“Bill and Jake are still here,” he said.  “They’re probably in for dinner now, and I’ll see you get a chance to talk to them.  I took them over with the ranch.  Property, you say?  Well, I hope it’s better land than he had here.”

He turned his horse and rode beside the car to the house.

“Comes a little late to do Henry Livingstone much good,” he said.  “He’s been lying in the Dry River graveyard for about ten years.  Not much mourned either.  He was about as close-mouthed and uncompanionable as they make them.”

The description Wasson had applied to Henry Livingstone, Bassett himself applied to the two ranch hands later on, during their interview.  It could hardly have been called an interview at all, indeed, and after a time Bassett realized that behind their taciturnity was suspicion.  They were watching him, undoubtedly; he rather thought, when he looked away, that once or twice they exchanged glances.  He was certain, too, that Wasson himself was puzzled.

“Speak up, Jake,” he said once, irritably.  “This gentleman has come a long way.  It’s a matter of some property.”

“What sort of property?” Jake demanded.  Jake was the spokesman of the two.

“That’s not important,” Bassett observed, easily.  “What we want to know is if Henry Livingstone had any family.”

“He had a brother.”

“No one else?”

“Then it’s up to me to trail the brother,” Bassett observed.  “Either of you remember where he lived?”

“Somewhere in the East.”

Bassett laughed.

“That’s a trifle vague,” he commented good-humoredly.  “Didn’t you boys ever mail any letters for him?”

He was certain again that they exchanged glances, but they continued to present an unbroken front of ignorance.  Wasson was divided between irritation and amusement.

“What’d I tell you?” he asked.  “Like master like man.  I’ve been here ten years, and I’ve never got a word about the Livingstones out of either of them.”

“I’m a patient man.”  Bassett grinned.  “I suppose you’ll admit that one of you drove David Livingstone to the train, and that you had a fair idea then of where he was going?”

He looked directly at Jake, but Jake’s face was a solid mask.  He made no reply whatever.

From that moment on Bassett was certain that David had not been driven away from the ranch at all.  What he did not know, and was in no way to find out, was whether the two ranch hands knew that he had gone into the mountains, or why.  He surmised back of their taciturnity a small mystery of their own, and perhaps a fear.  Possibly David’s going was as much a puzzle to them as to him.  Conceivably, during the hours together on the range, or during the winter snows, for ten years they had wrangled and argued over a disappearance as mysterious in its way as Judson Clark’s.

He gave up at last, having learned certain unimportant facts:  that the recluse had led a lonely life; that he had never tried to make the place more than carry itself; that he was a student, and that he had no other peculiarities.