The Breaking Point Part 41

"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. d.i.c.k 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 d.a.m.ned 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 d.i.c.k, 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 pa.s.sive. He had done his best, and he had failed. It was out of his hands now, and in the hands of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d would have to take it on, and do the best He could. But he added that if G.o.d did not save d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k--"

"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 impa.s.sive face, but with intense interest, for by that time he knew d.i.c.k'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 pa.s.sions of men to love and hate and the disorder they brought with them.

x.x.xI

"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.