her driving. I found a glove in the car. And he must be crazy about her, or he’d never do what he’s done.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“No. Somebody’s he’s ashamed of, probably, or he wouldn’t be so clandestine about it.”

“Nina!”

“Well, it looks like it. Jim’s a man, mother. He’s not a little boy. He’ll go through his shady period, like the rest.”

That night it was Mrs. Wheeler’s turn to lie awake. Again and again she went over Nina’s words, and her troubled mind found a basis in fact for them. Jim had been getting money from her, to supplement his small salary; he had been going out a great deal at night, and returning very late; once or twice, in the morning, he had looked ill and his eyes had been bloodshot, as though he had been drinking.

Anxiety gripped her. There were so many temptations for young men, so many who waited to waylay them. A girl. Not a good girl, perhaps.

She raised herself on her elbow and looked at her sleeping husband. Men were like that; they begot children and then forgot them. They never looked ahead or worried. They were taken up with business, and always they forgot that once they too had been young and liable to temptation.

She got up, some time later, and tiptoed to the door of Jim’s room. Inside she could hear his heavy, regular breathing. Her boy. Her only son.

She went back and crawled carefully into the bed.

There was an acrimonious argument between Jim and his father the next morning, and Jim slammed out of the house, leaving chaos behind him. It was then that Elizabeth learned that her father was going away. He said:

“Maybe I’m wrong, mother. I don’t know. Perhaps, when I come back, I’ll look around for a car. I don’t want him driven to doing underhand things.”

“Are you going away?” Elizabeth asked, surprised.

It appeared that he was. More than that, that he was going West with Dick. It was all arranged and nobody had told her anything about it.

She was hurt and a trifle offended, and she cried a little about it. Yet, as Dick explained to her later that day, it was simple enough. Her father needed a rest, and besides, it was right that he should know all about Dick’s life before he came to Haverly.

“He’s going to make me a present of something highly valuable, you know.”

“But it looks as though he didn’t trust you!”

“He’s being very polite about it; but, of course, in his eyes I’m a common thief, stealing – “

She would not let him go on.

A certain immaturity, the blind confidence of youth in those it loves, explains Elizabeth’s docility at that time. But underneath her submission that day was a growing uneasiness, fiercely suppressed. Buried deep, the battle between absolute trust and fear was beginning, a battle which was so rapidly to mature her.

Nina, shrewd and suspicious, sensed something of nervous strain in her when she came in, later that day, to borrow a hat.

“Look here, Elizabeth,” she began, “I want to talk to you. Are you going to live in this – this hole all your life?”

“Hole nothing,” Elizabeth said, hotly. “Really, Nina, I do think you might be more careful of what you say.”

“Oh, it’s a dear old hole,” Nina said negligently. “But hole it is, nevertheless. Why in the world mother don’t manage her servants – but no matter about that now. Elizabeth, there’s a lot of talk about you and Dick Livingstone, and it makes me furious. When I think that you can have Wallie Sayre by lifting your finger – “

“And that I don’t intend to lift my finger,” Elizabeth interrupted.

“Then you’re a fool. And it is Dick Livingstone !”

“It is, Nina.”

Nina’s ambitious soul was harrowed.

“That stodgy old house,” she said, “and two old people! A general house-work girl, and you cooking on her Thursdays out! I wish you joy of it.”

“I wonder,” Elizabeth said calmly, “whether it ever occurs to you that I may put love above houses and servants? Or that my life is my own, to live exactly as I please? Because that is what I intend to do.”

Nina rose angrily.

“Thanks,” she said. “I wish you joy of it.” And went out, slamming the door behind her.

Then, with only a day or so remaining before Dick’s departure, and Jim’s hand already reaching for the shuttle, Elizabeth found herself the object of certain unmistakable advances from Mrs. Sayre herself, and that at a rose luncheon at the house on the hill.

The talk about Dick and Elizabeth had been slow in reaching the house on the hill. When it came, via a little group on the terrace after the luncheon, Mrs. Sayre was upset and angry and inclined to blame Wallie. Everything that he wanted had come to him, all his life, and he did not know how to go after things. He had sat by, and let this shabby-genteel doctor, years older than the girl, walk away with her.

Not that she gave up entirely. She knew the town, and its tendency toward over-statement. And so she made a desperate attempt, that afternoon, to tempt Elizabeth. She took her through the greenhouses, and then through the upper floors of the house. She showed her pictures of their boat at Miami, and of the house at Marblehead. Elizabeth was politely interested and completely unresponsive.

“When you think,” Mrs. Sayre said at last, “that Wallie will have to assume a great many burdens one of these days, you can understand how anxious I am to have him marry the right sort of girl.”

She thought Elizabeth flushed slightly.
“I am sure he will, Mrs. Sayre.”

Mrs. Sayre tried a new direction.

“He will have all I have, my dear, and it is a great responsibility. Used properly, money can be an agent of great good. Wallie’s wife can be a power, if she so chooses. She can look after the poor. I have a long list of pensioners, but I am too old to add personal service.”

“That would be wonderful,” Elizabeth said gravely. For a moment she wished Dick were rich. There was so much to be done with money, and how well he would know how to do it. She was thoughtful on the way downstairs, and Mrs. Sayre felt some small satisfaction. Now if Wallie would only do his part –

It was that night that Jim brought the tragedy on the Wheeler house that was to lie heavy on it for many a day.

There had been a little dinner, one of those small informal affairs where Mrs. Wheeler, having found in the market the first of the broiling chickens and some fine green peas, bought them first and then sat down to the telephone to invite her friends. Mr. Oglethorpe, the clergyman, and his wife accepted cheerfully; Harrison Miller, resignedly. Then Mrs. Wheeler drew a long, resolute breath and invited Mrs. Sayre. When that lady accepted with alacrity Mrs. Wheeler hastily revised her menu, telephoned the florist for flowers, and spent a long half-hour with Annie over plates and finger bowls.

Jim was not coming home, and Elizabeth was dining with Nina. Mrs. Wheeler bustled about the house contentedly. Everything was going well, after all. Before long there would be a car, and Jim would spend more time at home. Nina and Leslie were happy again. And Elizabeth – not a good match, perhaps, but a marriage for love, if ever there was one.

She sat at the foot of her table that night, rather too watchful of Annie, but supremely content. She had herself scoured the loving cup to the last degree of brightness and it stood, full of flowers, in the center of the cloth.

At Nina’s was a smaller but similar group. All over the village at that time in the evening were similar groups, gathered around flowers and candles; neatly served, cheerful and undramatic groups, with the house doors closed and dogs waiting patiently outside in the long spring twilight.

Elizabeth was watching Nina. Just so, she was deciding, would she some day preside at her own board. Perhaps before so very long, too. A little separation, letters to watch for and answer, and then –

The telephone rang, and Leslie answered it. He did not come back; instead they heard the house door close, and soon after the rumble of the car as it left the garage. It stopped at the door, and Leslie came in.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I guess Elizabeth will have to go home. You’d better come along, Nina.”

“What is it? Is somebody sick ” Elizabeth gasped.

“Jim’s been in an automobile accident. Steady now, Elizabeth! He’s hurt, but he’s going to be all right.”

The Wheeler house, when they got there, was brightly lighted. Annie was crying in the hall, and in the living-room Mrs. Sayre stood alone, a strange figure in a gaudy dress, but with her face strong and calm.

“They’ve gone to the hospital in my car,” she said. “They’ll be there now any minute, and Mr. Oglethorpe will telephone at once. You are to wait before starting in.”

They all knew what that meant. It might be too late to start in. Nina was crying hysterically, but Elizabeth could not cry. She stood dry-eyed by the telephone, listening to Mrs. Sayre and Leslie, but hardly hearing them. They had got Dick Livingstone and he had gone on in. Mrs. Sayre was afraid it had been one of Wallie’s cars. She had begged Wallie to tell Jim to be careful in it. It had too much speed.

The telephone rang and Leslie took the receiver and pushed Elizabeth gently aside. He listened for a moment.

“Very well,” he said. Then he hung up and stood still before he turned around:

“It isn’t very good news,” he said. “I wish I could – Elizabeth!”

Elizabeth had crumpled up in a small heap on the floor.

All through the long night that followed, with the movement of feet through the halls, with her mother’s door closing and the ghastly silence that followed it, with the dawn that came through the windows, the dawn that to Jim meant not a new day, but a new life beyond their living touch, all through the night Elizabeth was aware of two figures that came and went. One was Dick, quiet, tender and watchful. And one was of a heavy woman in a gaudy dress, her face old and weary in the morning light, who tended her with gentle hands.

She fell asleep as the light was brightening in the East, with Dick holding her hands and kneeling on the floor beside her bed.

It was not until the next day that they knew that Jim had not been alone. A girl who was with him had been pinned under the car and had died instantly.

Jim had woven his bit in the pattern and passed on. The girl was negligible; she was, she had been. That was all. But Jim’s death added the last element to the impending catastrophe. It sent Dick West alone.

XXII

For several days after his visit to the Livingstone ranch Louis Bassett made no move to go to the cabin. He wandered around the town, made promiscuous acquaintances and led up, in careful conversations with such older residents as he could find, to the Clark and Livingstone families. Of the latter he learned nothing; of the former not much that he had not known before.

One day he happened on a short, heavy-set man, the sheriff, who had lost his office on the strength of Jud Clark’s escape, and had now recovered it. Bassett had brought some whisky with him, and on the promise of a drink lured Wilkins to his room. Over his glass the sheriff talked.

“All this newspaper stuff lately about Jud Clark being alive is dead wrong,” he declared, irritably. “Maggie Donaldson was crazy. You can ask the people here about her. They all know it. Those newspaper fellows descended on us here with a tooth-brush apiece and a suitcase full of liquor, and thought they’d get something. Seemed to think we’d hold out on them unless we got our skins full. But there isn’t anything to hold out. Jud Clark’s dead. That’s all.”

“Sure he’s dead,” Bassett agreed, amiably. “You found his horse, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Dead. And when you find a man’s horse dead in the mountains in a blizzard, you don’t need any more evidence. It was five months before you could see a trail up the Goat that winter.”

Bassett nodded, rose and poured out another drink.

“I suppose,” he observed casually, “that even if Clark turned up now, it would be hard to convict him, wouldn’t it?”

The 8herlff considered that, holding up his glass.

“Well, yes and no,” he said. “It was circumstantial evidence, mostly. Nobody saw it done. The worst thing against him was his running off.”

“How about witnesses?”

“Nobody actually saw it done. John Donaldson came the nearest, and he’s dead. Lucas’s wife was still alive, the last I heard, and I reckon the valet is floating around somewhere.”

“I suppose if he did turn up you’d make a try for it.” Bassett stared at the end of his cigar.

“We’d make a try for it, all right,” Wilkins said somberly. “There are some folks in this county still giving me the laugh over that case.”

The next day Bassett hired a quiet horse, rolled in his raincoat two days’ supply of food, strapped it to the cantle of his saddle, and rode into the mountains. He had not ridden for years, and at the end of the first hour he began to realize that he was in for a bad time. By noon he was so sore that he could hardly get out of the saddle, and so stiff that once out, he could barely get back again. All morning the horse had climbed, twisting back and forth on a narrow canyon trail, grunting occasionally, as is the way of a horse on a steep grade. All morning they bad followed a roaring mountain stream, descending in small cataracts from the ice fields far above. And all morning Bassett had been mentally following that trail as it had been ridden ten years ago by a boy maddened with fear and drink, who drove his horse forward through the night and the blizzard, with no objective and no hope.

He found it practically impossible to connect this frenzied fugitive with the quiet man in his office chair at Haverly, the man who was or was not Judson Clark. He lay on a bank at noon and faced the situation squarely, while his horse, hobbled, grazed with grotesque little forward jumps in an upland meadow. Either Dick Livingstone was Clark, or he was the unknown occasional visitor at the Livingstone Ranch. If he were Clark, and if that could be proved, there were two courses open to Bassett. He could denounce him to the authorities and then spring the big story of his career. Or he could let things stand. From a professional standpoint the first course attracted him, as a man he began to hate it. The last few days had shed a new light on Judson Clark. He had been immensely popular; there were men in the town who told about trying to save him from himself. He had been extravagant, but he had also been generous. He had been “a good kid,” until liberty and money got hold of him. There had been more than one man in the sheriff’s posse who hadn’t wanted to find him.

He was tempted to turn back. The mountains surrounded him, somber and majestically still. They made him feel infinitely small and rather impertinent, as though he had come to penetrate the secrets they never yielded. He had almost to fight a conviction that they were hostile.

After an hour or so he determined to go on. Let them throw him over a gorge if they so determined. He got up, grunting, and leading the horse beside a boulder, climbed painfully into the saddle. To relieve his depression he addressed the horse:

“It would be easier on both of us if you were two feet narrower in the beam, old dear,” he said.

Nevertheless, he made good time. By six o’clock he knew that he must have made thirty odd miles, and that he must be near the cabin. Also that it was going to be bitterly cold that night, under the snow fields, and that he had brought no wood axe. The deep valley was purple with twilight by seven, and he could scarcely see the rough-drawn trail map he had been following. And the trail grew increasingly bad. For the last mile or two the horse took its own way.

It wandered on, through fords and out of them, under the low-growing branches of scrub pine, brushing his bruised legs against rocks. He had definitely decided that he had missed the cabin when the horse turned off the trail, and he saw it.

It was built of rough logs, the chinks once closed with mud which had fallen away. The door stood open, and his entrance into its darkness was followed by the scurrying of many little feet. Bassett unstrapped his raincoat from the saddle with fingers numb with cold, and flung it to the ground. He uncinched and removed the heavy saddle, hobbled his horse and removed the bridle, and turned him loose with a slap on the flank.

“For the love of Mike, don’t go far, old man,” he besought him. And was startled by the sound of his own voice.

By the light of his candle lantern the prospects were extremely poor. The fir branches in the double-berthed bunk were dry and useless, the floor was crumbling under his feet, and the roof of the lean-to had fallen in and crushed the rusty stove. In the cabin itself some one had recently placed a large flat stone in a corner for a fireplace, with two slabs to back it, and above it had broken out a corner of the roof as a chimney. Bassett thought he saw the handwork of some enterprising journalist, and smiled grimly.

He set to work with the resource of a man who had learned to take what came, threw the dry bedding onto the slab and set a match to it, brought in portions of the lean-to roof for further supply for the fire, opened a can of tomatoes and set it on the edge of the hearth to heat, and sliced bacon into his diminutive frying-pan.

It was too late for any examination that night. He ate his supper from the rough table, drawing up to it a broken chair, and afterwards brought in more wood for his fire. Then, with a lighted cigar, and with his boots steaming on the hearth, he sat in front of the blaze and fell into deep study.

He was aching in every muscle when he finally stretched out on the bare boards of the lower bunk. While he slept small furry noses appeared in the openings in the broken floor, to be followed by little bodies that moved cautiously out into the open. He roused once and peered over the edge of the bunk. Several field mice were basking in front of the dying embers of the fire, and two were sitting on his boots. He grinned at them and lay back again, but he found himself fully awake and very uncomfortable. He lay there, contemplating his own folly, and demanding of himself almost fiercely what he had expected to get out of all this effort and misery. For ten days or so men had come here. Wilkins had come, for one, and there had been others. And had found nothing, and had gone away. And now he was there, the end of the procession, to look for God knows what.

He pulled the raincoat up around his shoulders, and lay back stiffly. Then – he was not an imaginative man – he began to feel that eyes were staring at him, furtive, hidden eyes, intently watching him.

Without moving he began to rake the cabin with his eyes, wall to wall, corner to corner. He turned, cautiously, and glanced at the door into the lean-to. It gaped, cavernous and empty. But the sense of being watched persisted, and when he looked at the floor the field mice had disappeared.

He began gradually to see more clearly as his eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness, and he felt, too, that he could almost locate the direction of the menace. For as a menace he found himself considering it. It was the broken, windowless East wall, opposite the bunk.

After a time the thing became intolerable. He reached for his revolver, and getting quickly out of the bunk, ran to the doorway and threw open the door, to find himself peering into a blackness like a wall, and to hear a hasty crunching of the underbrush that sounded like some animal in full flight.

With the sounds, and his own movement, the terror died. The cold night air on his face, the feel of the pine needles under his stockinged feet, brought him back to sense and normality. Some creature of the wilderness, a deer or a bear, perhaps, had been moving stealthily outside the cabin, and it was sound he had heard, not a gaze he had felt. He was rather cynically amused at himself. He went back into the cabin, closed the door, and stooped to turn his boots over before the fire.

It was while he was stooping that he heard a horse galloping off along the trail.

He did not go to sleep again. Now and then he considered the possibility of its having been his own animal, somehow freed of the rope and frightened by the same thing that had frightened him. But when with the first light he went outside, his horse, securely hobbled, was grazing on the scant pasture not far away.

Before he cooked his breakfast he made a minute examination of the ground beneath the East wall, but the earth was hard, and a broken branch or two might have been caused by his horse. He had no skill in woodcraft, and in the broad day his alarm seemed almost absurd. Some free horse on the range had probably wandered into the vicinity of the cabin, and had made off again on a trot. Nevertheless, he made up his mind not to remain over another night, but to look about after breakfast, and then to start down again.

He worked on his boots, dry and hard after yesterday’s wetting, fried his bacon and dropped some crackers into the sizzling fat, and ate quickly. After that he went out to the trail and inspected it. He had an idea that range horses were mostly unshod, and that perhaps the trail would reveal something. But it was unused and overgrown. Not until he had gone some distance did he find anything. Then in a small bare spot he found in the dust the imprints of a horse’s shoes, turned down the trail up which he had come.

Even then he was slow to read into the incident anything that related to himself or to his errand. He went over the various contingencies of the trail: a ranger, on his way to town; a forest fire somewhere; a belated hound from the newspaper pack. He was convinced now that human eyes had watched him for some time through the log wall the night before, but he could not connect them with the business in hand.

He set resolutely about his business, which was to turn up, somehow, some way, a proof of the truth of Maggie Donaldson’s dying statement. To begin with then he accepted that statement, to find where it would lead him, and it led him, eventually, to the broken-down stove under the fallen roof of the lean-to.

He deliberately set himself to work, at first, to reconstruct the life in the cabin. Jud would have had the lower bunk, David the upper. The skeleton of a cot bed in the lean-to would have been Maggie’s. But none of them yielded anything.

Very well. Having accepted that they lived here, it was from here that the escape was made. They would have started the moment the snow was melted enough to let them get out, and they would have taken, not the trail toward the town, but some other and circuitous route toward the railroad. But there had been things to do before they left. They would have cleared the cabin of every trace of occupancy; the tin cans, Clark’s clothing, such bedding as they could not carry. The cans must have been a problem; the clothes, of course, could have been burned. But there were things, like buttons, that did not burn easily. Clark’s watch, if he wore one, his cuff links. Buried?

It occurred to him that they might have disposed of some of the unburnable articles under the floor, and he lifted a rough board or two. But to pursue the search systematically he would have needed a pickaxe, and reluctantly he gave it up and turned his attention to the lean-to and the buried stove.

The stove lay in a shallow pit, filled with ancient ashes and crumbled bits of wood from the roof. It lay on its side, its sheet-iron sides collapsed, its long chimney disintegrated. He was in a heavy sweat before he had uncovered it and was able to remove it from its bed of ashes and pine needles. This done, he brought his candle-lantern and settled himself cross-legged on the ground.

His first casual inspection of the ashes revealed nothing. He set to work more carefully then, picking them up by handfuls, examining and discarding. Within ten minutes he had in a pile beside him some burned and blackened metal buttons, the eyelets and a piece of leather from a shoe, and the almost unrecognizable nib of a fountain pen.

He sat with them in the palm of his hand. Taken alone, each one was insignificant, proved nothing whatever. Taken all together, they assumed vast proportions, became convincing, became evidence.

Late that night he descended stiffly at the livery stable, and turned his weary horse over to a stableman.

“Looks dead beat,” said the stableman, eyeing the animal.

“He’s got nothing on me,” Bassett responded cheerfully. “Better give him a hot bath and put him to bed. That’s what I’m going to do.”

He walked back to the hotel, glad to stretch his aching muscles. The lobby was empty, and behind the desk the night clerk was waiting for the midnight train. Bassett was wide awake by that time, and he went back to the desk and lounged against it.

“You look as though you’d struck oil,” said the night clerk.

“Oil! I’ll tell you what I have struck. I’ve struck a livery stable saddle two million times in the last two days.”

The clerk grinned, and Bassett idly pulled the register toward him.

“J. Smith, Minneapolis,” he read. Then he stopped and stared. Richard Livingstone was registered on the next line above.