The Breaking Point Part 44

Outside, on the street, the man with the cigar struck a match and looked at his watch. Then he walked briskly toward the railway station. A half hour later he walked into the offices of the Times-Republican and to the night editor's desk.

"h.e.l.lo, Ba.s.sett," said that gentleman. "We thought you were dead. Well, how about the sister in California? It was the Clark story, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Ba.s.sett, noncommittally.

"And it blew up on you! Well, there were others who were fooled, too.

You had a holiday, anyhow."

"Yes, I had a holiday," said Ba.s.sett, and going over to his own desk began to sort his vast acc.u.mulation of mail. Sometime later he found the night editor at his elbow.

"Did you get anything on the Clark business at all?" he asked. "Williams thinks there's a page in it for Sunday, anyhow. You've been on the ground, and there's a human interest element in it. The last man who talked to Clark; the ranch to-day. That sort of thing."

Ba.s.sett went on doggedly sorting his mail.

"You take it from me," he said, "the story's dead, and so is Clark. The Donaldson woman was crazy. That's all."

x.x.xIII

David was brought home the next day, a shrivelled and aged David, but with a fighting fire in his eyes and a careful smile at the station for the group of friends who met him.

David had decided on a course and meant to follow it. That course was to protect d.i.c.k's name, and to keep the place he had made in the world open for him. Not even to Lucy had he yet breathed the terror that was with him day and night, that d.i.c.k had reached the breaking point and had gone back. But he knew it was possible. Lauler had warned him against shocks and trouble, and looking back David could see the gradually acc.u.mulating pressure against that mental wall of d.i.c.k's subconscious building; overwork and David's illness, his love affair and Jim Wheeler's tragedy, and coming on top of that, in some way he had not yet learned, the knowledge that he was Judson Clark and a fugitive from the law. The work of ten years perhaps undone.

Both David and Lucy found the home-coming painful. Harrison Miller rode up with them from the station, and between him and Doctor Reynolds David walked into his house and was a.s.sisted up the stairs. At the door of d.i.c.k's room he stopped and looked in, and then went on, his face set and rigid. He would not go to bed, but sat in his chair while about him went on the bustle of the return, the bringing up of trunks and bags; but the careful smile was gone, and his throat, now so much too thin for his collar, worked convulsively.

He had got Harrison Miller's narrative from him on the way from the station, and it had only confirmed his suspicions.

"He had been in a stupor all day," Miller related, "and was being cared for by a man named Ba.s.sett. I daresay that's the man Gregory had referred to. He may have become suspicious of Ba.s.sett. I don't know. But a chambermaid recognized him as he was making his escape, and raised an alarm. He got a horse out of the courtyard of the hotel, and not a sign of him has been found since."

"It wasn't Ba.s.sett who raised the alarm?"

"No, apparently not. The odd thing is that this Ba.s.sett disappeared, too, the same night. I called up his paper yesterday, but he hasn't shown up."

And with some small amplifications, that is all there was to it.

Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David called Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.

"It is my hope," he said, "to carry on exactly as though d.i.c.k might walk in to-morrow and take his place again. As I hold to my belief in G.o.d, so I hold to my conviction that he will come back, and that before I--before long. But our friends will be asking where he is and what he is doing, and we would better agree on that beforehand. What we'd better say is simply that d.i.c.k was called away on business connected with some property in the West. They may not believe it, but they'll hardly disprove it."

So the benevolent conspiracy to protect d.i.c.k Livingstone's name was arranged, and from that time on the four of them who were a party to it turned to the outside world an unbroken front of loyalty and courage.

Even to Minnie, anxious and red-eyed in her kitchen, Lucy gave the same explanation while she arranged David's tray.

"He has been detained in the West on business," Lucy said.

"He might have sent me a postcard. And he hasn't written Doctor Reynolds at all."

"He has been very busy. Get the sugar bowl, Minnie. He'll be back soon, I'm sure."

But Minnie did not immediately move.

"He'd better come soon if he wants to see Doctor David," she said, with twitching lips. "And I'll just say this, Mrs. Crosby. The talk that's going on in this town is something awful."

"I don't want to hear it," Lucy said firmly.

She ate alone, painfully remembering that last gay little feast before they started away. But before she sat down she did a touching thing. She rang the bell and called Minnie.

"After this, Minnie," she said, "we will always set Doctor Richard's place. Then, when he comes--"

Her voice broke and Minnie, scenting a tragedy but ignorant of it, went back to her kitchen to cry into the roller towel. Her world was gone to pieces. By years of service to the one family she had no other world, no home, no ties. She was with the Livingstones, but not one of them. Alone in her kitchen she felt lonely and cut off. She thought that David, had he not been ill, would have told her.

Lucy found David moving about upstairs some time later, and when she went up she found him sitting in d.i.c.k's room, on a stiff chair inside the door. She stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder, but he did not say anything, and she went away.

That night David had a caller. All evening the bell had been ringing, and the little card tray on the hatrack was filled with visiting cards.

There were gifts, too, flowers and jellies and some squab from Mrs.

Sayre. Lucy had seen no one, excusing herself on the ground of fatigue, but the man who came at nine o'clock was not inclined to be turned away.

"You take this card up to Doctor Livingstone, anyhow," he said. "I'll wait."

He wrote in pencil on the card, placing it against the door post to do so, and pa.s.sed it to Minnie. She calmly read it, and rather defiantly carried it off. But she came down quickly, touched by some contagion of expectation from the room upstairs.

"Hang your hat on the rack and go on up."

So it was that David and the reporter met, for the first time, in David's old fas.h.i.+oned chamber, with its walnut bed and the dresser with the marble top, and d.i.c.k's picture in his uniform on the mantle.

Ba.s.sett was shocked at the sight of David, shocked and alarmed. He was uncertain at first as to the wisdom of telling his startling story to an obviously sick man, but David's first words rea.s.sured him.

"Come in," he said. "You are the Ba.s.sett who was with Doctor Livingstone at Norada?"

"Yes. I see you know about it."

"We know something, not everything." Suddenly David's pose deserted him.

He got up and stood very straight, searching eyes on his visitor. "Is he living?" he asked, in a low voice.

"I think so. I'm not certain."

"Then you don't know where he is?"

"No. He got away--but you know that. Sit down, doctor. I've got a long story to tell."

"I'll get you to call my sister first," David said. "And tell her to get Harrison Miller. Mr. Miller is our neighbor, and he very kindly went west when my health did not permit me to go."

While they waited David asked only one question.

"The report we have had is that he was in a stupor in the hotel, and the doctor who saw him--you got him, I think--said he appeared to have been drinking heavily. Is that true? He was not a drinking man."

"I am quite sure he had not."