They all knew what that meant.  It might be too late to start in.  Nina was crying hysterically, but Elizabeth could not cry.  She stood dry-eyed by the telephone, listening to Mrs. Sayre and Leslie, but hardly hearing them.  They had got Dick Livingstone and he had gone on in.  Mrs. Sayre was afraid it had been one of Wallie’s cars.  She had begged Wallie to tell Jim to be careful in it.  It had too much speed.

The telephone rang and Leslie took the receiver and pushed Elizabeth gently aside.  He listened for a moment.

“Very well,” he said.  Then he hung up and stood still before he turned around: 

“It isn’t very good news,” he said.  “I wish I could—­Elizabeth!”

Elizabeth had crumpled up in a small heap on the floor.

All through the long night that followed, with the movement of feet through the halls, with her mother’s door closing and the ghastly silence that followed it, with the dawn that came through the windows, the dawn that to Jim meant not a new day, but a new life beyond their living touch, all through the night Elizabeth was aware of two figures that came and went.  One was Dick, quiet, tender and watchful.  And one was of a heavy woman in a gaudy dress, her face old and weary in the morning light, who tended her with gentle hands.

She fell asleep as the light was brightening in the East, with Dick holding her hands and kneeling on the floor beside her bed.

It was not until the next day that they knew that Jim had not been alone.  A girl who was with him had been pinned under the car and had died instantly.

Jim had woven his bit in the pattern and passed on.  The girl was negligible; she was, she had been.  That was all.  But Jim’s death added the last element to the impending catastrophe.  It sent Dick West alone.

XXII

For several days after his visit to the Livingstone ranch Louis Bassett made no move to go to the cabin.  He wandered around the town, made promiscuous acquaintances and led up, in careful conversations with such older residents as he could find, to the Clark and Livingstone families.  Of the latter he learned nothing; of the former not much that he had not known before.

One day he happened on a short, heavy-set man, the sheriff, who had lost his office on the strength of Jud Clark’s escape, and had now recovered it.  Bassett had brought some whisky with him, and on the promise of a drink lured Wilkins to his room.  Over his glass the sheriff talked.

“All this newspaper stuff lately about Jud Clark being alive is dead wrong,” he declared, irritably.  “Maggie Donaldson was crazy.  You can ask the people here about her.  They all know it.  Those newspaper fellows descended on us here with a tooth-brush apiece and a suitcase full of liquor, and thought they’d get something.  Seemed to think we’d hold out on them unless we got our skins full.  But there isn’t anything to hold out.  Jud Clark’s dead.  That’s all.”