“No.  He didn’t like women.  Never had one on the place.  Two ranch hands that are still at the Wassons’ and himself, that was all.  The Wassons are the folks who bought the ranch.”

No housekeeper then, and no son born out of wedlock, so far as any evidence went.  All that glib lying in the doctor’s office, all that apparent openness and frankness, gone by the board!  The man in the cabin, reported by Maggie Donaldson, had been David Livingstone.  Somehow, some way, he had got Judson Clark out of the country and spirited him East.  Not that the how mattered just yet.  The essential fact was there, that David Livingstone had been in this part of the country at the time Maggie Donaldson had been nursing Judson Clark in the mountains.

Bassett sat back and chewed the end of his cigar thoughtfully.  The sheer boldness of the scheme which had saved Judson Clark compelled his admiration, but the failure to cover the trail, the ease with which he had picked it up, made him suspicious.

He rose and threw away his cigar.

“You say this David went East, when he had sold out the place.  Do you remember where he lived?”

“Some town in eastern Pennsylvania.  I’ve forgotten the name.”

“I’ve got to be sure I’m wrong, and then go ahead,” he said, as he got his hat.  “I’ll see those men at the ranch, I guess, and then be on my way.  How far is it?”

It was about ten miles, along a bad road which kept him too much occupied for any connected thought.  But his sense of exultation persisted.  He had found Judson Clark.

XVI

Dick’s decision to cut himself off from Elizabeth was born of his certainty that he could not see her and keep his head.  He was resolutely determined to keep his head, until he knew what he had to offer her.  But he was very unhappy.  He worked sturdily all day and slept at night out of sheer fatigue, only to rouse in the early morning to a conviction of something wrong before he was fully awake.  Then would come the uncertainty and pain of full consciousness, and he would lie with his arms under his head, gazing unblinkingly at the ceiling and preparing to face another day.

There was no prospect of early relief, although David had not again referred to his going away.  David was very feeble.  The look of him sometimes sent an almost physical pain through Dick’s heart.  But there were times when he roused to something like his old spirit, shouted for tobacco, frowned over his diet tray, and fought Harrison Miller when he came in to play cribbage in much his old tumultuous manner.

Then, one afternoon late in May, when for four days Dick had not seen Elizabeth, suddenly he found the decision as to their relation taken out of his hands, and by Elizabeth herself.

He opened the door one afternoon to find her sitting alone in the waiting-room, clearly very frightened and almost inarticulate.  He could not speak at all at first, and when he did his voice, to his dismay, was distinctly husky.