The Breaking Point (29 page)

"We're following him up, little sister," he said. "Harrison Miller has
gone out, and there's enough talk as it is."

She thought, lying in her bed at night, that they were all too afraid
of what people might say. It seemed so unimportant to her. And she could
not understand the conspiracy of silence. Other men went away and were
not heard from, and the police were notified and the papers told. It
seemed to her, too, that every one, her father and Nina and Leslie and
even Harrison Miller, knew more than she did.

There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when Harrison
Miller came back from seeing David, and before he went west. Leslie had
been there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut her out. And her
father had not been the same since.

He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger. Not at
her, however. He was very gentle with her.

And here was a curious thing. She had always felt that she knew when
Dick was thinking of her. All at once, and without any warning, there
would come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of surrounding
and encircling sense of protection. Rather like what she had felt as a
little girl when she had run home through the terrors of twilight, and
closed the house door behind her. She was in the warm and lighted house,
safe and cared for.

That was completely gone. It was as though the warm and lighted house
of her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she was alone
outside, cold and frightened.

She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her alone.
The small gaieties of the summer were on, dinners, dances and picnics,
but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous. She could not, however,
avoid Mrs. Sayre. She tried to, at first, but that lady's insistence and
her own apathy made it easier to accept than to refuse. Then, after a
time, she found the house rather a refuge. She seldom saw Wallie, and
she found her hostess tactful, kindly and uninquisitive.

"Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,"
she would say. Or they would loot the green houses and, going in the car
to the cemetery, make of Jim's grave a thing of beauty and remembrance.

Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to the
day she had told him of her engagement. Mother and son, she began to
feel that only with them could she be herself. For the village, her chin
high as Nina had said. At home, assumed cheerfulness. Only at the house
on the hill could she drop her pose.

She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison
Miller. What she wanted that word to be she did not know. There were,
of course, times when she had to face the possibility that Dick had
deliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there had never been
any real reason why he should care for her. She was not clever and not
beautiful. Perhaps he had been disappointed in her, and this was the
thing they were concealing. Perhaps he had gone back to Wyoming and had
there found some one more worthy of im, some one who understood when he
talked about the things he did in his laboratory, and did not just sit
and listen with loving, rather bewildered eyes.

Then, one night at dinner, a telegram was brought in, and she knew it
was the expected word. She felt her mother's eyes on her, and she sat
very still with her hands clenched in her lap. But her father did not
read it at the table; he got up and went out, and some time later he
came to the door. The telegram was not in sight.

"That was from Harrison Miller," he said. "He has traced Dick to a hotel
at Norada, but he had left the hotel, and he hasn't got in touch with
him yet."

He went away then, and they heard the house door close.

Then, some days later, she learned that Harrison Miller was coming home,
and that David was being brought back. She saw that telegram from Mr.
Miller, and read into it failure and discouragement, and something more
ominous than either.

"Reach home Tuesday night. Nothing definite. Think safe."

"Think safe?" she asked, breathlessly. "Then he has been in danger? What
are you keeping from me?" And when no one spoke: "Oh, don't you see how
cruel it is? You are all trying to protect me, and you are killing me
instead."

"Not danger," her father said, slowly. "So far as we know, he is well.
Is all right." And seeing her face: "It is nothing that affects his
feeling for you, dear. He is thinking of you and loving you, wherever he
is. Only, we don't know where he is."

But when he came back on Tuesday, after seeing Harrison Miller, he was
discouraged and sick at heart. He went directly upstairs to his wife,
and shut the bedroom door.

"Not a trace," he said, in reply to the question in her eyes. "The
situation is as he outlined it in the letter. He elaborated, of course.
The fact is, and David will have to see it, that that statement of his
doesn't help at all, unless he can prove there is a Clifton Hines. And
even then it's all supposition. There's a strong sentiment out there
that Dick either killed himself or met with an accident and died in the
mountains. The horse wandered into town last week. I'll have to tell
her."

Over this possibility they faced each other, a tragic middle-aged pair,
helpless as is the way of middle-age before the attacks of life on their
young.

"It will kill her, Walter."

"She's young," he said sturdily. "She'll get over it."

But he did not think so, and she knew it.

"There is a rather queer element in it," he observed, after a time.
"Another man, named Bassett, disappeared the same night. His stuff is at
the hotel, but no papers to identify him. He had looked after Dick that
day when he was sick, and he simply vanished. He didn't take the train.
He was under suspicion for being with Dick, and the station was being
watched." But she was not interested in Bassett. The name meant nothing
to her. She harked back to the question that had been in both their
minds since they had read, in stupefied amazement, David's statement.

"In a way, Walter, it would be better, if he..."

"Why?"

"My little girl, and—Judson Clark!"

But he fought that sturdily. They had ten years of knowledge and respect
to build on. The past was past. All he prayed for was Dick's return, an
end to this long waiting. There would be no reservations in his welcome,
if only—

Some time later he went downstairs, to where Elizabeth sat waiting in
the library. He went like a man to his execution, and his resolution
nearly gave way when he saw her, small in her big chair and pathetically
patient. He told her the story as guardedly as he could. He began with
Dick's story to him, about his forgotten youth, and went on carefully
to Dick's own feeling that he must clear up that past before he married.
She followed him carefully, bewildered a little and very tense.

"But why didn't he tell me?"

"He saw it as a sort of weakness. He meant to when he came back."

He fought Dick's fight for him valiantly, stressing certain points
that were to prepare her for others to come. He plunged, indeed, rather
recklessly into the psychology of the situation, and only got out of the
unconscious mind with an effort. But behind it all was his overwhelming
desire to save her pain.

"You must remember," he said, "that Dick's life before this happened,
and since, are two different things. Whatever he did then should not
count against him now."

"Of course not," she said. "Then he—had done something?"

"Yes. Something that brought him into conflict with the authorities."

She did not shrink from that, and he was encouraged to go on.

"He was young then, remember. Only twenty-one or so. And there was a
quarrel with another man. The other man was shot."

"You mean Dick shot him?"

"Yes. You understand, don't you," he added anxiously, "that he doesn't
remember doing it?"

In spite of his anxiety he was forced to marvel at the sublime faith
with which she made her comment, through lips that had gone white.

"Then it was either an accident, or he deserved shooting," she said. But
she inquired, he thought with difficulty, "Did he die?"

He could not lie to her. "Yes," he said.

She closed her eyes, but a moment later she was fighting her valiant
fight again for Dick.

"But they let him go," she protested. "Men do shoot in the West, don't
they? There must have been a reason for it. You know Dick as well as I
do. He couldn't do a wrong thing."

He let that pass. "Nothing was done about it at the time," he said.
"And Dick came here and lived his useful life among us. He wouldn't have
known the man's name if he heard it. But do you see, sweetheart, where
this is taking us? He went back, and they tried to get him, for a thing
he didn't remember doing."

"Father!" she said, and went very white. "Is that where he is? In
prison?"

He tried to steady his voice.

"No, dear. He escaped into the mountains. But you can understand his
silence. You can understand, too, that he may feel he cannot come back
to us, with this thing hanging over him. What we have to do now is to
find him, and to tell him that it makes no difference. That he has his
place in the world waiting for him, and that we are waiting too."

When it was all over, her questions and his sometimes stumbling replies,
he saw that out of it all the one thing that mattered vitally to her was
that Dick was only a fugitive, and not dead. But she said, just before
they went, arm in arm, up the stairs:

"It is queer in one way, father. It isn't like him to run away."

He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.

"Then you didn't tell her about the woman in the case?"

"Certainly not. Why should I?"

Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at the
lack of masculine understanding.

"Because, whether you think it or not, she will resent and hate that as
she hates nothing else. Murder will be nothing, to that. And she will
have to know it some time."

He pondered her flat statement unhappily, standing by the window and
looking out into the shaded street, and a man who had been standing,
cigar in mouth, on a pavement across withdrew into the shadow of a tree
box.

"It's all a puzzle to me," he said, at last. "God alone knows how it
will turn out. Harrison Miller seems to think this Bassett, whoever he
is, could tell us something. I don't know."

He drew the shade and wound his watch. "I don't know," he repeated.

Outside, on the street, the man with the cigar struck a match and looked
at his watch. Then he walked briskly toward the railway station. A half
hour later he walked into the offices of the Times-Republican and to the
night editor's desk.

"Hello, Bassett," said that gentleman. "We thought you were dead. Well,
how about the sister in California? It was the Clark story, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Bassett, noncommittally.

"And it blew up on you! Well, there were others who were fooled, too.
You had a holiday, anyhow."

"Yes, I had a holiday," said Bassett, and going over to his own desk
began to sort his vast accumulation of mail. Sometime later he found the
night editor at his elbow.

"Did you get anything on the Clark business at all?" he asked. "Williams
thinks there's a page in it for Sunday, anyhow. You've been on the
ground, and there's a human interest element in it. The last man who
talked to Clark; the ranch to-day. That sort of thing."

Bassett went on doggedly sorting his mail.

"You take it from me," he said, "the story's dead, and so is Clark. The
Donaldson woman was crazy. That's all."

David was brought home the next day, a shrivelled and aged David, but
with a fighting fire in his eyes and a careful smile at the station for
the group of friends who met him.

David had decided on a course and meant to follow it. That course was to
protect Dick's name, and to keep the place he had made in the world open
for him. Not even to Lucy had he yet breathed the terror that was with
him day and night, that Dick had reached the breaking point and had gone
back. But he knew it was possible. Lauler had warned him against shocks
and trouble, and looking back David could see the gradually accumulating
pressure against that mental wall of Dick's subconscious building;
overwork and David's illness, his love affair and Jim Wheeler's tragedy,
and coming on top of that, in some way he had not yet learned, the
knowledge that he was Judson Clark and a fugitive from the law. The work
of ten years perhaps undone.

Both David and Lucy found the home-coming painful. Harrison Miller rode
up with them from the station, and between him and Doctor Reynolds David
walked into his house and was assisted up the stairs. At the door of
Dick's room he stopped and looked in, and then went on, his face set and
rigid. He would not go to bed, but sat in his chair while about him went
on the bustle of the return, the bringing up of trunks and bags; but
the careful smile was gone, and his throat, now so much too thin for his
collar, worked convulsively.

He had got Harrison Miller's narrative from him on the way from the
station, and it had only confirmed his suspicions.

"He had been in a stupor all day," Miller related, "and was being
cared for by a man named Bassett. I daresay that's the man Gregory had
referred to. He may have become suspicious of Bassett. I don't know. But
a chambermaid recognized him as he was making his escape, and raised an
alarm. He got a horse out of the courtyard of the hotel, and not a sign
of him has been found since."

"It wasn't Bassett who raised the alarm?"

"No, apparently not. The odd thing is that this Bassett disappeared,
too, the same night. I called up his paper yesterday, but he hasn't
shown up."