The Breaking Point

  XXIII

  Dick had found it hard to leave Elizabeth, for she clung to him in hergrief with childish wistfulness. He found, too, that her family dependedon him rather than on Leslie Ward for moral support. It was to him thatWalter Wheeler looked for assurance that the father had had no indirectresponsibility 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 heranxious questionings. Had Jim suffered? Could they have avoided it? Andan insistent demand to know who and what had been the girl who was withhim.

  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 tofind the answer to that question. But when he found it he could nottell them. The girl had been a dweller in the shady byways of life, hadplayed her small unmoral part and gone on, perhaps to some place wheremen were kinder and less urgent. Dick did not judge her. He saw her, asher kind had been through all time, storm centers of the social world,passively and unconsciously blighting, at once the hunters and the prey.

  He secured her former address from the police, a three-story brickrooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather uncomfortablyfor the mistress of the place to see him. She came at last, a big woman,vast and shapeless and with an amiable loose smile, and she came in withthe light step of the overfleshed, only to pause in the doorway and tostare at him.

  "My God!" she said. "I thought you were dead!"

  "I'm afraid you're mistaking me for some one else, aren't you?"

  She looked at him carefully.

  "I'd have sworn--" she muttered, and turning to the button inside thedoor she switched on the light. Then she surveyed him again.

  "What's your name?"

  "Livingstone. Doctor Livingstone. I called--"

  "Is that for me, or for the police?"

  "Now see here," he said pleasantly. "I don't know who you are mistakingme for, and I'm not hiding from the police. Here's my card, and Ihave come from the family of a young man named Wheeler, who was killedrecently in an automobile accident."

  She took the card and read it, and then resumed her intent scrutiny ofhim.

  "Well, you fooled me all right," she said at last. "I thought youwere--well, never mind that. What about this Wheeler family? Are theygoing to settle with the undertaker? Because I tell you flat, I can'tand won't. She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes won't bring overseventy-five or a hundred dollars."

  As he left he was aware that she stood in the doorway looking afterhim. He drove home slowly in the car, and on the way he made up a kindlystory to tell the family. He could not let them know that Jim had beenseeking love in the byways of life. And that night he mailed a check inpayment of the undertaker's bill, carefully leaving the stub empty.

  On the third day after Jim's funeral he started for Norada. An internefrom a local hospital, having newly finished his service there, hadagreed to take over his work for a time. But Dick was faintly jealouswhen he installed Doctor Reynolds in his office, and turned him over toa mystified Minnie to look after.

  "Is he going to sleep in your bed?" she demanded belligerently.

  She was only partially mollified when she found Doctor Reynolds was tohave the spare room. She did not like the way things were going, sheconfided to Mike. Why wasn't she to let on to Mrs. Crosby that DoctorDick had gone away? Or to the old doctor? Both of them away, and thatlittle upstart in the office ready to steal their patients and hang outhis own sign the moment they got back!

  Unused to duplicity as he was, Dick found himself floundering along anextremely crooked path. He wrote a half dozen pleasant, non-committalletters to David and Lucy, spending an inordinate time on them, andgave them to Walter Wheeler to mail at stated intervals. But his chiefdifficulty was with Elizabeth. Perhaps he would have told her; therewere times when he had to fight his desire to have her share his anxietyas well as know the truth about him. But she was already carrying theburden of Jim's tragedy, and her father, too, was insistent that she bekept in ignorance.

  "Until she can have the whole thing," he said, with the new heavinesswhich had crept into his voice.

  Beside that real trouble Dick's looked dim and nebulous. Other thingscould be set right; there was always a fighting chance. It was onlydeath that was final.

  Elizabeth went to the station to see him off, a small slim thing ina black frock, with eyes that persistently sought his face, and adetermined smile. He pulled her arm through his, so he might hold herhand, and when he found that she was wearing her ring he drew her evencloser, 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 theother. As when she asserted that she was sure she would always know themoment he stopped thinking about her, and he stopped, with any number ofpeople about, and said:

  "That's simply terrible! Suppose, when we are married, my mind turns onsuch a mundane thing as beefsteak and onions? Will you simply walk outon me?"

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

  "Darling, darling Dick," she had written. "I wonder so often how you cancare for me, or what I have done to deserve you. And I cannot write howI feel, just as I cannot say it. But, Dick dear, I have such a terriblefear of losing you, and you are my life now. You will be careful and notrun any risks, won't you? And just remember this always. Wherever youare 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 itin the pocket of his pajama coat.

  Three days later he reached Norada, and registered at the CommercialHotel. The town itself conveyed nothing to him. He found it totallyunfamiliar, 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 broughtwith it a fresh influx of prospectors, riggers, and lease buyers. Thehotel was crowded.

  That was his first disappointment. He had been nursing the hope thatsurroundings which he must once have known well would assist him infinding himself. That was the theory, he knew. He stood at the window ofhis hotel room, with its angular furniture and the Gideon Bible, and forthe 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 thenames 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 wasincreased, rather than diminished, in the new surroundings. He would,of course, go to the ranch at Dry River, and begin his inquiries fromthere, but not until now had he realized what that would mean; hisrecognition by people he could not remember, the questions he could notanswer.

  He knew the letter to David from beginning to end, but he got it out andread it again. Who was this Bassett, and what mischief was he up to? Whyshould he himself be got out of town quickly and the warning burned? Whowas "G"? And why wouldn't the simplest thing be to locate this Bassetthimself?

  The more he considered that the more obvious it seemed as a solution,provided of course he could locate the man. Whether Bassett werefriendly or inimical, he was convinced that he knew or was finding outsomething concerning himself which David was keeping from him.

  He was relieved when he went down to the desk to find that his man wasregistered there, although the clerk reported him out of town. But thevery fact that only a few hours or days separated him from a solution ofthe mystery heartened him.

  He ate his dinner alone, unnoticed, and after dinner, in the writingroom, with its mission furniture and its traveling men copying orders,he wrote a letter to Elizabeth. Into it he put some of the things thatlay too deep for speech when he was
with her, and because he had so muchto say and therefore wrote extremely fast, a considerable portion ofit was practically illegible. Then, as though he could hurry the trainsEast, he put a special delivery stamp on it.

  With that off his mind, and the need of exercise after the tripinsistent, he took his hat and wandered out into the town. The mainstreet was crowded; moving picture theaters were summoning their eveningaudiences with bright lights and colored posters, and automobiles linedthe curb. But here and there an Indian with braids and a Stetson hat, ora cowpuncher from a ranch in boots and spurs reminded him that after allthis was the West, the horse and cattle country. It was still twilight,and when he had left the main street behind him he began to have asense of the familiar. Surely he had stood here before, had seen thecourt-house on its low hill, the row of frame houses in small gardensjust across the street. It seemed infinitely long ago, but very real.He even remembered dimly an open place at the other side of the buildingwhere the ranchmen tied their horses. To test himself he walked around.Yes, it was there, but no horses stood there now, heads drooping, bridlereins thrown loosely over the rail. Only a muddy automobile, withoutlights, and a dog on guard beside it.

  He spoke to the dog, and it came and sniffed at him. Then it squatted infront of him, looking up into his face.

  "Lonely, old chap, aren't you?" he said. "Well, you've got nothing onme."

  He felt a little cheered as he turned back toward the hotel. A fewencounters with the things of his youth, and perhaps the cloud wouldclear away. Already the court-house had stirred some memories. And onturning back down the hill he had another swift vision, photographicallydistinct but unrelated to anything that had preceded or followed it. Itwas like a few feet cut from a moving picture film.

  He was riding down that street at night on a small horse, and his fatherwas beside him on a tall one. He looked up at his father, and he seemedvery large. The largest man in the world. And the most important.

  It began and stopped there, and his endeavor to follow it furtherresulted in its ultimately leaving him. It faded, became less real,until he wondered if he had not himself conjured it. But that experiencetaught him something. Things out of the past would come or they wouldnot come, but they could not be forced. One could not will to revivethem.

  He stood at a window facing north that night, under the impressionit was east, and sent his love and an inarticulate sort of prayer toElizabeth, for her safety and happiness, in the general direction of theArctic Circle.

  Bassett had not returned in the morning, and he found himself with aday on his hands. He decided to try the experiment of visiting theLivingstone ranch, or at least of viewing it from a safe distance, withthe hope of a repetition of last night's experience. Of all his childishmemories the ranch house, next to his father, was most distinct. Whenhe had at various times tried to analyze what things he recalled he hadfound that what they lacked of normal memory was connection. They stoodout, like the one the night before, each complete in itself, brief, andhaving no apparent relation to what had gone before or what came after.

  But the ranch house had been different. The pictures were mostlysuperimposed on it; it was their background. Himself standing on themountain looking down at it, and his father pointing to it; the tutorwho was afraid of horses, sitting at a big table in a great wood-ceiledand wood-paneled room; a long gallery or porch along one side of thebuilding and rooms added on to the house so that one had to go along thegallery to reach them; a gun-room full of guns.

  When, much later, Dick was able calmly to review that day, he found hisrecollection of it confused by the events that followed, but one thingstood out as clearly as his later knowledge of the almost incrediblefact that for one entire day and for the evening of another, he hadopenly appeared in Norada and had not been recognized. That fact was hisdiscovery that the Livingstone ranch house had no place in his memorywhatever.

  He had hired a car and a driver, a driver who asserted that this wasthe old Livingstone ranch house. And it bore no resemblance, not thefaintest, to the building he remembered. It did not lie where it shouldhave lain. The mountains were too far behind it. It was not the house.The fields were not the proper fields. It was wrong, all wrong.

  He went no closer than the highway, because it was not necessary. Heordered the car to turn and go back, and for the first and only time hewas filled with bitter resentment against David. David had fooled him.He sat beside the driver, his face glowering and his eyes hot, and lethis indignation burn in him like a flame.

  Hours afterwards he had, of course, found excuses for David. Acceptedthem, rather, as a part of the mystery which wrapped him about. But theyhad no effect on the decision he made during that miserable ride back toNorada, when he determined to see the man Bassett and get the truth outof him if he had to choke it out.