He looked at the figure on the bed.  Only ten years, and yet at that time David had been vigorous, seemed almost young.  He had aged in that ten years.  On the bed he was an old man, a tired old man at that.  On that long ride he had been tireless.  He had taken the burden of the nightly camps, and had hacked a trail with his hatchet across snow fields while Dick, still weak but furiously protesting, had been compelled to stand and watch.

Now, with the perspective of time behind him, and with the clearly defined issue of David’s protest against his return to the West, he went again over the details of that winter and spring.  Why had they not taken Donaldson’s trail?  Or gone back to the ranch?  Why, since Donaldson could make it, had not other visitors come?  Another doctor, the night he almost died, and David sat under the lamp behind the close-screened windows, and read the very pocket prayer-book that now lay on the stand beside the bed?  Why had they burned his clothes, and Donaldson brought a new outfit?  Why did Donaldson, for all his requests, never bring a razor, so that when they struck the railroad, miles from anywhere, they were both full bearded?

He brought himself up sharply.  He had allowed his imagination to run away with him.  He had been depicting a flight and no one who knew David could imagine him in flight.

Nevertheless he was conscious of a new uneasiness and anxiety.  When David recovered sufficiently he would go to Norada, as he had told Elizabeth, and there he would find the Donaldsons, and clear up the things that bothered him.  After that—­

He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity.  He remembered her at the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious emotions, its counterfeit drama.  He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found her on the verge of tears.

“Just remember, they’re only acting,” he had said.

“Yes.  But life does do things like that to people.”

“Not often.  The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life.  You and I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things because we get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them.”

“Doesn’t anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?”

“A little jam, sometimes.  Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, on the carpet.”

“But that is tragedy, isn’t it?”

He had had to acknowledge that it might be.  But he had been quite emphatic over the fact that most people didn’t drop it.

After a long time he slept in his chair.  The spring wind came in through the opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book on the stand.

XIII

The week that followed was an anxious one.  David’s physical condition slowly improved.  The slight thickness was gone from his speech, and he sipped resignedly at the broths Lucy or the nurse brought at regular intervals.  Over the entire house there hung all day the odor of stewing chicken or of beef tea in the making, and above the doorbell was a white card which said:  “Don’t ring.  Walk in.”