The stove lay in a shallow pit, filled with ancient ashes and crumbled bits of wood from the roof.  It lay on its side, its sheet-iron sides collapsed, its long chimney disintegrated.  He was in a heavy sweat before he had uncovered it and was able to remove it from its bed of ashes and pine needles.  This done, he brought his candle-lantern and settled himself cross-legged on the ground.

His first casual inspection of the ashes revealed nothing.  He set to work more carefully then, picking them up by handfuls, examining and discarding.  Within ten minutes he had in a pile beside him some burned and blackened metal buttons, the eyelets and a piece of leather from a shoe, and the almost unrecognizable nib of a fountain pen.

He sat with them in the palm of his hand.  Taken alone, each one was insignificant, proved nothing whatever.  Taken all together, they assumed vast proportions, became convincing, became evidence.

Late that night he descended stiffly at the livery stable, and turned his weary horse over to a stableman.

“Looks dead beat,” said the stableman, eyeing the animal.

“He’s got nothing on me,” Bassett responded cheerfully.  “Better give him a hot bath and put him to bed.  That’s what I’m going to do.”

He walked back to the hotel, glad to stretch his aching muscles.  The lobby was empty, and behind the desk the night clerk was waiting for the midnight train.  Bassett was wide awake by that time, and he went back to the desk and lounged against it.

“You look as though you’d struck oil,” said the night clerk.

“Oil!  I’ll tell you what I have struck.  I’ve struck a livery stable saddle two million times in the last two days.”

The clerk grinned, and Bassett idly pulled the register toward him.

“J.  Smith, Minneapolis,” he read.  Then he stopped and stared.  Richard Livingstone was registered on the next line above.

XXIII

Dick had found it hard to leave Elizabeth, for she clung to him in her grief with childish wistfulness.  He found, too, that her family depended on him rather than on Leslie Ward for moral support.  It was to him that Walter Wheeler looked for assurance that the father had had no indirect responsibility for the son’s death; it was to him that Jim’s mother, lying gray-faced and listless in her bed or on her couch, brought her anxious questionings.  Had Jim suffered?  Could they have avoided it?  And an insistent demand to know who and what had been the girl who was with him.

In spite of his own feeling that he would have to go to Norada quickly, before David became impatient over his exile, Dick took a few hours to find the answer to that question.  But when he found it he could not tell them.  The girl had been a dweller in the shady byways of life, had played her small unmoral part and gone on, perhaps to some place where men were kinder and less urgent.  Dick did not judge her.  He saw her, as her kind had been through all time, storm centers of the social world, passively and unconsciously blighting, at once the hunters and the prey.