“Then you didn’t tell her about the woman in the case?”

“Certainly not.  Why should I?”

Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at the lack of masculine understanding.

“Because, whether you think it or not, she will resent and hate that as she hates nothing else.  Murder will be nothing, to that.  And she will have to know it some time.”

He pondered her flat statement unhappily, standing by the window and looking out into the shaded street, and a man who had been standing, cigar in mouth, on a pavement across withdrew into the shadow of a tree box.

“It’s all a puzzle to me,” he said, at last.  “God alone knows how it will turn out.  Harrison Miller seems to think this Bassett, whoever he is, could tell us something.  I don’t know.”

He drew the shade and wound his watch.  “I don’t know,” he repeated.

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.

“Hello, Bassett,” 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 Bassett, 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 Bassett, and going over to his own desk began to sort his vast accumulation 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.”

Bassett 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.”

XXXIII

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 Dick’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 Dick 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 accumulating pressure against that mental wall of Dick’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.