The Breaking Point (20 page)

"You look as though you'd struck oil," said the night clerk.

"Oil! I'll tell you what I have struck. I've struck a livery stable
saddle two million times in the last two days."

The clerk grinned, and Bassett idly pulled the register toward him.

"J. Smith, Minneapolis," he read. Then he stopped and stared. Richard
Livingstone was registered on the next line above.

Dick had found it hard to leave Elizabeth, for she clung to him in her
grief with childish wistfulness. He found, too, that her family depended
on him rather than on Leslie Ward for moral support. It was to him that
Walter Wheeler looked for assurance that the father had had no indirect
responsibility 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 her
anxious questionings. Had Jim suffered? Could they have avoided it? And
an insistent demand to know who and what had been the girl who was with
him.

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 to
find the answer to that question. But when he found it he could not
tell them. The girl had been a dweller in the shady byways of life, had
played her small unmoral part and gone on, perhaps to some place where
men were kinder and less urgent. Dick did not judge her. He saw her, as
her 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 brick
rooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather uncomfortably
for 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 with
the light step of the overfleshed, only to pause in the doorway and to
stare 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 the
door 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 mistaking
me for, and I'm not hiding from the police. Here's my card, and I
have come from the family of a young man named Wheeler, who was killed
recently in an automobile accident."

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

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

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

On the third day after Jim's funeral he started for Norada. An interne
from a local hospital, having newly finished his service there, had
agreed to take over his work for a time. But Dick was faintly jealous
when he installed Doctor Reynolds in his office, and turned him over to
a 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 to
have the spare room. She did not like the way things were going, she
confided to Mike. Why wasn't she to let on to Mrs. Crosby that Doctor
Dick had gone away? Or to the old doctor? Both of them away, and that
little upstart in the office ready to steal their patients and hang out
his own sign the moment they got back!

Unused to duplicity as he was, Dick found himself floundering along an
extremely crooked path. He wrote a half dozen pleasant, non-committal
letters to David and Lucy, spending an inordinate time on them, and
gave them to Walter Wheeler to mail at stated intervals. But his chief
difficulty was with Elizabeth. Perhaps he would have told her; there
were times when he had to fight his desire to have her share his anxiety
as well as know the truth about him. But she was already carrying the
burden of Jim's tragedy, and her father, too, was insistent that she be
kept in ignorance.

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

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

Elizabeth went to the station to see him off, a small slim thing in
a black frock, with eyes that persistently sought his face, and a
determined smile. He pulled her arm through his, so he might hold her
hand, and when he found that she was wearing her ring he drew her even
closer, 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 the
other. As when she asserted that she was sure she would always know the
moment he stopped thinking about her, and he stopped, with any number of
people about, and said:

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

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

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

Three days later he reached Norada, and registered at the Commercial
Hotel. The town itself conveyed nothing to him. He found it totally
unfamiliar, 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 brought
with it a fresh influx of prospectors, riggers, and lease buyers. The
hotel was crowded.

That was his first disappointment. He had been nursing the hope that
surroundings which he must once have known well would assist him in
finding himself. That was the theory, he knew. He stood at the window of
his hotel room, with its angular furniture and the Gideon Bible, and for
the 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 the
names 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 was
increased, rather than diminished, in the new surroundings. He would,
of course, go to the ranch at Dry River, and begin his inquiries from
there, but not until now had he realized what that would mean; his
recognition by people he could not remember, the questions he could not
answer.

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

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

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

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

With that off his mind, and the need of exercise after the trip
insistent, he took his hat and wandered out into the town. The main
street was crowded; moving picture theaters were summoning their evening
audiences with bright lights and colored posters, and automobiles lined
the curb. But here and there an Indian with braids and a Stetson hat, or
a cowpuncher from a ranch in boots and spurs reminded him that after all
this 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 a
sense of the familiar. Surely he had stood here before, had seen the
court-house on its low hill, the row of frame houses in small gardens
just across the street. It seemed infinitely long ago, but very real.
He even remembered dimly an open place at the other side of the building
where the ranchmen tied their horses. To test himself he walked around.
Yes, it was there, but no horses stood there now, heads drooping, bridle
reins thrown loosely over the rail. Only a muddy automobile, without
lights, and a dog on guard beside it.

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

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

He felt a little cheered as he turned back toward the hotel. A few
encounters with the things of his youth, and perhaps the cloud would
clear away. Already the court-house had stirred some memories. And on
turning back down the hill he had another swift vision, photographically
distinct but unrelated to anything that had preceded or followed it. It
was like a few feet cut from a moving picture film.

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

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

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

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

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

When, much later, Dick was able calmly to review that day, he found his
recollection of it confused by the events that followed, but one thing
stood out as clearly as his later knowledge of the almost incredible
fact that for one entire day and for the evening of another, he had
openly appeared in Norada and had not been recognized. That fact was his
discovery that the Livingstone ranch house had no place in his memory
whatever.

He had hired a car and a driver, a driver who asserted that this was
the old Livingstone ranch house. And it bore no resemblance, not the
faintest, to the building he remembered. It did not lie where it should
have 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. He
ordered the car to turn and go back, and for the first and only time he
was filled with bitter resentment against David. David had fooled him.
He sat beside the driver, his face glowering and his eyes hot, and let
his indignation burn in him like a flame.

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