“I am quite sure he had not.”

There was another question in David’s mind, but he did not put it.  He sat, with the patience of his age and his new infirmity, waiting for Lucy to bring Harrison Miller, and had it not been for the trembling of his hands Bassett would have thought him calm and even placid.

During the recital that followed somewhat later David did not move.  He sat silent, his eyes closed, his face set.

“That’s about all,” Bassett finished.  “He had been perfectly clear in his head all day, and it took headwork to get over the pass.  But, as I say, he had simply dropped ten years, and was back to the Lucas trouble.  I tried everything I knew, used your name and would have used the young lady’s, because sometimes that sort of thing strikes pretty deep, but I didn’t know it.  He was convinced after a while, but he was dazed, of course.  He knew it, that is, but he couldn’t comprehend it.

“I was done up, and I’ve cursed myself for it since, but I must have slept like the dead.  I wakened once, early in the night, and he was still sitting by the fire, staring at it.  I’ve forgotten to say that he had been determined all day to go back and give himself up, and the only way I prevented it was by telling him what a blow it would be to you and to the girl.  I wakened once and said to him, ‘Better get some sleep, old man.’  He did not answer at once, and then he said, ‘All right.’  I was dozing off when he spoke again.  He said, ’Where is Beverly Carlysle now?  Has she married again?’ ’She’s revived “The Valley,” and she’s in New York with it,’ I told him.

“When I wakened in the morning he was gone, but he’d left a piece of paper in a cleft stick beside me, with directions for reaching the railroad, and—­well, here it is.”

Bassett took from his pocket-book a note, and passed it over to David, who got out his spectacles with shaking hands and read it.  It was on Dick’s prescription paper, with his name at the top and the familiar Rx below it.  David read it aloud, his voice husky.

“Many thanks for everything, Bassett,” he read.  “I don’t like to leave you, but you’ll get out all right if you follow the map on the back of this.  I’ve had all night to think things out, and I’m leaving you because you are safer without me.  I realize now what you’ve known all day and kept from me.  That woman at the hotel recognized me, and they are after me.

“I can’t make up my mind what to do.  Ultimately I think I’ll go back and give myself up.  I am a dead man, anyhow, to all who might have cared, but I’ve got to do one or two things first, and I want to think things over.  One thing you’ve got a right to know.  I hated Lucas, but it never entered my head to kill him.  How it happened God only knows.  I don’t.”

It was signed “J.  C.”

Bassett broke the silence that followed the reading.

“I made every effort to find him.  I had to work alone, you understand, and from the west side of the range, not to arouse suspicion.  They were after me, too, you know.  His horse, I heard, worked its way back a few days ago.  It’s a forsaken country, and if he lost his horse he was in it on foot and without food.  Of course there’s a chance—­”