His voice trailed off.  In the stillness David sat, touching with tender tremulous fingers what might be Dick’s last message, and gazing at the picture of Dick in his uniform.  He knew what they all thought, that Dick was dead and that he held his final words in his hands, but his militant old spirit refused to accept that silent verdict.  Dick might be dead to them, but he was living.  He looked around the room defiantly, resentfully.  Of all of them he was the only one to have faith, and he was bound to a chair.  He knew them.  They would sit down supinely and grieve, while time passed and Dick fought his battle alone.

No, by God, he would not be bound to a chair.  He raised himself and stood, swaying on his shaking legs.

“You’ve given up,” he said scornfully.  “You make a few days’ search, and then you quit.  It’s easy to say he’s dead, and so you say he’s dead.  I’m going out there myself, and I’ll make a search—­”

He collapsed into the chair again, and looked at them with shamed, appealing eyes.  Bassett was the first to break the silence, speaking in a carefully emotionless tone.

“I haven’t given up for a minute.  I’ve given up the search, because he’s beyond finding just now.  Either he’s got away, or he is—­well, beyond help.  We have to go on the hypothesis that he got away, and in that case sooner or later you’ll hear from him.  He’s bound to remember you in time.  The worst thing is this charge against him.”

“He never killed Howard Lucas,” David said, in a tone of conviction.  “Harrison, read Mr. Bassett my statement to you.”

Bassett took the statement home with him that night, and studied it carefully.  It explained a great deal that had puzzled him before; Mrs. Wasson’s story and David’s arrival at the mountain cabin.  But most of all it explained why the Thorwald woman had sent him after Dick.  She knew then, in spite of her protests to David, that Jud Clark had not killed Lucas.

He paced the floor for an hour or two, sunk in thought, and then unlocked a desk drawer and took out his bankbook.  He had saved a little money.  Not much, but it would carry him over if he couldn’t get another leave of absence.  He thought, as he put the book away and prepared for bed, that it was a small price to pay for finding Clifton Hines and saving his own soul.

XXXIV

Dick had written his note, and placed it where Bassett would be certain to see it.  Then he found his horse and led him for the first half mile or so of level ground before the trail began to descend.  He mounted there, for he knew the animal could find its way in the darkness where he could not.

He felt no weariness and no hunger, although he had neither slept nor eaten for thirty-odd hours, and as contrasted with the night before his head was clear.  He was able to start a train of thought and to follow it through consecutively for the first time in hours.  Thought, however, was easier than realization, and to add to his perplexity, he struggled to place Bassett and failed entirely.  He remained a mysterious and incomprehensible figure, beginning and ending with the trail.