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.

XXIII

Dick had found it hard to leave Elizabeth, for she clung to him in her
grief with childish wistfulness. He found, too, that her family depended
on him rather than on Leslie Ward for moral support. It was to him that
Walter Wheeler looked for assurance that the father had had no indirect
responsibility for the son's death; it was to him that Jim's mother,
lying gray-faced and listless in her bed or on her couch, brought her
anxious questionings. Had Jim suffered? Could they have avoided it? And
an insistent demand to know who and what had been the girl who was with
him.

In spite of his own feeling that he would have to go to Norada quickly,
before David became impatient over his exile, Dick took a few hours to
find the answer to that question. But when he found it he could not
tell them. The girl had been a dweller in the shady byways of life, had
played her small unmoral part and gone on, perhaps to some place where
men were kinder and less urgent. Dick did not judge her. He saw her, as
her kind had been through all time, storm centers of the social world,
passively and unconsciously blighting, at once the hunters and the prey.

He secured her former address from the police, a three-story brick
rooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather uncomfortably
for the mistress of the place to see him. She came at last, a big woman,
vast and shapeless and with an amiable loose smile, and she came in with
the light step of the overfleshed, only to pause in the doorway and to
stare at him.

"My God!" she said. "I thought you were dead!"

"I'm afraid you're mistaking me for some one else, aren't you?"

She looked at him carefully.

"I'd have sworn--" she muttered, and turning to the button inside the
door she switched on the light. Then she surveyed him again.

"What's your name?"

"Livingstone. Doctor Livingstone. I called--"

"Is that for me, or for the police?"

"Now see here," he said pleasantly. "I don't know who you are mistaking
me for, and I'm not hiding from the police. Here's my card, and I
have come from the family of a young man named Wheeler, who was killed
recently in an automobile accident."

She took the card and read it, and then resumed her intent scrutiny of
him.

"Well, you fooled me all right," she said at last. "I thought you
were--well, never mind that. What about this Wheeler family? Are they
going to settle with the undertaker? Because I tell you flat, I can't
and won't. She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes won't bring over
seventy-five or a hundred dollars."

As he left he was aware that she stood in the doorway looking after
him. He drove home slowly in the car, and on the way he made up a kindly
story to tell the family. He could not let them know that Jim had been
seeking love in the byways of life. And that night he mailed a check in
payment of the undertaker's bill, carefully leaving the stub empty.

On the third day after Jim's funeral he started for Norada. An interne
from a local hospital, having newly finished his service there, had
agreed to take over his work for a time. But Dick was faintly jealous
when he installed Doctor Reynolds in his office, and turned him over to
a mystified Minnie to look after.

"Is he going to sleep in your bed?" she demanded belligerently.

She was only partially mollified when she found Doctor Reynolds was to
have the spare room. She did not like the way things were going, she
confided to Mike. Why wasn't she to let on to Mrs. Crosby that Doctor
Dick had gone away? Or to the old doctor? Both of them away, and that
little upstart in the office ready to steal their patients and hang out
his own sign the moment they got back!

Unused to duplicity as he was, Dick found himself floundering along an
extremely crooked path. He wrote a half dozen pleasant, non-committal
letters to David and Lucy, spending an inordinate time on them, and
gave them to Walter Wheeler to mail at stated intervals. But his chief
difficulty was with Elizabeth. Perhaps he would have told her; there
were times when he had to fight his desire to have her share his anxiety
as well as know the truth about him. But she was already carrying the
burden of Jim's tragedy, and her father, too, was insistent that she be
kept in ignorance.

"Until she can have the whole thing," he said, with the new heaviness
which had crept into his voice.

Beside that real trouble Dick's looked dim and nebulous. Other things
could be set right; there was always a fighting chance. It was only
death that was final.

Elizabeth went to the station to see him off, a small slim thing in
a black frock, with eyes that persistently sought his face, and a
determined smile. He pulled her arm through his, so he might hold her
hand, and when he found that she was wearing her ring he drew her even
closer, with a wave of passionate possession.

"You are mine. My little girl."

"I am yours. For ever and ever."

But they assumed a certain lightness after that, each to cheer the
other. As when she asserted that she was sure she would always know the
moment he stopped thinking about her, and he stopped, with any number of
people about, and said:

"That's simply terrible! Suppose, when we are married, my mind turns on
such a mundane thing as beefsteak and onions? Will you simply walk out
on me?"

He stood on the lowest step of the train until her figure was lost in
the darkness, and the porter expostulated. He was, that night, a little
drunk with love, and he did not read the note she had thrust into his
hand at the last moment until he was safely in his berth, his long
figure stretched diagonally to find the length it needed.

"Darling, darling Dick," she had written. "I wonder so often how you can
care for me, or what I have done to deserve you. And I cannot write how
I feel, just as I cannot say it. But, Dick dear, I have such a terrible
fear of losing you, and you are my life now. You will be careful and not
run any risks, won't you? And just remember this always. Wherever you
are and wherever I am, I am thinking of you and waiting for you."

He read it three times, until he knew it by heart, and he slept with it
in the pocket of his pajama coat.

Three days later he reached Norada, and registered at the Commercial
Hotel. The town itself conveyed nothing to him. He found it totally
unfamiliar, and for its part the town passed him by without a glance.
A new field had come in, twenty miles from the old one, and had brought
with it a fresh influx of prospectors, riggers, and lease buyers. The
hotel was crowded.

That was his first disappointment. He had been nursing the hope that
surroundings which he must once have known well would assist him in
finding himself. That was the theory, he knew. He stood at the window of
his hotel room, with its angular furniture and the Gideon Bible, and for
the first time he realized the difficulty of what he had set out to do.
Had he been able to take David into his confidence he would have had the
names of one or two men to go to, but as things were he had nothing.

The almost morbid shrinking he felt from exposing his condition was
increased, rather than diminished, in the new surroundings. He would,
of course, go to the ranch at Dry River, and begin his inquiries from
there, but not until now had he realized what that would mean; his
recognition by people he could not remember, the questions he could not
answer.

He knew the letter to David from beginning to end, but he got it out and
read it again. Who was this Bassett, and what mischief was he up to? Why
should he himself be got out of town quickly and the warning burned? Who
was "G"? And why wouldn't the simplest thing be to locate this Bassett
himself?

The more he considered that the more obvious it seemed as a solution,
provided of course he could locate the man. Whether Bassett were
friendly or inimical, he was convinced that he knew or was finding out
something concerning himself which David was keeping from him.

He was relieved when he went down to the desk to find that his man was
registered there, although the clerk reported him out of town. But the
very fact that only a few hours or days separated him from a solution of
the mystery heartened him.

He ate his dinner alone, unnoticed, and after dinner, in the writing
room, with its mission furniture and its traveling men copying orders,
he wrote a letter to Elizabeth. Into it he put some of the things that
lay too deep for speech when he was with her, and because he had so much
to say and therefore wrote extremely fast, a considerable portion of
it was practically illegible. Then, as though he could hurry the trains
East, he put a special delivery stamp on it.

With that off his mind, and the need of exercise after the trip
insistent, he took his hat and wandered out into the town. The main
street was crowded; moving picture theaters were summoning their evening
audiences with bright lights and colored posters, and automobiles lined
the curb. But here and there an Indian with braids and a Stetson hat, or
a cowpuncher from a ranch in boots and spurs reminded him that after all
this was the West, the horse and cattle country. It was still twilight,
and when he had left the main street behind him he began to have a
sense of the familiar. Surely he had stood here before, had seen the
court-house on its low hill, the row of frame houses in small gardens
just across the street. It seemed infinitely long ago, but very real.
He even remembered dimly an open place at the other side of the building
where the ranchmen tied their horses. To test himself he walked around.
Yes, it was there, but no horses stood there now, heads drooping, bridle
reins thrown loosely over the rail. Only a muddy automobile, without
lights, and a dog on guard beside it.

He spoke to the dog, and it came and sniffed at him. Then it squatted in
front of him, looking up into his face.

"Lonely, old chap, aren't you?" he said. "Well, you've got nothing on
me."

He felt a little cheered as he turned back toward the hotel. A few
encounters with the things of his youth, and perhaps the cloud would
clear away. Already the court-house had stirred some memories. And on
turning back down the hill he had another swift vision, photographically
distinct but unrelated to anything that had preceded or followed it. It
was like a few feet cut from a moving picture film.

He was riding down that street at night on a small horse, and his father
was beside him on a tall one. He looked up at his father, and he seemed
very large. The largest man in the world. And the most important.

It began and stopped there, and his endeavor to follow it further
resulted in its ultimately leaving him. It faded, became less real,
until he wondered if he had not himself conjured it. But that experience
taught him something. Things out of the past would come or they would
not come, but they could not be forced. One could not will to revive
them.

He stood at a window facing north that night, under the impression
it was east, and sent his love and an inarticulate sort of prayer to
Elizabeth, for her safety and happiness, in the general direction of the
Arctic Circle.

Bassett had not returned in the morning, and he found himself with a
day on his hands. He decided to try the experiment of visiting the
Livingstone ranch, or at least of viewing it from a safe distance, with
the hope of a repetition of last night's experience. Of all his childish
memories the ranch house, next to his father, was most distinct. When
he had at various times tried to analyze what things he recalled he had
found that what they lacked of normal memory was connection. They stood
out, like the one the night before, each complete in itself, brief, and
having no apparent relation to what had gone before or what came after.

But the ranch house had been different. The pictures were mostly
superimposed on it; it was their background. Himself standing on the
mountain looking down at it, and his father pointing to it; the tutor
who was afraid of horses, sitting at a big table in a great wood-ceiled
and wood-paneled room; a long gallery or porch along one side of the
building and rooms added on to the house so that one had to go along the
gallery to reach them; a gun-room full of guns.

When, much later, Dick was able calmly to review that day, he found his
recollection of it confused by the events that followed, but one thing
stood out as clearly as his later knowledge of the almost incredible
fact that for one entire day and for the evening of another, he had
openly appeared in Norada and had not been recognized. That fact was his
discovery that the Livingstone ranch house had no place in his memory
whatever.

He had hired a car and a driver, a driver who asserted that this was
the old Livingstone ranch house. And it bore no resemblance, not the
faintest, to the building he remembered. It did not lie where it should
have lain. The mountains were too far behind it. It was not the house.
The fields were not the proper fields. It was wrong, all wrong.

He went no closer than the highway, because it was not necessary. He
ordered the car to turn and go back, and for the first and only time he
was filled with bitter resentment against David. David had fooled him.
He sat beside the driver, his face glowering and his eyes hot, and let
his indignation burn in him like a flame.

Hours afterwards he had, of course, found excuses for David. Accepted
them, rather, as a part of the mystery which wrapped him about. But they
had no effect on the decision he made during that miserable ride back to
Norada, when he determined to see the man Bassett and get the truth out
of him if he had to choke it out.

XXIV

Bassett was astounded when he saw Dick's signature on the hotel
register. It destroyed, in one line, every theory he held. That Judson
Clark should return to Norada after his flight was incredible. Ten years
was only ten years after all. It was not a lifetime. There were men in
the town who had known Clark well.

Nevertheless for a time he held to his earlier conviction, even fought
for it. He went so far as to wonder if Clark had come back for a tardy
surrender. Men had done that before this, had carried a burden for
years, had reached the breaking point, had broken. But he dismissed
that. There had been no evidence of breaking in the young man in the
office chair. He found himself thrown back, finally, on the story of the
Wasson woman, and wondering if he would have to accept it after all.

The reaction from his certainty in the cabin to uncertainty again made
him fretful and sleepless. It was almost morning before he relaxed on
his hard hotel bed enough to sleep.

He wakened late, and telephoned down for breakfast. His confusion had
not decreased with the night, and while he got painfully out of bed and
prepared to shave and dress, his thoughts were busy. There was no doubt
in his mind that, in spite of the growth of the town, the newcomer would
be under arrest almost as soon as he made his appearance. A resemblance
that could deceive Beverly Carlysle's brother could deceive others, and
would. That he had escaped so long amazed him.

By the time he had bathed he had developed a sort of philosophic
acceptance of the new situation. There would be no exclusive story now,
no scoop. The events of the next few hours were for every man to read.
He shrugged his shoulders as, partially dressed, he carried his shaving
materials into the better light of his bedroom.

With his face partially lathered he heard a knock at the door, and sang
out a not uncheerful "Come in." It happened, then, that it was in
his mirror that he learned that his visitor was not the waiter, but
Livingstone himself. He had an instant of stunned amazement before he
turned.

"I beg your pardon," Dick said. "I was afraid you'd get out before I
saw you. My name's Livingstone, and I want to talk to you, if you don't
mind. If you like I'll come back later."

Bassett perceived two things simultaneously; that owing probably to the
lather on his face he had not been recognized, and that the face of the
man inside the door was haggard and strained.

"That's all right. Come in and sit down. I'll get this stuff off my face
and be with you in a jiffy."

But he was very deliberate in the bathroom. His astonishment grew,
rather than decreased. Clearly Livingstone had not known him. How, then,
had he known that he was in Norada? And when he recognized him, as he
would in a moment, what then? He put on his collar and tied his tie
slowly. Gregory might be the key. Gregory might have found out that he
had started for Norada and warned him. Then, if that were true, this man
was Clark after all. But if he were Clark he wouldn't be there. It was
like a kitten after its tail. It whirled in a circle and got nowhere.

The waiter had laid his breakfast and gone when he emerged from the
bathroom, and Dick was standing by the window looking out. He turned.

"I'm here, Mr. Bassett, on rather a peculiar--" He stopped and looked at
Bassett. "I see. You were in my office about a month ago, weren't you?"

"For a headache, yes." Bassett was very wary and watchful, but there was
no particular unfriendliness in his visitor's eyes.

"It never occurred to me that you might be Bassett," Dick said gravely.
"Never mind about that. Eat your breakfast. Do you mind if I talk while
you do it?"

"Will you have some coffee? I can get a glass from the bathroom. It
takes a week to get a waiter here."

"Thanks. Yes."

The feeling of unreality grew in the reporter's mind. It increased still
further when they sat opposite each other, the small table with its
Bible on the lower shelf between them, while he made a pretense at
breakfasting.

"First of all," Dick said, at last, "I was not sure I had found the
right man. You are the only Bassett in the place, however, and you're
registered from my town. So I took a chance. I suppose that headache was
not genuine."

Bassett hesitated.

"No" he said at last.

"What you really wanted to do was to see me, then?"

"In a way, yes."

"I'll ask you one more question. It may clear the air. Does this mean
anything to you? I'll tell you now that it doesn't, to me."

From his pocketbook he took the note addressed to David, and passed it
over the table. Bassett looked at him quickly and took it.

"Before you read it, I'll explain something. It was not sent to me. It
was sent to my--to Doctor David Livingstone. It happened to fall into my
hands. I've come a long way to find out what it means."

He paused, and looked the reporter straight in the eyes. "I am laying my
cards on the table, Bassett. This 'G,' whoever he is, is clearly warning
my uncle against you. I want to know what he is warning him about."

Bassett read the note carefully, and looked up.

"I suppose you know who 'G' is?"

"I do not. Do you?"

"I'll give you another name, and maybe you'll get it. A name that I
think will mean something to you. Beverly Carlysle."

"The actress?"

Bassett had an extraordinary feeling of unreality, followed by one of
doubt. Either the fellow was a very good actor, or--

"Sorry," Dick said slowly. "I don't seem to get it. I don't know that
'G' is as important as his warning. That note's a warning."

"Yes. It's a warning. And I don't think you need me to tell you what
about."

"Concerning my uncle, or myself?"

"Are you trying to put it over on me that you don't know?"

"That's what I'm trying to do," Dick said, with a sort of grave
patience.

The reporter liked courage when he saw it, and he was compelled to a
sort of reluctant admiration.

"You've got your courage with you," he observed. "How long do you
suppose it will be after you set foot on the streets of this town before
you're arrested? How do you know I won't send for the police myself?"

"I know damned well you won't," Dick said grimly. "Not before I'm
through with you. You've chosen to interest yourself in me. I suppose
you don't deny the imputation in that letter. You'll grant that I have
a right to know who and what you are, and just what you are interested
in."

"Right-o," the reporter said cheerfully, glad to get to grips; and
to stop a fencing that was getting nowhere. "I'm connected with the
Times-Republican, in your own fair city. I was in the theater the night
Gregory recognized you. Verbum sap."

"This Gregory is the 'G'?"

"Oh, quit it, Clark," Bassett said, suddenly impatient. "That letter's
the last proof I needed. Gregory wrote it after he'd seen David
Livingstone. He wouldn't have written it if he and the old man hadn't
come to an understanding. I've been to the cabin. My God, man, I've even
got the parts of your clothing that wouldn't burn! You can thank Maggie
Donaldson for that."

"Donaldson," Dick repeated. "That was it. I couldn't remember her name.
The woman in the cabin. Maggie. And Jack. Jack Donaldson."

He got up, and was apparently dizzy, for he caught at the table.

"Look here," Bassett said, "let me give you a drink. You look all in."

But Dick shook his head.

"No, thanks just the same. I'll ask you to be plain with me, Bassett. I
am--I have become engaged to a girl, and--well, I want the story. That's
all."

And, when Bassett only continued to stare at him:

"I suppose I've begun wrong end first. I forgot about how it must seem
to you. I dropped a block out of my life about ten years ago. Can't
remember it. I'm not proud of it, but it's the fact. What I'm trying to
do now is to fill in the gap. But I've got to, somehow. I owe it to the
girl."

When Bassett could apparently find nothing to say he went on:

"You say I may be arrested if I go out on the street. And you rather
more than intimate that a woman named Beverly Carlysle is mixed up in it
somehow. I take it that I knew her."

"Yes. You knew her," Bassett said slowly. At the intimation in his tone
Dick surveyed him for a moment without speaking. His face, pale before,
took on a grayish tinge.

"I wasn't--married to her?"

"No. You didn't marry her. See here, Clark, this is straight goods, is
it? You're not trying to put something over on me? Because if you are,
you needn't.  I'd about made up my mind to follow the story through for
my own satisfaction, and then quit cold on it. When a man's pulled
himself out of the mud as you have it's not my business to pull him
down. But I don't want you to pull any bunk."

Dick winced.

"Out of the mud!" he said. "No. I'm telling you the truth, Bassett. I
have some fragmentary memories, places and people, but no names, and
all of them, I imagine from my childhood. I pick up at a cabin in the
mountains, with snow around, and David Livingstone feeding me soup with
a tin spoon." He tried to smile and failed. His face twitched. "I could
stand it for myself," he said, "but I've tied another life to mine, like
a cursed fool, and now you speak of a woman, and of arrest. Arrest! For
what?"

"Suppose," Bassett said after a moment, "suppose you let that go just
now, and tell me more about this--this gap. You're a medical man. You've
probably gone into your own case pretty thoroughly. I'm accepting your
statement, you see. As a matter of fact it must be true, or you wouldn't
be here. But I've got to know what I'm doing before I lay my cards
on the table. Make it simple, if you can. I don't know your medical
jargon."

Dick did his best. The mind closed down now and then, mainly from a
shock. No, there was no injury required. He didn't think he had had an
injury. A mental shock would do it, if it were strong enough. And fear.
It was generally fear. He had never considered himself braver than the
other fellow, but no man liked to think that he had a cowardly mind.
Even if things hadn't broken as they had, he'd have come back before
he went to the length of marriage, to find out what it was he had been
afraid of. He paused then, to give Bassett a chance to tell him, but the
reporter only said: "Go on, you put your cards on the table, and then
I'll lay mine out."

Dick went on. He didn't blame Bassett. If there was something that was
in his line of work, he understood. At the same time he wanted to save
David anything unpleasant. (The word "unpleasant" startled Bassett, by
its very inadequacy.) He knew now that David had built up for him an
identity that probably did not exist, but he wanted Bassett to know that
there could never be doubt of David's high purpose and his essential
fineness.

"Whatever I was before." he finished simply, "and I'll get that from you
now, if I am any sort of a man at all it is his work."

He stood up and braced himself. It had been clear to Bassett for ten
minutes that Dick was talking against time, against the period of
revelation. He would have it, but he was mentally bracing himself
against it.

"I think," he said, "I'll have that whisky now."

Bassett poured him a small drink, and took a turn about the room while
he drank it. He was perplexed and apprehensive. Strange as the story
was, he was convinced that he had heard the truth. He had, now and then,
run across men who came back after a brief disappearance, with a cock
and bull story of forgetting who they were, and because nearly always
these men vanished at the peak of some crisis they had always been open
to suspicion. Perhaps, poor devils, they had been telling the truth
after all. So the mind shut down, eh? Closed like a grave over the
unbearable!

His own part in the threatening catastrophe began to obsess him. Without
the warning from Gregory there would have been no return to Norada, no
arrest. It had all been dead and buried, until he himself had revived
it. And a girl, too! The girl in the blue dress at the theater, of
course.

Dick put down the glass.

"I'm ready, if you are."

"Does the name of Clark recall anything to you?"

"Nothing."

"Judson Clark? Jud Clark?"

Dick passed his hand over his forehead wearily.

"I'm not sure," he said. "It sounds familiar, and then it doesn't. It
doesn't mean anything to me, if you get that. If it's a key, it doesn't
unlock. That's all. Am I Judson Clark?"

Oddly enough, Bassett found himself now seeking for hope of escape in
the very situation that had previously irritated him, in the story he
had heard at Wasson's. He considered, and said, almost violently:

"Look here, I may have made a mistake. I came out here pretty well
convinced I'd found the solution to an old mystery, and for that matter
I think I have. But there's a twist in it that isn't clear, and until
it is clear I'm not going to saddle you with an identity that may not
belong to you. You are one of two men. One of them is Judson Clark, and
I'll be honest with you; I'm pretty sure you're Clark. The other I don't
know, but I have reason to believe that he spent part of his time with
Henry Livingstone at Dry River."

"I went to the Livingstone ranch yesterday. I remember my early home.
That wasn't it. Which one of these two men will be arrested if he is
recognized?"

"Clark."

"For what?"

"I'm coming to that. I suppose you'll have to know. Another drink? No?
All right. About ten years ago, or a little less, a young chap called
Judson Clark got into trouble here, and headed into the mountains in a
blizzard. He was supposed to have frozen to death. But recently a woman
named Donaldson made a confession on her deathbed. She said that she had
helped to nurse Clark in a mountain cabin, and that with the aid of some
one unnamed he had got away."

"Then I'm Clark. I remember her, and the cabin."

There was a short silence following that admission. To Dick, it was
filled with the thought of Elizabeth, and of her relation to what he was
about to hear. Again he braced himself for what was coming.

"I suppose," he said at last, "that if I ran away I was in pretty
serious trouble. What was it?"

"We've got no absolute proof that you are Clark, remember. You don't
know, and Maggie Donaldson was considered not quite sane before she
died. I've told you there's a chance you are the other man."

"All right. What had Clark done?"

"He had shot a man."

The reporter was instantly alarmed. If Dick had been haggard before, he
was ghastly now. He got up slowly and held to the back of his chair.

"Not--murder?" he asked, with stiff lips.

"No," Bassett said quickly. "Not at all. See here, you've had about all
you can stand. Remember, we don't even know you are Clark. All I said
was--"

"I understand that. It was murder, wasn't it?"

"Well, there had been a quarrel, I understand. The law allows for that,
I think."

Dick went slowly to the window, and stood with his back to Bassett. For
a long time the room was quiet. In the street below long lines of cars
in front of the hotel denoted the luncheon hour. An Indian woman with a
child in the shawl on her back stopped in the street, looked up at Dick
and extended a beaded belt. With it still extended she continued to
stare at his white face.

"The man died, of course?" he asked at last, without turning.

"Yes. I knew him. He wasn't any great loss. It was at the Clark ranch.
I don't believe a conviction would be possible, although they would try
for one. It was circumstantial evidence."

"And I ran away?"

"Clark ran away," Bassett corrected him. "As I've told you, the
authorities here believe he is dead."

After an even longer silence Dick turned.

"I told you there was a girl. I'd like to think out some way to keep
the thing from her, before I surrender myself. If I can protect her, and
David--"

"I tell you, you don't even know you are Clark."

"All right. If I'm not, they'll know. If I am--I tell you I'm not going
through the rest of my life with a thing like that hanging over me.
Maggie Donaldson was sane enough. Why, when I look back, I know our
leaving the cabin was a flight. I'm not Henry Livingstone's son, because
he never had a son. I can tell you what the Clark ranch house looks
like." And after a pause: "Can you imagine the reverse of a dream when
you've dreamed you are guilty of something and wake up to find you are
innocent? Who was the man?"

Bassett watched him narrowly.

"His name was Lucas. Howard Lucas."

"All right. Now we have that, where does Beverly Carlysle come in?"

"Clark was infatuated with her. The man he shot was the man she had
married."

XXV

Shortly after that Dick said he would go to his room. He was still pale,
but his eyes looked bright and feverish, and Bassett went with him,
uneasily conscious that something was not quite right. Dick spoke only
once on the way.

"My head aches like the mischief," he said, and his voice was dull and
lifeless.

He did not want Bassett to go with him, but Bassett went, nevertheless.
Dick's statement, that he meant to surrender himself, had filled him
with uneasiness. He determined, following him along the hall, to keep a
close guard on him for the next few hours, but beyond that, just then,
he did not try to go. If it were humanly possible he meant to smuggle
him out of the town and take him East. But he had an uneasy conviction
that Dick was going to be ill. The mind did strange things with the
body.

Dick sat down on the edge of the bed.

"My head aches like the mischief," he repeated. "Look in that grip and
find me some tablets, will you? I'm dizzy."

He made an effort and stretched out on the bed. "Good Lord," he
muttered, "I haven't had such a headache since--"

His voice trailed off. Bassett, bending over the army kit bag in the
corner, straightened and looked around. Dick was suddenly asleep and
breathing heavily.

For a long time the reporter sat by the side of the bed, watching him
and trying to plan some course of action. He was overcome by his own
responsibility, and by the prospect of tragedy that threatened. That
Livingstone was Clark, and that he would insist on surrendering himself
when he wakened, he could no longer doubt. His mind wandered back to
that day when he had visited the old house as a patient, and from that
along the strange road they had both come since then. He reflected, not
exactly in those terms, that life, any man's life, was only one thread
in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle
the one thread was to interfere with all the others. David Livingstone,
the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed,
Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell how many others, all
threads.

He swore in a whisper.

The maid tapped at the door. He opened it an inch or so and sent her
off. In view of his new determination even the maid had become a danger.
She was the same elderly woman who looked after his own bedroom, and
she might have known Clark. Just what Providence had kept him from
recognition before this he did not know, but it could not go on
indefinitely.

After an hour or so Bassett locked the door behind him and went down to
lunch. He was not hungry, but he wanted to get out of the room, to think
without that quiet figure before him. Over the pretence of food he faced
the situation. Lying ready to his hand was the biggest story of his
career, but he could not carry it through. It was characteristic of
him that, before abandoning it, he should follow through to the end the
result of its publication. He did not believe, for instance, that
either Dick's voluntary surrender or his own disclosure of the situation
necessarily meant a conviction for murder. To convict a man of a crime
he did not know he had committed would be difficult. But, with his
customary thoroughness he followed that through also. Livingstone
acquitted was once again Clark, would be known to the world as Clark.
The new place he had so painfully made for himself would be gone. The
story would follow him, never to be lived down. And in his particular
profession confidence and respect were half the game. All that would be
gone.

Thus by gradual stages he got back to David, and he struggled for the
motive which lay behind every decisive human act. A man who followed a
course by which he had nothing to gain and everything to lose was either
a fool or was actuated by some profound unselfishness. To save a life?
But with all the resources Clark could have commanded, added to his
personal popularity, a first degree sentence would have been unlikely.
Not a life, then, but perhaps something greater than a life. A man's
soul.

It came to him, then, in a great light of comprehension, the thing David
had tried to do; to take this waster and fugitive, the slate of his mind
wiped clean by shock and illness, only his childish memories remaining,
and on it to lead him to write a new record. To take the body he had
found, and the always untouched soul, and from them to make a man.

And with that comprehension came the conviction, too, that David had
succeeded. He had indeed made a man.

He ate absently, consulting his railroad schedule and formulating the
arguments he meant to use against Dick's determination to give himself
up. He foresaw a struggle there, but he himself held one or two strong
cards--the ruthless undoing of David's work, the involving of David for
conspiring against the law. And Dick's own obligation to the girl at
home.

He was more at ease in the practical arrangements. An express went
through on the main line at midnight, and there was a local on the
branch line at eight. But the local train, the railway station, too,
were full of possible dangers. After some thought he decided to get a
car, drive down to the main line with Dick, and then send the car back.

He went out at once and made an arrangement for a car, and on returning
notified the clerk that he was going to leave, and asked to have his
bill made out. After some hesitation he said: "I'll pay three-twenty
too, while I'm at it. Friend of mine there, going with me. Yes, up to
to-night."

As he turned away he saw the short, heavy figure of Wilkins coming in.
He stood back and watched. The sheriff went to the desk, pulled the
register toward him and ran over several pages of it. Then he shoved it
away, turned and saw him.

"Been away, haven't you?" he asked.

"Yes. I took a little horseback trip into the mountains. My knees are
still not on speaking terms."

The sheriff chuckled. Then he sobered.

"Come and sit down," he said. "I'm going to watch who goes in and out of
here for a while."

Bassett followed him unwillingly to two chairs that faced the desk and
the lobby. He had the key of Dick's room in his pocket, but he knew that
if he wakened he could easily telephone and have his door unlocked.
But that was not his only anxiety. He had a sudden conviction that
the sheriff's watch was connected with Dick himself. Wilkins, from a
friendly and gregarious fellow-being, had suddenly grown to sinister
proportions in his mind.

And, as the minutes went by, with the sheriff sitting forward and
watching the lobby and staircase with intent, unblinking eyes, Bassett's
anxiety turned to fear. He found his heart leaping when the room
bells rang, and the clerk, with a glance at the annunciator, sent boys
hurrying off. His hands shook, and he felt them cold and moist. And all
the time Wilkins was holding him with a flow of unimportant chatter.

"Watching for any one in particular?" he managed, after five minutes or
so.

"Yes. I'll tell you about it as soon as--Bill! Is Alex outside?"

Bill stopped in front of them, and nodded.

"All right. Now get this--I want everything decent and in order. No
excitement. I'll come out behind him, and you and Bill stand by. Outside
I'll speak to him, and when we walk off, just fall in behind. But keep
close."

Bill wandered off, to take up a stand of extreme nonchalance inside the
entrance. When Wilkins turned to him again Bassett had had a moment to
adjust himself, and more or less to plan his own campaign.

"Somebody's out of luck," he commented. "And speaking of being out of
luck, I've got a sick man on my hands. Friend of mine from home. We've
got to catch the midnight, too."

"Too bad," Wilkins commented rather absently. Then, perhaps feeling that
he had not shown proper interest, "Tell you what I'll do. I've got some
business on hand now, but it'll be cleared up one way or another pretty
soon. I'll bring my car around and take him to the station. These hacks
are the limit to ride in."

The disaster to his plans thus threatened steadied the reporter, and he
managed to keep his face impassive.

"Thanks," he said. "I'll let you know if he's able to travel. Is
this--is this business you're on confidential?"

"Well, it is and it isn't. I've talked some to you, and as you're
leaving anyhow--it's the Jud Clark case again."

"Sort of hysteria, I suppose. He'll be seen all over the country for the
next six months."

"Yes. But I never saw a hysterical Indian. Well, a little while ago an
Indian woman named Lizzie Lazarus blew into my office. She's a smart
woman. Her husband was a breed, dairy hand on the Clark ranch for years.
Lizzie was the first Indian woman in these parts to go to school, and
besides being smart, she's got Indian sight. You know these Indians.
When they aren't blind with trachoma they can see further and better
than a telescope."

Bassett made an effort.

"What's that got to do with Jud Clark?" he asked.

"Well, she blew in. You know there was a reward out for him, and I guess
it still stands. I'll have to look it up, for if Maggie Donaldson wasn't
crazy some one will turn him up some day, probably. Well, Lizzie blew
in, and she said she'd seen Jud Clark. Saw him standing at a second
story window of this hotel. Can you beat that?"

"Not for pure invention. Hardly."

"That's what I said at first. But I don't know. In some ways it would
be like him. He wouldn't mind coming back and giving us the laugh, if
he thought he could get away with it. He didn't know fear. Only time he
ever showed funk was when he beat it after the shooting, and then he was
full of hootch, and on the edge of D.T.'s."

"A man doesn't play jokes with the hangman's rope," Bassett commented,
dryly. He looked at his watch and rose. "It's a good story, but I
wouldn't wear out any trouser-seats sitting here watching for him. If
he's living he's taken pretty good care for ten years not to put his
head in the noose; and I'd remember this, too. Wherever he is, if he is
anywhere, he's probably so changed his appearance that Telescope Lizzie
wouldn't know him. Or you either."

"Probably," the sheriff said, comfortably. "Still I'm not taking any
chances. I'm up for reelection this fall, and that Donaldson woman's
story nearly queered me. I've got a fellow at the railroad station, just
for luck."

Bassett went up the stairs and along the corridor, deep in dejected
thought. The trap of his own making was closing, and his active mind was
busy with schemes for getting Dick away before it shut entirely.

It might be better, in one way, to keep Livingstone there in his room
until the alarm blew over. On the other hand, Livingstone himself had
to be dealt with, and that he would remain quiescent under the
circumstances was unlikely. The motor to the main line seemed to be the
best thing. True, he would have first to get Livingstone to agree to go.
That done, and he did not underestimate its difficulty, there was the
question of getting him out of the hotel, now that the alarm had been
given.

When he found Dick still sleeping he made a careful survey of the second
floor. There was a second staircase, but investigation showed that it
led into the kitchens. He decided finally on a fire-escape from a rear
hall window, which led into a courtyard littered with the untidy rubbish
of an overcrowded and undermanned hotel, and where now two or three
saddled horses waited while their riders ate within.

When he had made certain that he was not observed he unlocked and opened
the window, and removed the wire screen. There was a red fire-exit lamp
in the ceiling nearby, but he could not reach it, nor could he find any
wall switch. Nevertheless he knew by that time that through the window
lay Dick's only chance of escape. He cleared the grating of a broken box
and an empty flower pot, stood the screen outside the wall, and then,
still unobserved, made his way back to his own bedroom and packed his
belongings.

Dick was still sleeping, stretched on his bed, when he returned to
three-twenty. And here Bassett's careful plans began to go awry, for
Dick's body was twitching, and his face was pale and covered with a cold
sweat. From wondering how they could get away, Bassett began to wonder
whether they would get away at all. The sleep was more like a stupor
than sleep. He sat down by the bed, closer to sheer fright than he had
ever been before, and wretched with the miserable knowledge of his own
responsibility.

As the afternoon wore on, it became increasingly evident that somehow or
other he must get a doctor. He turned the subject over in his mind, pro
and con. If he could get a new man, one who did not remember Jud Clark,
it might do. But he hesitated until, at seven, Dick opened his eyes and
clearly did not know him. Then he knew that the matter was out of his
hands, and that from now on whatever it was that controlled the affairs
of men, David's God or his own vague Providence, was in charge.

He got his hat and went out, and down the stairs again. Wilkins had
disappeared, but Bill still stood by the entrance, watching the crowd
that drifted in and out. In his state of tension he felt that the hotel
clerk's eyes were suspicious as he retained the two rooms for another
day, and that Bill watched him out with more than casual interest.
Even the matter of cancelling the order for the car loomed large and
suspicion-breeding before him, but he accomplished it, and then set out
to find medical assistance.

There, however, chance favored him. The first doctor's sign led him to a
young man, new to the town, and obviously at leisure. Not that he found
that out at once. He invented a condition for himself, as he had done
once before, got a prescription and paid for it, learned what he wanted,
and then mentioned Dick. He was careful to emphasize his name and
profession, and his standing "back home."

"I'll admit he's got me worried," he finished. "He saw me registered and
came to my room this morning to see me, and got sick there. That is, he
said he had a violent headache and was dizzy. I got him to his room and
on the bed, and he's been sleeping ever since. He looks pretty sick to
me."

He was conscious of Bill's eyes on him as they went through the lobby
again, but he realized now that they were unsuspicious. Bassett himself
was in a hot sweat. He stopped outside the room and mopped his face.

"Look kind of shot up yourself," the doctor commented. "Watch this sun
out here. Because it's dry here you Eastern people don't notice the heat
until it plays the deuce with you."

He made a careful examination of the sleeping man, while Bassett watched
his face.

"Been a drinking man? Or do you know?"

"No. But I think not. I gave him a small drink this morning, when he
seemed to need it."

"Been like this all day?"

"Since noon. Yes."

Once more the medical man stooped. When he straightened it was to
deliver Bassett a body blow.

"I don't like his condition, or that twitching. If these were the good
old days in Wyoming I'd say he is on the verge of delirium tremens.
But that's only snap judgment. He might be on the verge of a good many
things. Anyhow, he'd better be moved to the hospital. This is no place
for him."

And against this common-sense suggestion Bassett had nothing to offer.
If the doctor had been looking he would have seen him make a gesture of
despair.

"I suppose so," he said, dully. "Is it near? I'll go myself and get a
room."

"That's my advice. I'll look in later, and if the stupor continues I'll
have in a consultant." He picked up his bag and stood looking down at
the bed. "Big fine-looking chap, isn't he?" he commented. "Married?"

"No."

"Well, we'll get the ambulance, and later on we'll go over him properly.
I'd call a maid to sit with him, if I were you." In the grip of a
situation that was too much for him, Bassett rang the bell. It was
answered by the elderly maid who took care of his own bedroom.

Months later, puzzling over the situation, Bassett was to wonder, and
not to know, whether chance or design brought the Thorwald woman to
the door that night. At the time, and for weeks, he laid it to tragic
chance, the same chance which had placed in Dick's hand the warning
letter that had brought him West. But as months went on, the part played
in the tragedy by that faded woman with her tired dispirited voice and
her ash colored hair streaked with gray, assumed other proportions,
loomed large and mysterious.

There were times when he wished that some prescience of danger had
made him throttle her then and there, so she could not have raised her
shrill, alarming voice! But he had no warning. All he saw was a woman
in a washed-out blue calico dress and a fresh white apron, raising
incurious eyes to his.

"I suppose it's all right if she sits in the hall?" Bassett inquired,
still fighting his losing fight. "She can go in if he stirs."

"Right-o," said the doctor, who had been to France and had brought home
some British phrases.

Bassett walked back from the hospital alone. The game was up and he knew
it. Sooner or later--In a way he tried to defend himself to himself.
He had done his best. Two or three days ago he would have been exultant
over the developments. After all, mince things as one would, Clark was a
murderer. Other men killed and paid the penalty. And the game was not up
entirely, at that. The providence which had watched over him for so long
might continue to. The hospital was new. (It was, ironically enough, the
Clark Memorial hospital.) There was still a chance.

He was conscious of something strange as he entered the lobby. The
constable was gone, and there was no clerk behind the desk. At the foot
of the stairs stood a group of guests and loungers, looking up, while a
bell-boy barred the way.

Even then Bassett's first thought was of fire. He elbowed his way to
the foot of the stairs, and demanded to be allowed to go up, but he was
refused.

"In a few minutes," said the boy. "No need of excitement."

"Is it a fire?"

"I don't know myself. I've got my orders. That's all." Wilkins came
hurrying in. The crowd, silent and respectful before the law, opened to
let him through and closed behind him.

Bassett stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up.

XXVI

To Elizabeth the first days of Dick's absence were unbelievably dreary.
She seemed to live only from one visit of the postman to the next. She
felt sometimes that only part of her was at home in the Wheeler house,
slept at night in her white bed, donned its black frocks and took them
off, and made those sad daily pilgrimages to the cemetery above the
town, where her mother tidied with tender hands the long narrow mound,
so fearfully remindful of Jim's tall slim body.

That part of her grieved sorely, and spent itself in small comforting
actions and little caressing touches on bowed heads and grief-stooped
shoulders. It put away Jim's clothing, and kept immaculate the room
where now her mother spent most of her waking hours. It sent her on
her knees at night to pray for Jim's happiness in some young-man heaven
which would please him. But the other part of her was not there at all.
It was off with Dick in some mysterious place of mountains and vast
distance called Wyoming.

And because of this division in herself, because she felt that her
loyalty to her people had wavered, because she knew that already she had
forsaken her father and her mother and would follow her love through the
rest of her life, she was touchingly anxious to comfort and to please
them.

"She's taking Dick's absence very hard," Mrs. Wheeler said one night,
when she had kissed them and gone upstairs to bed. "She worries me
sometimes."

Mr. Wheeler sighed. Why was it that a man could not tell his children
what he had learned,--that nothing was so great as one expected; that
love was worth living for, but not dying for. The impatience of youth
for life! It had killed Jim. It was hurting Nina. It would all come,
all come, in God's good time. The young did not live to-day, but always
to-morrow. There seemed no time to live to-day, for any one. First one
looked ahead and said, "I will be so happy." And before one knew it one
was looking back and saying: "I was so happy."

"She'll be all right," he said aloud.

He got up and whistled for the dog.

"I'll take him around the block before I lock up," he said heavily. He
bent over and kissed his wife. She was a sad figure to him in her black
dress. He did not say to her what he thought sometimes; that Jim had
been saved a great deal. That to live on, and to lose the things one
loved, one by one, was harder than to go quickly, from a joyous youth.

He had not told her what he knew about Jim's companion that night. She
would never have understood. In her simple and child-like faith she
knew that her boy sat that day among the blessed company of heaven. He
himself believed that Jim had gone forgiven into whatever lay behind the
veil we call death, had gone shriven and clean before the Judge who knew
the urge of youth and life. He did not fear for Jim. He only missed him.

He walked around the block that night, a stooped commonplace figure, the
dog at his heels. Now and then he spoke to him, for companionship.
At the corner he stopped and looked along the side street toward the
Livingstone house. And as he looked he sighed. Jim and Nina, and now
Elizabeth. Jim and Nina were beyond his care now. He could do no more.
But what could he do for Elizabeth? That, too, wasn't that beyond him?
He stood still, facing the tragedy of his helplessness, beset by vague
apprehensions. Then he went on doggedly, his hands clasped behind him,
his head sunk on his breast.

He lay awake for a long time that night, wondering whether he and Dick
had been quite fair to Elizabeth. She should, he thought, have been
told. Then, if Dick's apprehensions were justified, she would have had
some preparation. As it was--Suppose something turned up out there,
something that would break her heart?

He had thought Margaret was sleeping, but after a time she moved and
slipped her hand into his. It comforted him. That, too, was life. Very
soon now they would be alone together again, as in the early days before
the children came. All the years and the struggle, and then back where
they started. But still, thank God, hand in hand.

Ever since the night of Jim's death Mrs. Sayre had been a constant
visitor to the house. She came in, solid, practical, and with an
everyday manner neither forcedly cheerful nor too decorously mournful,
which made her very welcome. After the three first days, when she
had practically lived at the house, there was no necessity for small
pretensions with her. She knew the china closet and the pantry, and the
kitchen. She had even penetrated to Mr. Wheeler's shabby old den on
the second floor, and had slept a part of the first night there on the
leather couch with broken springs which he kept because it fitted his
body.

She was a kindly woman, and she had ached with pity. And, because of her
usual detachment from the town and its affairs, the feeling that she
was being of service gave her a little glow of content. She liked the
family, too, and particularly she liked Elizabeth. But after she had
seen Dick and Elizabeth together once or twice she felt that no plan she
might make for Wallace could possibly succeed. Lying on the old leather
couch that first night, between her frequent excursions among the waking
family, she had thought that out and abandoned it.

But, during the days that followed the funeral, she was increasingly
anxious about Wallace. She knew that rumors of the engagement had
reached him, for he was restless and irritable. He did not care to go
out, but wandered about the house or until late at night sat smoking
alone on the terrace, looking down at the town with sunken, unhappy
eyes. Once or twice in the evening he had taken his car and started out,
and lying awake in her French bed she would hear him coming hours later.
In the mornings his eyes were suffused and his color bad, and she knew
that he was drinking in order to get to sleep.

On the third day after Dick's departure for the West she got up when
she heard him coming in, and putting on her dressing gown and slippers,
knocked at his door.

"Come in," he called ungraciously.

She found him with his coat off, standing half defiantly with a glass of
whisky and soda in his hand. She went up to him and took it from him.

"We've had enough of that in the family, Wallie," she said. "And it's a
pretty poor resource in time of trouble."

"I'll have that back, if you don't mind."

"Nonsense," she said briskly, and flung it, glass and all, out of the
window. She was rather impressive when she turned.

"I've been a fairly indulgent mother," she said. "I've let you alone,
because it's a Sayre trait to run away when they feel a pull on the bit.
But there's a limit to my patience, and it is reached when my son drinks
to forget a girl."

He flushed and glowered at her in somber silence, but she moved about
the room calmly, giving it a housekeeper's critical inspection, and
apparently unconscious of his anger.

"I don't believe you ever cared for any one in all your life," he said
roughly. "If you had, you would know."

She was straightening a picture over the mantel, and she completed her
work before she turned.

"I care for you."

"That's different."

"Very well, then. I cared for your father. I cared terribly. And he
killed my love."

She padded out of the room, her heavy square body in its blazing kimono
a trifle rigid, but her face still and calm. He remained staring at
the door when she had closed it, and for some time after. He knew what
message for him had lain behind that emotionless speech of hers, not
only understanding, but a warning. She had cared terribly, and his
father had killed that love. He had drunk and played through his gay
young life, and then he had died, and no one had greatly mourned him.

She had left the decanter on its stand, and he made a movement toward
it. Then, with a half smile, he picked it up and walked to the window
with it. He was still smiling, half boyishly, as he put out his light
and got into bed. It had occurred to him that the milkman's flivver,
driving in at the break of dawn, would encounter considerable glass.

By morning, after a bad night, he had made a sort of double-headed
resolution, that he was through with booze, as he termed it, and that
he would find out how he stood with Elizabeth. But for a day or two no
opportunity presented itself. When he called there was always present
some grave-faced sympathizing visitor, dark clad and low of voice, and
over the drawing-room would hang the indescribable hush of a house
in mourning. It seemed to touch Elizabeth, too, making her remote and
beyond earthly things. He would go in, burning with impatience, hungry
for the mere sight of her, fairly overcharged with emotion, only to face
that strange new spirituality that made him ashamed of the fleshly urge
in him.

Once he found Clare Rossiter there, and was aware of something electric
in the air. After a time he identified it. Behind the Rossiter girl's
soft voice and sympathetic words, there was a veiled hostility. She
was watching Elizabeth, was overconscious of her. And she was, for some
reason, playing up to himself. He thought he saw a faint look of relief
on Elizabeth's face when Clare at last rose to go.

"I'm on my way to see the man Dick Livingstone left in his place,"
Clare said, adjusting her veil at the mirror. "I've got a cold. Isn't it
queer, the way the whole Livingstone connection is broken up?"

"Hardly queer. And it's only temporary."

"Possibly. But if you ask me, I don't believe Dick will come back. Mind,
I don't defend the town, but it doesn't like to be fooled. And he's
fooled it for years. I know a lot of people who'd quit going to him."
She turned to Wallie.

"He isn't David's nephew, you know. The question is, who is he? Of
course I don't say it, but a good many are saying that when a man takes
a false identity he has something to hide."

She gave them no chance to reply, but sauntered out with her
sex-conscious, half-sensuous walk. Outside the door her smile faded,
and her face was hard and bitter. She might forget Dick Livingstone,
but never would she forgive herself for her confession to Elizabeth, nor
Elizabeth for having heard it.

Wallie turned to Elizabeth when she had gone, slightly bewildered.

"What's got into her?" he inquired. And then, seeing Elizabeth's white
face, rather shrewdly: "That was one for him and two for you, was it?"

"I don't know. Probably."

"I wonder if you would look like that if any one attacked me!"

"No one attacks you, Wallie."

"That's not an answer. You wouldn't, would you? It's different, isn't
it?"

"Yes. A little."

He straightened, and looked past her, unseeing, at the wall. "I guess
I've known it for quite a while," he said at last. "I didn't want to
believe it, so I wouldn't. Are you engaged to him?"

"Yes. It's not to be known just yet, Wallie."

"He's a good fellow," he said, after rather a long silence. "Not that
that makes it easier," he added with a twisted smile. Then, boyishly and
unexpectedly he said, "Oh, my God!"

He sat down, and when the dog came and placed a head on his knee he
patted it absently. He wanted to go, but he had a queer feeling that
when he went he went for good.

"I've cared for you for years," he said. "I've been a poor lot, but I'd
have been a good bit worse, except for you."

And again:

"Only last night I made up my mind that if you'd have me, I'd make
something out of myself. I suppose a man's pretty weak when he puts a
responsibility like that on a girl."

She yearned over him, rather. She made little tentative overtures of
friendship and affection. But he scarcely seemed to hear them, wrapped
as he was in the selfish absorption of his disappointment. When she
heard the postman outside and went to the door for the mail, she thought
he had not noticed her going. But when she returned he was watching her
with jealous, almost tragic eyes.

"I suppose you hear from him by every mail."

"There has been nothing to-day."

Something in her voice or her face made him look at her closely.

"Has he written at all?"

"The first day he got there. Not since."

He went away soon, and not after all with the feeling of going for
good. In his sceptical young mind, fed by Clare's malice, was growing a
comforting doubt of Dick's good faith.

XXVII

When Wilkins had disappeared around the angle of the staircase
Bassett went to a chair and sat down. He felt sick, and his knees were
trembling. Something had happened, a search for Clark room by room
perhaps, and the discovery had been made.

He was totally unable to think or to plan. With Dick well they could
perhaps have made a run for it. The fire-escape stood ready. But as
things were--The murmuring among the crowd at the foot of the stairs
ceased, and he looked up. Wilkins was on the staircase, searching
the lobby with his eyes. When he saw Bassett he came quickly down and
confronted him, his face angry and suspicious.

"You're mixed up in this somehow," he said sharply. "You might as well
come over with the story. We'll get him. He can't get out of this town."

With the words, and the knowledge that in some incredible fashion Dick
had made his escape, Bassett's mind reacted instantly.

"What's eating you, Wilkins?" he demanded. "Who got away? I couldn't get
that tongue-tied bell-hop to tell me. Thought it was a fire."

"Don't stall, Bassett. You've had Jud Clark hidden upstairs in
three-twenty all day."

Bassett got up and towered angrily over the sheriff. The crowd had
turned and was watching.

"In three-twenty?" he said. "You're crazy. Jud Clark! Let me tell you
something. I don't know what you've got in your head, but three-twenty
is a Doctor Livingstone from near my home town. Well known and highly
respected, too. What's more, he's a sick man, and if he's got away, as
you say, it's because he is delirious. I had a doctor in to see him an
hour ago. I've just arranged for a room at the hospital for him. Does
that look as though I've been hiding him?"

The positiveness of his identification and his indignation resulted in a
change in Wilkins' manner.

"I'll ask you to stay here until I come back." His tone was official,
but less suspicious. "We'll have him in a half hour. It's Clark all
right. I'm not saying you knew it was Clark, but I want to ask you some
questions."

He went out, and Bassett heard him shouting an order in the street. He
went to the street door, and realized that a search was going on, both
by the police and by unofficial volunteers. Men on horseback clattered
by to guard the borders of the town, and in the vicinity of the hotel
searchers were investigating yards and alleyways.

Bassett himself was helpless. He stood by, watching the fire of his own
igniting, conscious of the curious scrutiny of the few hotel loungers
who remained, and expecting momentarily to hear of Dick's capture. It
must come eventually, he felt sure. As to how Dick had been identified,
or by what means he had escaped, he was in complete ignorance; and an
endeavor to learn by establishing the former entente cordiale between
the room clerk and himself was met by a suspicious glance and what
amounted to a snub. He went back to his chair against the wall and sat
there, waiting for the end.

It was an hour before the sheriff returned, and he came in scowling.

"I'll see you now," he said briefly, and led the way back to the hotel
office behind the desk. Bassett's last hope died when he saw sitting
there, pale but composed, the elderly maid. The sheriff lost no time.

"Now I'll tell you what we know about your connection with this case,
Bassett," he said. "You engaged a car to take you both to the main line
to-night. You paid off Clark's room as well as your own this afternoon.
When you found he was sick you canceled your going. That's true, isn't
it?"

"It is. I've told you I knew him at home, but not as Clark."

"I'll let that go. You intended to take the midnight on the main line,
but you ordered a car instead of using the branch road."

"Livingstone was sick. I thought it would be easier. That's all." His
voice sharpened. "You can't drag me into this, Sheriff. In the first
place I don't believe it was Clark, or he wouldn't have come here, of
all places on the earth. I didn't even know he was here, until he came
into my room this morning."

"Why did he come into your room?"

"He had seen that I was registered. He said he felt sick. I took him
back and put him to bed. To-night I got a doctor."

The sheriff felt in his pocket and produced a piece of paper. Bassett's
morale was almost destroyed when he saw that it was Gregory's letter to
David.

"I'll ask you to explain this. It was on Clark's bed."

Bassett took it and read it slowly. He was thinking hard.

"I see," he said. "Well, that explains why he came here. He was too sick
to talk when I saw him. You see, this is not addressed to him, but to
his uncle, David Livingstone. David Livingstone is a brother of Henry
Livingstone, who died some years ago at Dry River. This refers to a
personal matter connected with the Livingstone estate."

The sheriff took the letter and reread it. He was puzzled.

"You're a good talker," he acknowledged grudgingly. He turned to the
maid.

"All right, Hattie," he said. "We'll have that story again. But just
a minute." He turned to the reporter. "Mrs. Thorwald here hasn't seen
Lizzie Lazarus, the squaw. Lizzie has been sitting in my office ever
since noon. Now, Hattie."

Hattie moistened her dry lips.

"It was Jud Clark, all right," she said. "I knew him all his life, off
and on. But I wish I hadn't screamed. I don't believe he killed Lucas,
and I never will. I hope he gets away."

She eyed the sheriff vindictively, but he only smiled grimly.

"What did I tell you?" he said to Bassett. "Hell with the women--that
was Jud Clark. And we'll get him, Hattie. Don't worry. Go on."

She looked at Bassett.

"When you left me, I sat outside the door, as you said. Then I heard him
moving, and I went in. The room was not very light, and I didn't know
him at first. He sat up in bed and looked at me, and he said, 'Why,
hello, Hattie Thorwald.' That's my name. I married a Swede. Then
he looked again, and he said, 'Excuse me, I thought you were a Mrs.
Thorwald, but I see now you're older.' I recognized him then, and I
thought I was going to faint. I knew he'd be arrested the moment it was
known he was here. I said, 'Lie down, Mr. Jud. You're not very well.'
And I closed the door and locked it. I was scared."

Her voice broke; she fumbled for a handkerchief. The sheriff glanced at
Bassett.

"Now where's your Livingstone story?" he demanded. "All right, Hattie.
Let's have it."

"I said, 'For God's sake, Mr. Jud, lie still, until I think what to
do. The sheriff's likely downstairs this very minute.' And then he went
queer and wild. He jumped off the bed and stood listening and staring,
and shaking all over. 'I've got to get away,' he said, very loud. 'I
won't let them take me. I'll kill myself first!' When I put my hand on
his arm he threw it off, and he made for the door. I saw then that he
was delirious with fever, and I stood in front of the door and begged
him not to go out. But he threw me away so hard that that I fell, and I
screamed."

"And then what?"

"That's all. If I hadn't been almost out of my mind I'd never have told
that it was Jud Clark. That'll hang on me dying day."

An hour or so later Bassett went back to his room in a state of mental
and nervous exhaustion. He knew that from that time on he would be under
suspicion and probably under espionage, and he proceeded methodically,
his door locked, to go over his papers. His notebook and the cuttings
from old files relative to the Clark case he burned in his wash basin
and then carefully washed the basin. That done, his attendance on a sick
man, and the letter found on the bed was all the positive evidence they
had to connect him with the case. He had had some thought of slipping
out by the fire-escape and making a search for Dick on his own account,
but his lack of familiarity with his surroundings made that practically
useless.

At midnight he stretched out on his bed without undressing, and went
over the situation carefully. He knew nothing of the various neuroses
which affect the human mind, but he had a vague impression that
memory when lost did eventually return, and Dick's recognition of the
chambermaid pointed to such a return. He wondered what a man would
feel under such conditions, what he would think. He could not do it. He
abandoned the effort finally, and lay frowning at the ceiling while he
considered his own part in the catastrophe. He saw himself, following
his training and his instinct, leading the inevitable march toward this
night's tragedy, planning, scheming, searching, and now that it had
come, lying helpless on his bed while the procession of events went on
past him and beyond his control.

When an automobile engine back-fired in the street below he went sick
with fear.

He made the resolution then that was to be the guiding motive for his
life for the next few months, to fight the thing of his own creating to
a finish. But with the resolution newly made he saw the futility of
it. He might fight, would fight, but nothing could restore to Dick
Livingstone the place he had made for himself in the world. He might be
saved from his past, but he could not be given a future.

All at once he was aware that some one was working stealthily at
the lock of the door which communicated with a room beyond. He slid
cautiously off the bed and went to the light switch, standing with a
hand on it, and waited. The wild thought that it might be Livingstone
was uppermost in his mind, and when the door creaked open and closed
again, that was the word he breathed into the darkness.

"No," said a woman's voice in a whisper. "It's the maid, Hattie. Be
careful. There's a guard at the top of the stairs."

He heard her moving to his outer door, and he knew that she stood
there, listening, her head against the panel. When she was satisfied she
slipped, with the swiftness of familiarity with her surroundings, to the
stand beside his bed, and turned on the lamp. In the shaded light he saw
that she wore a dark cape, with its hood drawn over her head. In some
strange fashion the maid, even the woman, was lost, and she stood,
strange, mysterious, and dramatic in the little room.

"If you found Jud Clark, what would you do with him?" she demanded. From
beneath the hood her eyes searched his face. "Turn him over to Wilkins
and his outfit?"

"I think you know better than that."

"Have you got any plan?"

"Plan? No. They've got every outlet closed, haven't they? Do you know
where he is?"

"I know where he isn't, or they'd have him by now. And I know Jud Clark.
He'd take to the mountains, same as he did before. He's got a good
horse."

"A horse!"

"Listen. I haven't told this, and I don't mean to. They'll learn it in
a couple of hours, anyhow. He got out by a back fire-escape--they know
that. But they don't know he took Ed Rickett's black mare. They think
he's on foot. I've been down there now, and she's gone. Ed's shut up in
a room on the top floor, playing poker. They won't break up until about
three o'clock and he'll miss his horse then. That's two hours yet."

Bassett tried to see her face in the shadow of the hood. He was puzzled
and suspicious at her change of front, more than half afraid of a trap.

"How do I know you are not working with Wilkins?" he demanded. "You
could have saved the situation to-night by saying you weren't sure."

"I was upset. I've had time to think since."

He was forced to trust her, eventually, although the sense of some
hidden motive, some urge greater than compassion, persisted in him.

"You've got some sort of plan for me, then? I can't follow him haphazard
into the mountains at night, and expect to find him."

"Yes. He was delirious when he left. That thing about the sheriff being
after him--he wasn't after him then. Not until I gave the alarm. He's
delirious, and he thinks he's back to the night he--you know. Wouldn't
he do the same thing again, and make for the mountains and the cabin? He
went to the cabin before."

Bassett looked at his watch. It was half past twelve.

"Even if I could get a horse I couldn't get out of the town."

"You might, on foot. They'll be trailing Rickett's horse by dawn. And if
you can get out of town I can get you a horse. I can get you out, too, I
think. I know every foot of the place."

A feeling of theatrical unreality was Bassett's chief emotion during the
trying time that followed. The cloaked and shrouded figure of the woman
ahead, the passage through two dark and empty rooms by pass key to an
unguarded corridor in the rear, the descent of the fire-escape, where
they stood flattened against the wall while a man, possibly one of the
posse, rode in, tied his horse and stamped in high heeled boots into the
building, and always just ahead the sure movement and silent tread of
the woman, kept his nerves taut and increased his feeling of the unreal.

At the foot of the fire-escape the woman slid out of sight noiselessly,
but under Bassett's feet a tin can rolled and clattered. Then a horse
snorted close to his shoulder, and he was frozen with fright. After
that she gave him her hand, and led him through an empty outbuilding and
another yard into a street.

At two o'clock that morning Bassett, waiting in a lonely road near what
he judged to be the camp of a drilling crew, heard a horse coming toward
him and snorting nervously as it came and drew back into the shadows
until he recognized the shrouded silhouette leading him.

"It belongs to my son," she said. "I'll fix it with him to-morrow. But
if you're caught you'll have to say you came out and took him, or you'll
get us all in trouble."

She gave him careful instructions as to how to find the trail, and urged
him to haste.

"If you get him," she advised, "better keep right on over the range."

He paused, with his foot in the stirrup.

"You seem pretty certain he's taken to the mountains."

"It's your only chance. They'll get him anywhere else."

He mounted and prepared to ride off. He would have shaken hands with
her, but the horse was still terrified at her shrouded figure and
veered and snorted when she approached. "However it turns out," he said,
"you've done your best, and I'm grateful."

The horse moved off and left her standing there, her cowl drawn forward
and her hands crossed on her breast. She stood for a moment, facing
toward the mountains, oddly monkish in outline and posture. Then she
turned back toward the town.

XXVIII

Dick had picked up life again where he had left it off so long before.
Gone was David's house built on the sands of forgetfulness. Gone was
David himself, and Lucy. Gone not even born into his consciousness
was Elizabeth. The war, his work, his new place in the world, were all
obliterated, drowned in the flood of memories revived by the shock of
Bassett's revelations.

Not that the breaking point had revealed itself as such at once. There
was confusion first, then stupor and unconsciousness, and out of that,
sharply and clearly, came memory. It was not ten years ago, but an hour
ago, a minute ago, that he had stood staring at Howard Lucas on the
floor of the billiard room, and had seen Beverly run in through the
door.

"Bev!" he was saying. "Bev! Don't look like that!"

He moved and found he was in bed. It had been a dream. He drew a long
breath, looked about the room, saw the woman and greeted her. But
already he knew he had not been dreaming. Things were sharpening in his
mind. He shuddered and looked at the floor, but nobody lay there. Only
the horror in his mind, and the instinct to get away from it. He was not
thinking at all, but rising in him was not only the need for flight, but
the sense of pursuit. They were after him. They would get him. They must
never get him alive.

Instinct and will took the place of thought, and whatever closed chamber
in his brain had opened, it clearly influenced his physical condition.
He bore all the stigmata of prolonged and heavy drinking; his nerves
were gone; he twitched and shook. When he got down the fire-escape his
legs would scarcely hold him.

The discovery of Ed Rickett's horse in the courtyard, saddled and ready,
fitted in with the brain pattern of the past.

Like one who enters a room for the first time, to find it already
familiar, for a moment he felt that this thing that he was doing he
had done before. Only for a moment. Then partial memory ceased, and he
climbed into the saddle, rode out and turned toward the mountains and
the cabin. By that strange quality of the brain which is called habit,
although the habit be of only one emphatic precedent, he followed the
route he had taken ten years before. How closely will never be known.
Did he stop at this turn to look back, as he had once before? Did he let
his horse breathe there? Not the latter, probably, for as, following the
blind course that he had followed ten years before, he left the town and
went up the canyon trail, he was riding as though all the devils of hell
were behind him.

One thing is certain. The reproduction of the conditions of the earlier
flight, the familiar associations of the trail, must have helped rather
than hindered his fixation in the past. Again he was Judson Clark, who
had killed a man, and was flying from himself and from pursuit.

Before long his horse was in acute distress, but he did not notice it.
At the top of the long climb the animal stopped, but he kicked him on
recklessly. He was as unaware of his own fatigue, or that he was swaying
in the saddle, until galloping across a meadow the horse stumbled and
threw him.

He lay still for some time; not hurt but apparently lacking the
initiative to get up again. He had at that period the alternating
lucidity and mental torpor of the half drunken man. But struggling up
through layers of blackness at last there came again the instinct for
flight, and he got on the horse and set off.

The torpor again overcame him and he slept in the saddle. When the
horse stopped he roused and kicked it on. Once he came up through the
blackness to the accompaniment of a great roaring, and found that the
animal was saddle deep in a ford, and floundering badly among the rocks.
He turned its head upstream, and got it out safely.

Toward dawn some of the confusion was gone, but he firmly fixed in the
past. The horse wandered on, head down, occasionally stopping to seize a
leaf as it passed, and once to drink deeply at a spring. Dick was still
not thinking--there was something that forbade him to think-but he was
weak and emotional. He muttered:

"Poor Bev! Poor old Bev!"

A great wave of tenderness and memory swept over him. Poor Bev! He
had made life hell for her, all right. He had an almost uncontrollable
impulse to turn the horse around, go back and see her once more. He was
gone anyhow. They would get him. And he wanted her to know that he would
have died rather than do what he had done.

The flight impulse died; he felt sick and very cold, and now and then he
shook violently. He began to watch the trail behind him for the pursuit,
but without fear. He seemed to have been wandering for a thousand black
nights through deep gorges and over peaks as high as the stars, and now
he wanted to rest, to stop somewhere and sleep, to be warm again. Let
them come and take him, anywhere out of this nightmare.

With the dawn still gray he heard a horse behind and below him on the
trail up the cliff face. He stopped and sat waiting, twisted about
in his saddle, his expression ugly and defiant, and yet touchingly
helpless, the look of a boy in trouble and at bay. The horseman came
into sight on the trail below, riding hard, a middle-aged man in a dark
sack suit and a straw hat, an oddly incongruous figure and manifestly
weary. He rode bent forward, and now and again he raised his eyes from
the trail and searched the wall above with bloodshot, anxious eyes.

On the turn below Dick, Bassett saw him for the first time, and spoke to
him in a quiet voice.

"Hello, old man," he said. "I began to think I was going to miss you
after all."

His scrutiny of Dick's face had rather reassured him. The delirium had
passed, apparently. Dishevelled although he was, covered with dust and
with sweat from the horse, Livingstone's eyes were steady enough. As
he rode up to him, however, he was not so certain. He found himself
surveyed with a sort of cool malignity that startled him.

"Miss me!" Livingstone sneered bitterly. "With every damned hill covered
by this time with your outfit! I'll tell you this. If I'd had a gun
you'd never have got me alive."

Bassett was puzzled and slightly ruffled.

"My outfit! I'll tell you this, son, I've risked my neck half the night
to get you out of this mess."

"God Almighty couldn't get me out of this mess," Dick said somberly.

It was then that Bassett saw something not quite normal in his face, and
he rode closer.

"See here, Livingstone," he said, in a soothing tone, "nobody's going to
get you. I'm here to keep them from getting you. We've got a good start,
but we'll have to keep moving."

Dick sat obstinately still, his horse turned across the trail, and his
eyes still suspicious and unfriendly.

"I don't know you," he said doggedly. "And I've done all the running
away I'm going to do. You go back and tell Wilkins I'm here and to come
and get me. The sooner the better." The sneer faded, and he turned
on Bassett with a depth of tragedy in his eyes that frightened the
reporter. "My God," he said, "I killed a man last night! I can't go
through life with that on me. I'm done, I tell you."

"Last night!" Some faint comprehension began to dawn in Bassett's mind,
a suspicion of the truth. But there was no time to verify it. He turned
and carefully inspected the trail to where it came into sight at the
opposite rim of the valley. When he was satisfied that the pursuit was
still well behind them he spoke again.

"Pull yourself together, Livingstone," he said, rather sharply. "Think
a bit. You didn't kill anybody last night. Now listen," he added
impressively. "You are Livingstone, Doctor Richard Livingstone. You
stick to that, and think about it."

But Dick was not listening, save to some bitter inner voice, for
suddenly he turned his horse around on the trail. "Get out of the way,"
he said, "I'm going back to give myself up."

He would have done it, probably, would have crowded past Bassett on
the narrow trail and headed back toward capture, but for his horse. It
balked and whirled on the ledge, but it would not pass Bassett. Dick
swore and kicked it, his face ugly and determined, but it refused
sullenly. He slid out of the saddle then and tried to drag it on, but he
was suddenly weak and sick. He staggered. Bassett was off his horse in
a moment and caught him. He eased him onto a boulder, and he sat there,
his shoulders sagging and his whole body twitching.

"Been drinking my head off," he said at last. "If I had a drink now I'd
straighten out." He tried to sit up. "That's what's the matter with me.
I'm funking, of course, but that's not all. I'd give my soul for some
whisky."'

"I can get you a drink, if you'll come on about a mile," Bassett coaxed.
"At the cabin you and I talked about yesterday."

"Now you're talking." Dick made an effort and got to his feet, shaking
off Bassett's assisting arm. "For God's sake keep your hands off me," he
said irritably. "I've got a hangover, that's all."

He got into his saddle without assistance and started off up the trail.
Bassett once more searched the valley, but it was empty save for a deer
drinking at the stream far below. He turned and followed.

He was fairly hopeless by that time, what with Dick's unexpected
resistance and the change in the man himself. He was dealing with
something he did not understand, and the hypothesis of delirium did
not hold. There was a sort of desperate sanity in Dick's eyes. That
statement, now, about drinking his head off--he hadn't looked yesterday
like a drinking man. But now he did. He was twitching, his hands shook.
On the rock his face had been covered with a cold sweat. What was
that the doctor yesterday had said about delirium tremens? Suppose he
collapsed? That meant capture.

He did not need to guide Dick to the cabin. He turned off the trail
himself, and Bassett, following, saw him dismount and survey the ruin
with a puzzled face. But he said nothing. Bassett waiting outside to tie
the horses came in to find him sitting on one of the dilapidated chairs,
staring around, but all he said was:

"Get me that drink, won't you? I'm going to pieces." Bassett found his
tin cup where he had left it on a shelf and poured out a small amount of
whisky from his flask.

"This is all we have," he explained. "We'll have to go slow with it."

It had an almost immediate effect. The twitching grew less, and a faint
color came into Dick's face. He stood up and stretched himself. "That's
better," he said. "I was all in. I must have been riding that infernal
horse for years."

He wandered about while the reporter made a fire and set the coffee pot
to boil. Bassett, glancing up once, saw him surveying the ruined lean-to
from the doorway, with an expression he could not understand. But he did
not say anything, nor did he speak again until Bassett called him to get
some food. Even then he was laconic, and he seemed to be listening and
waiting.

Once something startled the horses outside, and he sat up and listened.

"They're here!" he said.

"I don't think so," Bassett replied, and went to the doorway. "No," he
called back over his shoulder, "you go on and finish. I'll watch."

"Come back and eat," Dick said surlily.

He ate very little, but drank of the coffee. Bassett too ate almost
nothing. He was pulling himself together for the struggle that was to
come, marshaling his arguments for flight, and trying to fathom the
extent of the change in the man across the small table.

Dick put down his tin cup and got up. He was strong again, and the
nightmare confusion of the night had passed away. Instead of it
there was a desperate lucidity and a courage born of desperation. He
remembered it all distinctly; he had killed Howard Lucas the night
before. Before long Wilkins or some of his outfit would ride up to the
door, and take him back to Norada. He was not afraid of that. They would
always think he had run away because he was afraid of capture, but it
was not that. He had run away from Bev's face. Only he had not got away
from it. It had been with him all night, and it was with him now.

But he would have to go back. He couldn't be caught like a rat in a
trap. The Clarks didn't run away. They were fighters. Only the Clarks
didn't kill. They fought, but they didn't murder.

He picked up his hat and went to the door.

"Well, you've been mighty kind, old man," he said. "But I've got to go
back. I ran last night like a scared kid, but I'm through with that sort
of foolishness."

"I'd give a good bit," Bassett said, watching him, "to know what made
you run last night. You were safe where you were."

"I don't know what you are talking about," Dick said drearily. "I
didn't run from them. I ran to get away from something." He turned away
irritably. "You wouldn't understand. Say I was drunk. I was, for that
matter. I'm not over it yet."

Bassett watched him.

"I see," he said quietly. "It was last night, was it, that this thing
happened?"

"You know it, don't you?"

"And, after it happened, do you remember what followed?"

"I've been riding all night. I didn't care what happened. I knew I'd run
into a whale of a blizzard, but I--"

He stopped and stared outside, to where the horses grazed in the upland
meadow, knee deep in mountain flowers. Bassett, watching him, saw the
incredulity in his eyes, and spoke very gently.

"My dear fellow," he said, "you are right. Try to understand what I am
saying, and take it easy. You rode into a blizzard, right enough. But
that was not last night. It was ten years ago."

XXIX

Had Bassett had some wider knowledge of Dick's condition he might have
succeeded better during that bad hour that followed. Certainly, if he
had hoped that the mere statement of fact and its proof would bring
results, he failed. And the need for haste, the fear of the pursuit
behind them, made him nervous and incoherent.

He had first to accept the incredible, himself--that Dick Livingstone no
longer existed, that he had died and was buried deep in some chamber of
an unconscious mind. He made every effort to revive him, to restore him
into the field of consciousness, but without result. And his struggle
was increased in difficulty by the fact that he knew so little of Dick's
life. David's name meant nothing, apparently, and it was the only name
he knew. He described the Livingstone house; he described Elizabeth as
he had seen her that night at the theater. Even Minnie. But Dick only
shook his head. And until he had aroused some instinct, some desire to
live, he could not combat Dick's intention to return and surrender.

"I understand what you are saying," Dick would say. "I'm trying to get
it. But it doesn't mean anything to me."

He even tried the war.

"War? What war?" Dick asked. And when he heard about it he groaned.

"A war!" he said. "And I've missed it!"

But soon after that he got up, and moved to the door.

"I'm going back," he said.

"Why?"

"They're after me, aren't they?"

"You're forgetting again. Why should they be after you now, after ten
years?"

"I see. I can't get it, you know. I keep listening for them."

Bassett too was listening, but he kept his fears to himself.

"Why did you do it?" he asked finally.

"I was drunk, and I hated him. He married a girl I was crazy about."

Bassett tried new tactics. He stressed the absurdity of surrendering for
a crime committed ten years before and forgotten.

"They won't convict you anyhow," he urged. "It was a quarrel, wasn't it?
I mean, you didn't deliberately shoot him?"

"I don't remember. We quarreled. Yes. I don't remember shooting him."

"What do you remember?"

Dick made an effort, although he was white to the lips.

"I saw him on the floor," he said slowly, and staggered a little.

"Then you don't even know you did it."

"I hated him."

But Bassett saw that his determination to surrender himself was
weakening. Bassett fought it with every argument he could summon, and at
last he brought forward the one he felt might be conclusive.

"You see, you've not only made a man's place in the world, Clark, as
I've told you. You've formed associations you can't get away from.
You've got to think of the Livingstones, and you told me yesterday a
shock would kill the old man. But it's more than that. There's a girl
back in your town. I think you were engaged to her."

But if he had hoped to pierce the veil with that statement he failed.
Dick's face flushed, and he went to the door of the cabin, much as he
had gone to the window the day before. He did not look around when he
spoke.

"Then I'm an unconscionable cad," he said. "I've only cared for one
woman in my life. And I've shipwrecked her for good."

"You mean--"

"You know who I mean."

Sometime later Bassett got on his horse and rode out to a ledge which
commanded a long stretch of trail in the valley below. Far away horsemen
were riding along it, one behind the other, small dots that moved on
slowly but steadily. He turned and went back to the cabin.

"We'd better be moving," he said, "and it's up to you to say where.
You've got two choices. You can go back to Norada and run the chance of
arrest. You know what that means. Without much chance of a conviction
you will stand trial and bring wretchedness to the people who stood by
you before and who care for you now. Or you can go on over the mountains
with me and strike the railroad somewhere to the West. You'll have time
to think things over, anyhow. They've waited ten years. They can wait
longer."

To his relief Dick acquiesced. He had become oddly passive; he seemed
indeed not greatly interested. He did not even notice the haste with
which Bassett removed the evidences of their meal, or extinguished the
dying fire and scattered the ashes. Nor, when they were mounted, the
care with which they avoided the trail. He gave, when asked, information
as to the direction of the railroad at the foot of the western slope of
the range, and at the same instigation found a trail for them some miles
beyond their starting point. But mostly he merely followed, in a dead
silence.

They made slow progress. Both horses were weary and hungry, and the
going was often rough and even dangerous. But for Dick's knowledge of
the country they would have been hopelessly lost. Bassett, however,
although tortured with muscular soreness, felt his spirits rising as the
miles were covered, and there was no sign of the pursuit.

By mid-afternoon they were obliged to rest their horses and let them
graze, and the necessity of food for themselves became insistent. Dick
stretched out and was immediately asleep, but the reporter could not
rest. The magnitude of his undertaking obsessed him. They had covered
perhaps twenty miles since leaving the cabin, and the railroad was still
sixty miles away. With fresh horses they could have made it by dawn of
the next morning, but he did not believe their jaded animals could go
much farther. The country grew worse instead of better. A pass ahead,
which they must cross, was full of snow.

He was anxious, too, as to Dick's physical condition. The twitching was
gone, but he was very pale and he slept like a man exhausted and at his
physical limit. But the necessity of crossing the pass before nightfall
or of waiting until dawn to do it drove Bassett back from an anxious
reconnoitering of the trail at five o'clock, to rouse the sleeping man
and start on again.

Near the pass, however, Dick roused himself and took the lead.

"Let me ahead, Bassett," he said peremptorily. "And give your horse his
head. He'll take care of you if you give him a chance."

Bassett was glad to fall back. He was exhausted and nervous. The trail
frightened him. It clung to the side of a rocky wall, twisting and
turning on itself; it ran under milky waterfalls of glacial water, and
higher up it led over an ice field which was a glassy bridge over a
rushing stream beneath. To add to their wretchedness mosquitoes hung
about them in voracious clouds, and tiny black gnats which got into
their eyes and their nostrils and set the horses frantic.

Once across the ice field Dick's horse fell and for a time could not get
up again. He lay, making ineffectual efforts to rise, his sides heaving,
his eyes rolling in distress. They gave up then, and prepared to make
such camp as they could.

With the setting of the sun it had grown bitterly cold, and Bassett was
forced to light a fire. He did it under the protection of the mountain
wall, and Dick, after unsaddling his fallen horse, built a rough shelter
of rocks against the wind. After a time the exhausted horse got up, but
there was no forage, and the two animals stood disconsolate, or made
small hopeless excursions, noses to the ground, among the moss and scrub
pines.

Before turning in Bassett divided the remaining contents of the flask
between them, and his last cigarettes. Dick did not talk. He sat, his
back to the shelter, facing the fire, his mind busy with what Bassett
knew were bitter and conflicting thoughts. Once, however, as the
reporter was dozing off, Dick spoke.

"You said I told you there was a girl," he said. "Did I tell you her
name?"

"No."

"All right. Go to sleep. I thought if I heard it it might help."

Bassett lay back and watched him.

"Better get some sleep, old man," he said.

He dozed, to waken again cold and shivering. The fire had burned low,
and Dick was sitting near it, unheeding, and in a deep study. He looked
up, and Bassett was shocked at the quiet tragedy in his face.

"Where is Beverly Carlysle now?" he asked. "Or do you know?"

"Yes. I saw her not long ago."

"Is she married again?"

"No. She's revived 'The Valley,' and she's in New York with it."

Dick slept for only an hour or so that night, but as he slept he
dreamed. In his dream he was at peace and happy, and there was a girl
in a black frock who seemed to be a part of that peace. When he roused,
however, still with the warmth of his dream on him, he could not summon
her. She had slipped away among the shadows of the night.

He sat by the fire in the grip of a great despair. He had lost ten years
out of his life, his best years. And he could not go back to where he
had left off. There was nothing to go back to but shame and remorse.
He looked at Bassett, lying by the fire, and tried to fit him into the
situation. Who was he, and why was he here? Why had he ridden out at
night alone, into unknown mountains, to find him?

As though his intent gaze had roused the sleeper, Bassett opened his
eyes, at first drowsily, then wide awake. He raised himself on his
elbow and listened, as though for some far-off sound, and his face was
strained and anxious. But the night was silent, and he relaxed and slept
again.

Something that had been forming itself in Dick's mind suddenly
crystallized into conviction. He rose and walked to the edge of the
mountain wall and stood there listening. When he went back to the
fire he felt in his pockets, found a small pad and pencil, and bending
forward to catch the light, commenced to write... At dawn Bassett
wakened. He was stiff and wretched, and he grunted as he moved. He
turned over and surveyed the small plateau. It was empty, except for his
horse, making its continuous, hopeless search for grass.

XXX

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.

XXXI

"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."

XXXII

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