The Breaking Point (32 page)

"I sometimes wonder-" Nina began one day, and stopped.

"Wonder what?"

"Oh, well, I suppose I might as well go on. Do you ever think that if
Dick had gone back, as they say he has, that there might be somebody
else?"

"Another girl, you mean?"

"Yes. Some one he knew before."

Nina was watching her. Sometimes she almost burst with the drama she
was suppressing. She had been a small girl when Judson Clark had
disappeared, but even at twelve she had known something of the story.
She wanted frantically to go about the village and say to them: "Do you
know who has been living here, whom you used to patronize? Judson Clark,
one of the richest men in the world!" She built day dreams on that
foundation. He would come back, for of course he would be found and
acquitted, and buy the Sayre place perhaps, or build a much larger one,
and they would all go to Europe in his yacht. But she knew now that the
woman Leslie had sent his flowers to had loomed large in Dick's past,
and she both hated and feared her. Not content with having given her,
Nina, some bad hours, she saw the woman now possibly blocking her
ambitions for Elizabeth.

"What I'm getting at is this," she said, examining her polished nails
critically. "If it does turn out that there was somebody, you'd have to
remember that it was all years and years ago, and be sensible."

"I only want him back," Elizabeth said. "I don't care how he comes, so
he comes."

Louis Bassett had become a familiar figure in the village life by that
time. David depended on him with a sort of wistful confidence that
set him to grinding his teeth occasionally in a fury at his own
helplessness. And, as the extent of the disaster developed, as he saw
David failing and Lucy ageing, and when in time he met Elizabeth, the
feeling of his own guilt was intensified.

He spent hours studying the case, and he was chiefly instrumental in
sending Harrison Miller back to Norada in September. He had struck up a
friendship with Miller over their common cause, and the night he was to
depart that small inner group which was fighting David's battle for
him formed a board of strategy in Harrison's tidy living-room; Walter
Wheeler and Bassett, Miller and, tardily taken into their confidence,
Doctor Reynolds.

The same group met him on his return, sat around with expectant faces
while he got out his tobacco and laid a sheaf of papers on the table,
and waited while their envoy, laying Bassett's map on the table,
proceeded carefully to draw in a continuation of the trail beyond the
pass, some sketchy mountains, and a small square.

"I've got something," he said at last. "Not much, but enough to work
on. Here's where you lost him, Bassett." He pointed with his pencil.
"He went on for a while on the horse. Then somehow he must have lost the
horse, for he turned up on foot, date unknown, in a state of exhaustion
at a cabin that lies here. I got lost myself, or I'd never have found
the place. He was sick there for weeks, and he seems to have stayed on
quite a while after he recovered, as though he couldn't decide what to
do next."

Walter Wheeler stirred and looked up.

"What sort of condition was he in when he left?"

"Very good, they said."

"You're sure it was Livingstone?"

"The man there had a tree fall on him. He operated. I guess that's the
answer."

He considered the situation.

"It's the answer to more than that," Reynolds said slowly. "It shows he
had come back to himself. If he hadn't he couldn't have done it."

"And after that?" some one asked.

"I lost him. He left to hike to the railroad, and he said nothing of his
plans. If I'd been able to make open inquiries I might have turned
up something, but I couldn't. It's a hard proposition. I had trouble
finding Hattie Thorwald, too. She'd left the hotel, and is living with
her son. She swears she doesn't know where Clifton Hines is, and hasn't
seen him for years."

Bassett had been listening intently, his head dropped forward.

"I suppose the son doesn't know about Hines?"

"No. She warned me. He was surly and suspicious. The sheriff had sent
for him and questioned him about how you got his horse, and I gathered
that he thought I was a detective. When I told him I was a friend of
yours, he sent you a message. You may be able to make something out of
it. I can't. He said: 'You can tell him I didn't say anything about the
other time.'"

Bassett sat forward.

"The other time?"

"He is under the impression that his mother got the horse for you once
before, about ten days before Clark escaped. At night, also."

"Not for me," Bassett said decisively. "Ten days before that I was—" he
got out his notebook and consulted it. "I was on my way to the cabin
in the mountains, where the Donaldsons had hidden Jud Clark. I hired a
horse at a livery stable."

"Could the Thorwald woman have followed you?"

"Why the devil should she do that?" he asked irritably. "She didn't know
who I was. She hadn't a chance at my papers, for I kept them on me. If
she did suspect I was on the case, a dozen fellows had preceded me, and
half of them had gone to the cabin."

"Nevertheless," he finished, "I believe she did. She or Hines himself.
There was some one on a horse outside the cabin that night."

There was silence in the room, Harrison Miller thoughtfully drawing at
random on the map before him. Each man was seeing the situation from his
own angle; to Reynolds, its medical interest, and the possibility of
his permanency in the town; to Walter Wheeler, Elizabeth's spoiled young
life; to Harrison Miller, David; and to the reporter a conviction that
the clues he now held should lead him somewhere, and did not.

Before the meeting broke up Miller took a folded manuscript from the
table and passed it to Bassett.

"Copy of the Coroner's inquiry, after the murder," he said. "Thought it
might interest you..."

Then, for a time, that was all. Bassett, poring at home over the inquest
records, and finding them of engrossing interest, saw the futility of
saving a man who could not be found. And even Nina's faith, that the
fabulously rich could not die obscurely, began to fade as the summer
waned. She restored some of her favor to Wallie Sayre, and even listened
again to his alternating hopes and fears.

And by the end of September he felt that he had gained real headway with
Elizabeth. He had come to a point where she needed him more than she
realized, where the call in her of youth for youth, even in trouble, was
insistent. In return he felt his responsibility and responded to it. In
the vernacular of the town he had "settled down," and the general trend
of opinion, which had previously disapproved him, was now that Elizabeth
might do worse.

On a crisp night early in October he had brought her home from Nina's,
and because the moon was full they sat for a time on the steps of the
veranda, Wallie below her, stirring the dead leaves on the walk with his
stick, and looking up at her with boyish adoring eyes when she spoke.
He was never very articulate with her, and her trouble had given her a
strange new aloofness that almost frightened him. But that night, when
she shivered a little, he reached up and touched her hand.

"You're cold," he said almost roughly. He was sometimes rather savage,
for fear he might be tender.

"I'm not cold. I think it's the dead leaves."

"Dead leaves?" he repeated, puzzled. "You're a queer girl, Elizabeth.
Why dead leaves?"

"I hate the fall. It's the death of the year."

"Nonsense. It's going to bed for a long winter's nap. That's all. I'll
bring you a wrap."

He went in, and came out in a moment with her father's overcoat.

"Here," he said peremptorily, "put this on. I'm not going to be called
on the carpet for giving you a sniffle."

She stood up obediently and he put the big coat around her. Then,
obeying an irresistible impulse, he caught her to him. He released her
immediately, however, and stepped back.

"I love you so," he stammered. "I'm sorry. I'll not do it again."

She was startled, but not angry.

"I don't like it," was all she said. And because she did not want him to
think she was angry, she sat down again. But the boy was shaken. He got
out a cigarette and lighted it, his hands trembling. He could not think
of anything to say. It was as though by that one act he had cut a bridge
behind him and on the other side lay all the platitudes, the small give
and take of their hours together. What to her was a regrettable incident
was to him a great dramatic climax. Boylike, he refused to recognize its
unimportance to her. He wanted to talk about it.

"When you said just now that you didn't like what I did just then, do
you mean you didn't like me to do it? Or that you don't care for that
sort of thing? Of course I know," he added hastily, "you're not that
kind of girl. I—"

He turned and looked at her.

"You know I'm still in love with you, don't you, Elizabeth?"

She returned his gaze frankly.

"I don't see how you can be when you know what you do know."

"I know how you feel now. But I know that people don't go on loving
hopelessly all their lives. You're young. You've got"—he figured
quickly—"you've got about fifty-odd years to live yet, and some of
these days you'll be—not forgetting," he changed, when he saw her quick
movement. "I know you'll not forget him. But remembering and loving are
different."

"I wonder," she said, her eyes on the moon, and full of young tragedy.
"If they are, if one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love
without remembering?"

He stared at her.

"You're too deep for me sometimes," he said. "I'm not subtle, Elizabeth.
I daresay I'm stupid in lots of things. But I'm not stupid about this.
I'm not trying to get a promise, you know. I only want you to know how
things are. I don't want to know why he went away, or why he doesn't
come back. I only want you to face the facts. I'd be good to you," he
finished, in a low tone. "I'd spend my life thinking of ways to make you
happy."

She was touched. She reached down and put her hand on his shoulder.

"You deserve the best, Wallie. And you're asking for a second best. Even
that—I'm just not made that way, I suppose. Fifty years or a hundred,
it would be all the same."

"You'd always care for him, you mean?"

"Yes. I'm afraid so."

When he looked at her her eyes had again that faraway and yet flaming
look which he had come to associate with her thoughts of Dick. She
seemed infinitely removed from him, traveling her lonely road past
loving outstretched hands and facing ahead toward—well, toward fifty
years of spinsterhood. The sheer waste of it made him shudder.

"You're cold, too, Wallie," she said gently. "You'd better go home."

He was about to repudiate the idea scornfully, when he sneezed! She got
up at once and held out her hand.

"You are very dear to feel about me the way you do" she said, rather
rapidly. "I appreciate your telling me. And if you're chilly when you
get home, you'd better take some camphor."

He saw her in, hat in hand, and then turned and stalked up the street.
Camphor, indeed! But so stubborn was hope in his young heart that before
he had climbed the hill he was finding comfort in her thought for him.

Mrs. Sayre had been away for a week, visiting in Michigan, and he had
not expected her for a day or so. To his surprise he found her on the
terrace, wrapped in furs, and evidently waiting for him.

"I wasn't enjoying it," she explained, when he had kissed her. "It's
a summer place, not heated to amount to anything, and when it turned
cold—where have you been to-night?"

"Dined at the Wards', and then took Elizabeth home."

"How is she?"

"She's all right."

"And there's no news?"

He knew her very well, and he saw then that she was laboring under
suppressed excitement.

"What's the matter, mother? You're worried about something, aren't you?"

"I have something to tell you. We'd better go inside." He followed her
in, unexcited and half smiling. Her world was a small one, of minor
domestic difficulties, of not unfriendly gossip, of occasional money
problems, investments and what not. He had seen her hands tremble over a
matter of a poorly served dinner. So he went into the house, closed the
terrace window and followed her to the library. When she closed the door
he recognized her old tactics when the servants were in question.

"Well?" he inquired. "I suppose—" Then he saw her face. "Sorry, mother.
What's the trouble?"

"Wallie, I saw Dick Livingstone in Chicago."

During August Dick had labored in the alfalfa fields of Central
Washington, a harvest hand or "working stiff" among other migratory
agricultural workers. Among them, but not entirely of them. Recruited
from the lowest levels as men grade, gathered in at a slave market on
the coast, herded in bunk houses alive with vermin, fully but badly fed,
overflowing with blasphemy and filled with sullen hate for those above
them in the social scale, the "stiffs" regarded him with distrust from
the start.

In the beginning he accepted their sneers with a degree of philosophy.
His physical condition was poor. At night he ached intolerably,
collapsing into his wooden bunk to sleep the dreamless sleep of utter
exhaustion. There were times when he felt that it would be better
to return at once to Norada and surrender, for that he must do so
eventually he never doubted. It was as well perhaps that he had no time
for brooding, but he gained sleep at the cost of superhuman exertion all
day.

A feeling of unreality began to obsess him, so that at times he felt
like a ghost walking among sweating men, like a resurrection into life,
but without life. And more than once he tried to sink down to the level
of the others, to unite himself again with the crowd, to feel again the
touch of elbows, the sensation of fellowship. The primal instinct of the
herd asserted itself, the need of human companionship of any sort.