And he had other advantages. The pack, as he cynically thought of them,
would have started at the Clark ranch and the cabin. He would get to
them, of course, but he meant to start on the outside of the circle and
work in.
"Been here long?" he asked the clerk at the desk, after a leisurely
meal.
The clerk grinned.
"I came here two years ago. I never saw Jud Clark. To get to the Clark
place take the road north out of the town and keep straight about eight
miles. The road's good now. You fellows have worn it smooth."
"Must have written that down and learned it off," Bassett said
admiringly. "What the devil's the Clark place? And why should I go
there? Unless," he added, "they serve a decent meal."
"Sorry." The clerk looked at him sharply, was satisfied, and picked up a
pen. "You'll hear the story if you stay around here any time. Anything I
can do for you?"
"Yes. Fire the cook," Bassett said, and moved away.
He spent the evening in going over his notes and outlining a campaign,
and the next day he stumbled on a bit of luck. His elderly chambermaid
had lived in and around the town for years.
"Ever hear of any Livingstones in these parts?" he asked.
"Why, yes. There used to be a Livingstone ranch at Dry River," she said,
pausing with her carpet sweeper, and looking at him. "It wasn't much of
a place. Although you can't tell these days. I sold sixty acres eight
years ago for two thousand dollars, and the folks that bought it are
getting a thousand a day out of it."
She sighed. She had touched the hem of fortune's garment and passed on;
for some opportunity knocked but faintly, and for others it burst open
the door and forced its way in.
"I'd be a millionaire now if I'd held on," she said somberly. That day
Bassett engaged a car by the day, he to drive it himself and return it
in good condition, the garage to furnish tires.
"I'd just like to say one thing," the owner said, as he tried the gears.
"I don't know where you're going, and it's not exactly my business. Here
in the oil country, where they're cutting each other's throats for new
leases, we let a man alone. But if you've any idea of taking that car by
the back road to the old fire station where Jud Clark's supposed to have
spent the winter, I'll just say this: we've had two stuck up there for a
week, and the only way I see to get them back is a cyclone."
"I'm going to Dry River," Bassett said shortly.
"Dry River's right, if you're looking for oil! Go easy on the brakes,
old man. We need 'em in our business."
Dry River was a small settlement away from the railroad. It consisted
of two intersecting unpaved streets, a dozen or so houses, a closed and
empty saloon and two general stores. He chose one at random and found
that the old Livingstone place had been sold ten years ago, on the death
of its owner, Henry Livingstone.
"His brother from the East inherited it," said the storekeeper. "He came
and sold out, lock, stock and barrel. Not that there was much. A few
cattle and horses, and the stuff in the ranch house, which wasn't
valuable. There were a lot of books, and the brother gave them for a
library, but we haven't any building. The railroad isn't built this far
yet, and unless we get oil here it won't be."
"The brother inherited it, eh? Do you know the brother's name?"
"David, I think. He was a doctor back East somewhere."
"Then this Henry Livingstone wasn't married? Or at least had no
children?"
"He wasn't married. He was a sort of hermit. He'd been dead two days
before any one knew it. My wife went out when they found him and got him
ready for the funeral. He was buried before the brother got here." He
glanced at Bassett shrewdly. "The place has been prospected for oil, and
there's a dry hole on the next ranch. I tell my wife nature's like the
railroad. It quit before it got this far."
Bassett's last scruple had fled. The story was there, ready for the
gathering. So ready, indeed, that he was almost suspicious of his luck.
And that conviction, that things were coming too easy, persisted through
his interview with the storekeeper's wife, in the small house behind the
store. She was a talkative woman, eager to discuss the one drama in
a drab life, and she showed no curiosity as to the reason for his
question.
"Henry Livingstone!" she said. "Well, I should say so. I went out right
away when we got the word he was dead, and there I stayed until it was
all over. I guess I know as much about him as any one around here does,
for I had to go over his papers to find out who his people were."
The papers, it seemed, had not been very interesting; canceled checks
and receipted bills, and a large bundle of letters, all of them from a
brother named David and a sister who signed herself Lucy. There had
been a sealed one, too, addressed to David Livingstone, and to be opened
after his death. She had had her husband wire to "David" and he had come
out, too late for the funeral.
"Do you remember when that was?"
"Let me see. Henry Livingstone died about a month before the murder at
the Clark ranch. We date most things around here from that time."
"How long did 'David' stay?" Bassett had tried to keep his tone
carefully conversational, but he saw that it was not necessary. She was
glad of a chance to talk.
"Well, I'd say about three or four weeks. He hadn't seen his brother for
years, and I guess there was no love lost. He sold everything as quick
as he could, and went back East." She glanced at the clock. "My husband
will be in soon for dinner. I'd be glad to have you stay and take a meal
with us."
The reporter thanked her and declined.
"It's an interesting story," he said. "I didn't tell your husband, for
I wasn't sure I was on the right trail. But the David and Lucy business
eliminates this man. There's a piece of property waiting in the East
for a Henry Livingstone who came to this state in the 80's, or for his
heirs. You can say positively that this man was not married?"
"No. He didn't like women. Never had one on the place. Two ranch hands
that are still at the Wassons' and himself, that was all. The Wassons
are the folks who bought the ranch."
No housekeeper then, and no son born out of wedlock, so far as any
evidence went. All that glib lying in the doctor's office, all that
apparent openness and frankness, gone by the board! The man in the
cabin, reported by Maggie Donaldson, had been David Livingstone.
Somehow, some way, he had got Judson Clark out of the country and
spirited him East. Not that the how mattered just yet. The essential
fact was there, that David Livingstone had been in this part of the
country at the time Maggie Donaldson had been nursing Judson Clark in
the mountains.
Bassett sat back and chewed the end of his cigar thoughtfully. The
sheer boldness of the scheme which had saved Judson Clark compelled his
admiration, but the failure to cover the trail, the ease with which he
had picked it up, made him suspicious.
He rose and threw away his cigar.
"You say this David went East, when he had sold out the place. Do you
remember where he lived?"
"Some town in eastern Pennsylvania. I've forgotten the name."
"I've got to be sure I'm wrong, and then go ahead," he said, as he got
his hat. "I'll see those men at the ranch, I guess, and then be on my
way. How far is it?"
It was about ten miles, along a bad road which kept him too much
occupied for any connected thought. But his sense of exultation
persisted. He had found Judson Clark.
Dick's decision to cut himself off from Elizabeth was born of his
certainty that he could not see her and keep his head. He was resolutely
determined to keep his head, until he knew what he had to offer her. But
he was very unhappy. He worked sturdily all day and slept at night out
of sheer fatigue, only to rouse in the early morning to a conviction
of something wrong before he was fully awake. Then would come the
uncertainty and pain of full consciousness, and he would lie with his
arms under his head, gazing unblinkingly at the ceiling and preparing to
face another day.
There was no prospect of early relief, although David had not again
referred to his going away. David was very feeble. The look of him
sometimes sent an almost physical pain through Dick's heart. But there
were times when he roused to something like his old spirit, shouted for
tobacco, frowned over his diet tray, and fought Harrison Miller when he
came in to play cribbage in much his old tumultuous manner.
Then, one afternoon late in May, when for four days Dick had not seen
Elizabeth, suddenly he found the decision as to their relation taken out
of his hands, and by Elizabeth herself.
He opened the door one afternoon to find her sitting alone in the
waiting-room, clearly very frightened and almost inarticulate. He could
not speak at all at first, and when he did his voice, to his dismay, was
distinctly husky.
"Is anything wrong?" he asked, in a tone which was fairly sepulchral.
"That's what I want to know, Dick."
Suddenly he found himself violently angry. Not at her, of course. At
everything.
"Wrong?" he said, savagely. "Yes. Everything is wrong!"
Then he was angry! She went rather pale.
"What have I done, Dick?"
As suddenly as he had been fierce he was abject and ashamed. Startled,
too.
"You?" he said. "What have you done? You're the only thing that's right
in a wrong world. You—"
He checked himself, put down his bag—he had just come in—and closed
the door into the hall. Then he stood at a safe distance from her, and
folded his arms in order to be able to keep his head-which shows how
strange the English language is.
"Elizabeth," he said gravely. "I've been a self-centered fool. I stayed
away because I've been in trouble. I'm still in trouble, for that
matter. But it hasn't anything to do with you. Not directly, anyhow."
"Don't you think it's possible that I know what it is?"
"You do know."
He was too absorbed to notice the new maturity in her face, the brooding
maternity born of a profound passion. To Elizabeth just then he was not
a man, her man, daily deciding matters of life and death, but a worried
boy, magnifying a trifle into importance.
"There is always gossip," she said, "and the only thing one can do is to
forget it at once. You ought to be too big for that sort of thing."
"But—suppose it is true?"
"What difference would it make?"
He made a quick movement toward her.
"There may be more than that. I don't know, Elizabeth," he said, his
eyes on hers. "I have always thought—I can't go to David now."
He was moved to go on. To tell her of his lost youth, of that strange
trick by which his mind had shut off those hidden years. But he could
not. He had a perfectly human fear of being abnormal in her eyes,
precisely but greatly magnified the same instinct which had made him
inspect his new tie in daylight for fear it was too brilliant. But
greater than that was his new fear that something neither happy nor
right lay behind him under lock and key in his memory.
"I want you to know this, Dick," she said. "That nothing, no gossip or
anything, can make any difference to me. And I've been terribly hurt.
We've been such friends. You—I've been lying awake at night, worrying."
That went to his heart first, and then to his head. This might be all,
all he was ever to have. This hour, and this precious and tender child,
so brave in her declaration, so simple and direct; all his world in that
imitation mahogany chair.
"You're all I've got," he said. "The one real thing in a world that's
going to smash. I think I love you more than God."
The same mood, of accepting what he had without question and of refusing
to look ahead, actuated him for the next few days. He was incredibly
happy.
He went about his work with his customary care and thoroughness, for
long practice had made it possible for him to go on as though nothing
had happened, to listen to querulous complaints and long lists of
symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled prescriptions which
were, so hopefully, to cure. Not that Dick himself believed greatly in
those empirical doses, but he considered that the expectation of relief
was half the battle. But that was the mind of him, which went about
clothed in flesh, of course, and did its daily and nightly work, and put
up a very fair imitation of Doctor Richard Livingstone. But hidden away
was a heart that behaved in a highly unprofessional manner, and sang
and dreamed, and jumped at the sight of a certain small figure on the
street, and generally played hob with systole and diastole, and the
vagus and accelerator nerves. Which are all any doctor really knows
about the heart, until he falls in love.
He even began to wonder if he had read into the situation something
that was not there, and in this his consciousness of David's essential
rectitude helped him. David could not do a wrong thing, or an unworthy
one. He wished he were more like David.
The new humility extended to his love for Elizabeth. Sometimes, in his
room or shaving before the bathroom mirror, he wondered what she could
see in him to care about. He shaved twice a day now, and his face was so
sore that he had to put cream on it at night, to his secret humiliation.
When he was dressed in the morning he found himself once or twice
taking a final survey of the ensemble, and at those times he wished very
earnestly that he had some outstanding quality of appearance that she
might admire.
He refused to think. He was content for a time simply to feel, to be
supremely happy, to live each day as it came and not to look ahead. And
the old house seemed to brighten with him. Never had Lucy's window boxes
been so bright, or Minnie's bread so light; the sun poured into David's
sick room and turned the nurse so dazzling white in her uniform that
David declared he was suffering from snow-blindness.