“I think,” he said, “I’ll have that whisky now.”

Bassett poured him a small drink, and took a turn about the room while he drank it.  He was perplexed and apprehensive.  Strange as the story was, he was convinced that he had heard the truth.  He had, now and then, run across men who came back after a brief disappearance, with a cock and bull story of forgetting who they were, and because nearly always these men vanished at the peak of some crisis they had always been open to suspicion.  Perhaps, poor devils, they had been telling the truth after all.  So the mind shut down, eh?  Closed like a grave over the unbearable!

His own part in the threatening catastrophe began to obsess him.  Without the warning from Gregory there would have been no return to Norada, no arrest.  It had all been dead and buried, until he himself had revived it.  And a girl, too!  The girl in the blue dress at the theater, of course.

Dick put down the glass.

“I’m ready, if you are.”

“Does the name of Clark recall anything to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Judson Clark?  Jud Clark?”

Dick passed his hand over his forehead wearily.

“I’m not sure,” he said.  “It sounds familiar, and then it doesn’t.  It doesn’t mean anything to me, if you get that.  If it’s a key, it doesn’t unlock.  That’s all.  Am I Judson Clark?”

Oddly enough, Bassett found himself now seeking for hope of escape in the very situation that had previously irritated him, in the story he had heard at Wasson’s.  He considered, and said, almost violently: 

“Look here, I may have made a mistake.  I came out here pretty well convinced I’d found the solution to an old mystery, and for that matter I think I have.  But there’s a twist in it that isn’t clear, and until it is clear I’m not going to saddle you with an identity that may not belong to you.  You are one of two men.  One of them is Judson Clark, and I’ll be honest with you; I’m pretty sure you’re Clark.  The other I don’t know, but I have reason to believe that he spent part of his time with Henry Livingstone at Dry River.”

“I went to the Livingstone ranch yesterday.  I remember my early home.  That wasn’t it.  Which one of these two men will be arrested if he is recognized?”

“Clark.”

“For what?”

“I’m coming to that.  I suppose you’ll have to know.  Another drink?  No?  All right.  About ten years ago, or a little less, a young chap called Judson Clark got into trouble here, and headed into the mountains in a blizzard.  He was supposed to have frozen to death.  But recently a woman named Donaldson made a confession on her deathbed.  She said that she had helped to nurse Clark in a mountain cabin, and that with the aid of some one unnamed he had got away.”

“Then I’m Clark.  I remember her, and the cabin.”

There was a short silence following that admission.  To Dick, it was filled with the thought of Elizabeth, and of her relation to what he was about to hear.  Again he braced himself for what was coming.