“Until she can have the whole thing,” he said, with the new heaviness which had crept into his voice.

Beside that real trouble Dick’s looked dim and nebulous.  Other things could be set right; there was always a fighting chance.  It was only death that was final.

Elizabeth went to the station to see him off, a small slim thing in a black frock, with eyes that persistently sought his face, and a determined smile.  He pulled her arm through his, so he might hold her hand, and when he found that she was wearing her ring he drew her even closer, with a wave of passionate possession.

“You are mine.  My little girl.”

“I am yours.  For ever and ever.”

But they assumed a certain lightness after that, each to cheer the other.  As when she asserted that she was sure she would always know the moment he stopped thinking about her, and he stopped, with any number of people about, and said: 

“That’s simply terrible!  Suppose, when we are married, my mind turns on such a mundane thing as beefsteak and onions?  Will you simply walk out on me?”

He stood on the lowest step of the train until her figure was lost in the darkness, and the porter expostulated.  He was, that night, a little drunk with love, and he did not read the note she had thrust into his hand at the last moment until he was safely in his berth, his long figure stretched diagonally to find the length it needed.

“Darling, darling Dick,” she had written.  “I wonder so often how you can care for me, or what I have done to deserve you.  And I cannot write how I feel, just as I cannot say it.  But, Dick dear, I have such a terrible fear of losing you, and you are my life now.  You will be careful and not run any risks, won’t you?  And just remember this always.  Wherever you are and wherever I am, I am thinking of you and waiting for you.”

He read it three times, until he knew it by heart, and he slept with it in the pocket of his pajama coat.

Three days later he reached Norada, and registered at the Commercial Hotel.  The town itself conveyed nothing to him.  He found it totally unfamiliar, and for its part the town passed him by without a glance.  A new field had come in, twenty miles from the old one, and had brought with it a fresh influx of prospectors, riggers, and lease buyers.  The hotel was crowded.

That was his first disappointment.  He had been nursing the hope that surroundings which he must once have known well would assist him in finding himself.  That was the theory, he knew.  He stood at the window of his hotel room, with its angular furniture and the Gideon Bible, and for the first time he realized the difficulty of what he had set out to do.  Had he been able to take David into his confidence he would have had the names of one or two men to go to, but as things were he had nothing.

The almost morbid shrinking he felt from exposing his condition was increased, rather than diminished, in the new surroundings.  He would, of course, go to the ranch at Dry River, and begin his inquiries from there, but not until now had he realized what that would mean; his recognition by people he could not remember, the questions he could not answer.