A detailed description of Judson Clark, and a photograph of him accompanied the story.  Bassett re-read the article carefully, and swore a little, under his breath.  If he had needed confirmation of his suspicions, it lay to his hand.  But the situation had changed over night.  There would be a search for Clark now, as wide as the knowledge of his disappearance.  Local police authorities would turn him up in every city from Maine to the Pacific coast.  Even Europe would be on the lookout and South America.

But it was not the police he feared so much as the press.  Not all of the papers, but some of them, would go after that story, and send their best men on it.  It offered not so much a chance of solution as an opportunity to revive the old dramatic story.  He could see, when he closed his eyes, the local photographers climbing to that cabin and later sending its pictures broadcast, and divers gentlemen of the press, eager to pit their wits against ten years of time and the ability of a once conspicuous man to hide from the law, packing their suitcases for Norada.

No, he couldn’t stop now.  He would go on, like the others, and with this advantage, that he was morally certain he could lay his hands on Clark at any time.  But he would have to prove his case, connect it.  Who, for instance, was the other man in the cabin?  He must have known who the boy was who lay in that rough bunk, delirious.  Must have suspected anyhow.  That made him, like the Donaldsons, accessory after the fact, and criminally liable.  Small chance of him coming out with any confession.  Yet he was the connecting link.  Must be.

On his third reading the reporter began to visualize the human elements of the fight to save the boy; he saw moving before him the whole pitiful struggle; the indomitable ranch manager, his heart-breaking struggle with the blizzard, the shooting of his horse, the careful disarming of suspicion, and later the intrepid woman, daring that night ride through snow that had sent the posse back to its firesides to the boy, locked in the cabin and raving.

His mind was busy as he packed his suitcase.  Already he had forgotten his compunctions of the early morning; he moved about methodically, calculating roughly what expense money he would need, and the line of attack, if any, required at the office.  Between Norada and that old brick house at Haverly lay his story.  Ten years of it.  He was closing his bag when he remembered the little girl in the blue dress, at the theater.  He straightened and scowled.  After a moment he snapped the bag shut.  Damn it all, if Clark had chosen to He up with a girl, that was on Clark’s conscience, not his.

But he was vaguely uncomfortable.

“It’s a queer world, Joe,” he observed to the waiter, who had come in for the breakfast dishes.

“Yes, sir.  It is that,” said Joe.

XII