"That was from Harrison Miller," he said. "He has traced d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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 st.u.r.dily. "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 Ba.s.sett, disappeared the same night. His stuff is at the hotel, but no papers to identify him. He had looked after d.i.c.k that day when he was sick, and he simply vanished. He didn"t take the train.
He was under suspicion for being with d.i.c.k, and the station was being watched." But she was not interested in Ba.s.sett. 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 st.u.r.dily. They had ten years of knowledge and respect to build on. The past was past. All he prayed for was d.i.c.k"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 d.i.c.k"s story to him, about his forgotten youth, and went on carefully to d.i.c.k"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 d.i.c.k"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 d.i.c.k"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 d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k.
"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 d.i.c.k as well as I do. He couldn"t do a wrong thing."
He let that pa.s.s. "Nothing was done about it at the time," he said.
"And d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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. "G.o.d alone knows how it will turn out. Harrison Miller seems to think this Ba.s.sett, 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.