“Why?”

“I’d like to fill the gap.  Attempt it anyhow.”

What he was thinking about, as he sat by David’s bedside, was David’s attitude toward that threatened return of his.  For David had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons.  Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear.  David afraid!  David, whose life and heart were open books!  David, whose eyes never wavered, nor his courage!

“You let well enough alone, Dick,” he had finished.  “You’ve got everything you want.  And a medical man can’t afford to go gadding about.  When people want him they want him.”

But he had noticed that David had been different, since.  He had taken to following him with his faded old eyes, had even spoken once of retiring and turning all the work over to him.  Was it possible that David did not want him to go back to Norada?

He bent over and felt the sick man’s pulse.  It was stronger, not so rapid.  The mechanical act took him back to his first memory of David.

He had been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David, beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling his pulse.  He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now that he had been very ill.  The cabin had been a small and lonely one, with snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold.  During the day a woman kept up the fire.  Her name was Maggie, and she moved about the cabin like a thin ghost.  At night she slept in a lean-to shed and David kept the fire going.  A man who seemed to know him well—­John Donaldson, he learned, was his name—­was Maggie’s husband, and every so often he came, about dawn, and brought food and supplies.

After a long time, as he grew stronger, Maggie had gone away, and David had fried the bacon and heated the canned tomatoes or the beans.  Before she left she had written out a recipe for biscuits, and David would study over it painstakingly, and then produce a panfull of burned and blackened lumps, over which he would groan and agonize.

He himself had been totally incurious.  He had lived a sort of animal life of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative excursions around the room on legs that shook when he walked.  The snows came and almost covered the cabin, and David had read a great deal, and talked at intervals.  David had tried to fill up the gap in his mind.  That was how he learned that David was his father’s brother, and that his father had recently died.

Going over it all now, it had certain elements that were not clear.  They had, for instance, never gone hack to the ranch at all.  With the first clearing of the snow in the spring John Donaldson had appeared again, leading two saddled horses and driving a pack animal, and they had started off, leaving him standing in the clearing and gazing after them.  But they had not followed Donaldson’s trail.  They had started West, over the mountains, and David did not know the country.  Once they were lost for three days.