“But why didn’t he tell me?”

“He saw it as a sort of weakness.  He meant to when he came back.”

He fought Dick’s fight for him valiantly, stressing certain points that were to prepare her for others to come.  He plunged, indeed, rather recklessly into the psychology of the situation, and only got out of the unconscious mind with an effort.  But behind it all was his overwhelming desire to save her pain.

“You must remember,” he said, “that Dick’s life before this happened, and since, are two different things.  Whatever he did then should not count against him now.”

“Of course not,” she said.  “Then he—­had done something?”

“Yes.  Something that brought him into conflict with the authorities.”

She did not shrink from that, and he was encouraged to go on.

“He was young then, remember.  Only twenty-one or so.  And there was a quarrel with another man.  The other man was shot.”

“You mean Dick shot him?”

“Yes.  You understand, don’t you,” he added anxiously, “that he doesn’t remember doing it?”

In spite of his anxiety he was forced to marvel at the sublime faith with which she made her comment, through lips that had gone white.

“Then it was either an accident, or he deserved shooting,” she said.  But she inquired, he thought with difficulty, “Did he die?”

He could not lie to her.  “Yes,” he said.

She closed her eyes, but a moment later she was fighting her valiant fight again for Dick.

“But they let him go,” she protested.  “Men do shoot in the West, don’t they?  There must have been a reason for it.  You know Dick as well as I do.  He couldn’t do a wrong thing.”

He let that pass.  “Nothing was done about it at the time,” he said.  “And Dick came here and lived his useful life among us.  He wouldn’t have known the man’s name if he heard it.  But do you see, sweetheart, where this is taking us?  He went back, and they tried to get him, for a thing he didn’t remember doing.”

“Father!” she said, and went very white.  “Is that where he is?  In prison?”

He tried to steady his voice.

“No, dear.  He escaped into the mountains.  But you can understand his silence.  You can understand, too, that he may feel he cannot come back to us, with this thing hanging over him.  What we have to do now is to find him, and to tell him that it makes no difference.  That he has his place in the world waiting for him, and that we are waiting too.”

When it was all over, her questions and his sometimes stumbling replies, he saw that out of it all the one thing that mattered vitally to her was that Dick was only a fugitive, and not dead.  But she said, just before they went, arm in arm, up the stairs: 

“It is queer in one way, father.  It isn’t like him to run away.”

He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.