When Ba.s.sett could apparently find nothing to say he went on:
"You say I may be arrested if I go out on the street. And you rather more than intimate that a woman named Beverly Carlysle is mixed up in it somehow. I take it that I knew her."
"Yes. You knew her," Ba.s.sett said slowly. At the intimation in his tone d.i.c.k surveyed him for a moment without speaking. His face, pale before, took on a grayish tinge.
"I wasn"t--married to her?"
"No. You didn"t marry her. See here, Clark, this is straight goods, is it? You"re not trying to put something over on me? Because if you are, you needn"t. I"d about made up my mind to follow the story through for my own satisfaction, and then quit cold on it. When a man"s pulled himself out of the mud as you have it"s not my business to pull him down. But I don"t want you to pull any bunk."
d.i.c.k winced.
"Out of the mud!" he said. "No. I"m telling you the truth, Ba.s.sett. I have some fragmentary memories, places and people, but no names, and all of them, I imagine from my childhood. I pick up at a cabin in the mountains, with snow around, and David Livingstone feeding me soup with a tin spoon." He tried to smile and failed. His face twitched. "I could stand it for myself," he said, "but I"ve tied another life to mine, like a cursed fool, and now you speak of a woman, and of arrest. Arrest! For what?"
"Suppose," Ba.s.sett said after a moment, "suppose you let that go just now, and tell me more about this--this gap. You"re a medical man. You"ve probably gone into your own case pretty thoroughly. I"m accepting your statement, you see. As a matter of fact it must be true, or you wouldn"t be here. But I"ve got to know what I"m doing before I lay my cards on the table. Make it simple, if you can. I don"t know your medical jargon."
d.i.c.k did his best. The mind closed down now and then, mainly from a shock. No, there was no injury required. He didn"t think he had had an injury. A mental shock would do it, if it were strong enough. And fear.
It was generally fear. He had never considered himself braver than the other fellow, but no man liked to think that he had a cowardly mind.
Even if things hadn"t broken as they had, he"d have come back before he went to the length of marriage, to find out what it was he had been afraid of. He paused then, to give Ba.s.sett a chance to tell him, but the reporter only said: "Go on, you put your cards on the table, and then I"ll lay mine out."
d.i.c.k went on. He didn"t blame Ba.s.sett. If there was something that was in his line of work, he understood. At the same time he wanted to save David anything unpleasant. (The word "unpleasant" startled Ba.s.sett, by its very inadequacy.) He knew now that David had built up for him an ident.i.ty that probably did not exist, but he wanted Ba.s.sett to know that there could never be doubt of David"s high purpose and his essential fineness.
"Whatever I was before." he finished simply, "and I"ll get that from you now, if I am any sort of a man at all it is his work."
He stood up and braced himself. It had been clear to Ba.s.sett for ten minutes that d.i.c.k was talking against time, against the period of revelation. He would have it, but he was mentally bracing himself against it.
"I think," he said, "I"ll have that whisky now."
Ba.s.sett 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 c.o.c.k 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.
d.i.c.k put down the gla.s.s.
"I"m ready, if you are."
"Does the name of Clark recall anything to you?"
"Nothing."
"Judson Clark? Jud Clark?"
d.i.c.k pa.s.sed 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, Ba.s.sett found himself now seeking for hope of escape in the very situation that had previously irritated him, in the story he had heard at Wa.s.son"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 ident.i.ty 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 d.i.c.k, 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.
"I suppose," he said at last, "that if I ran away I was in pretty serious trouble. What was it?"
"We"ve got no absolute proof that you are Clark, remember. You don"t know, and Maggie Donaldson was considered not quite sane before she died. I"ve told you there"s a chance you are the other man."
"All right. What had Clark done?"
"He had shot a man."
The reporter was instantly alarmed. If d.i.c.k had been haggard before, he was ghastly now. He got up slowly and held to the back of his chair.
"Not--murder?" he asked, with stiff lips.
"No," Ba.s.sett said quickly. "Not at all. See here, you"ve had about all you can stand. Remember, we don"t even know you are Clark. All I said was--"
"I understand that. It was murder, wasn"t it?"
"Well, there had been a quarrel, I understand. The law allows for that, I think."
d.i.c.k went slowly to the window, and stood with his back to Ba.s.sett. For a long time the room was quiet. In the street below long lines of cars in front of the hotel denoted the luncheon hour. An Indian woman with a child in the shawl on her back stopped in the street, looked up at d.i.c.k and extended a beaded belt. With it still extended she continued to stare at his white face.
"The man died, of course?" he asked at last, without turning.
"Yes. I knew him. He wasn"t any great loss. It was at the Clark ranch.
I don"t believe a conviction would be possible, although they would try for one. It was circ.u.mstantial evidence."
"And I ran away?"
"Clark ran away," Ba.s.sett corrected him. "As I"ve told you, the authorities here believe he is dead."
After an even longer silence d.i.c.k turned.
"I told you there was a girl. I"d like to think out some way to keep the thing from her, before I surrender myself. If I can protect her, and David--"
"I tell you, you don"t even know you are Clark."
"All right. If I"m not, they"ll know. If I am--I tell you I"m not going through the rest of my life with a thing like that hanging over me.