He put his arm around his wife and held her to him.

“Don’t worry about Jim, mother,” he said.  “He’s all right fundamentally.  He’s going through the bad time between being a boy and being a man.  He’s a good boy.”

He watched her moving up the stairs, his eyes tender and solicitous.  To him she was just “mother.”  He had never thought of another woman in all their twenty-four years together.

Elizabeth waited near him, her eyes on his face.

“Is it Dick?” she asked in a low tone.

“Yes.”

“You don’t mind, daddy, do you?”

“I only want you to be happy,” he said rather hoarsely.  “You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded, and turned up her face to be kissed.  He knew that she had no doubt whatever that this interview was to seal her to Dick Livingstone for ever and ever.  She fairly radiated happiness and confidence.  He left her standing there going back to the living-room closed the door.

XIX

Louis Bassett, when he started to the old Livingstone ranch, now the Wasson place, was carefully turning over in his mind David’s participation in the escape of Judson Clark.  Certain phases of it were quite clear, provided one accepted the fact that, following a heavy snowfall, an Easterner and a tenderfoot had gone into the mountains alone, under conditions which had caused the posse after Judson Clark to turn back and give him up for dead.

Had Donaldson sent him there, knowing he was a medical man?  If he had, would Maggie Donaldson not have said so?  She had said “a man outside that she had at first thought was a member of the searching party.”  Evidently, then, Donaldson had not prepared her to expect medical assistance.

Take the other angle.  Say David Livingstone had not been sent for.  Say he knew nothing of the cabin or its occupants until he stumbled on them.  He had sold the ranch, distributed his brother’s books, and apparently the townspeople at Dry River believed that he had gone back home.  Then what had taken him, clearly alone and having certainly given the impression of a departure for the East, into the mountains?  To hunt?  To hunt what, that he went about it secretly and alone?

Bassett was inclined to the Donaldson theory, finally.  John Donaldson would have been wanting a doctor, and not wanting one from Norada.  He might have heard of this Eastern medical man at Dry River, have gone to him with his story, even have taken him part of the way.  The situation was one that would have a certain appeal.  It was possible, anyhow: 

But instead of clarifying the situation Bassett’s visit at the Wasson place brought forward new elements which fitted neither of the hypotheses in his mind.

To Wasson himself, whom he met on horseback on the road into the ranch, he gave the same explanation he had given to the store-keeper’s wife.  Wasson was a tall man in chaps and a Stetson, and he was courteously interested.