Part 25

On his third reading the reporter began to visualize the human elements of the fight to save the boy; he saw moving before him the whole pitiful struggle; the indomitable ranch manager, his heart-breaking struggle with the blizzard, the shooting of his horse, the careful disarming of suspicion, and later the intrepid woman, daring that night ride through snow that had sent the posse back to its firesides to the boy, locked in the cabin and raving.

His mind was busy as he packed his suitcase. Already he had forgotten his compunctions of the early morning; he moved about methodically, calculating roughly what expense money he would need, and the line of attack, if any, required at the office. Between Norada and that old brick house at Haverly lay his story. Ten years of it. He was closing his bag when he remembered the little girl in the blue dress, at the theater. He straightened and scowled. After a moment he snapped the bag shut. Damn it all, if Clark had chosen to tie up with a girl, that was on Clark's conscience, not his.

But he was vaguely uncomfortable.

“It's a queer world, Joe,” he observed to the waiter, who had come in for the breakfast dishes.

“Yes, sir. It is that,” said Joe.

XII

DURING all the long night Dick sat by David's bedside. Earlier in the evening there had been a consultation; David had suffered a light stroke, but there was no paralysis, and the prognosis was good. For this time, at least, David had escaped, but there must be no other time. He was to be kept quiet and free from worry, his diet was to be carefully regulated, and with care he still had long years before him.

David slept, his breathing heavy and slow. In the morning there would be a nurse, but that night Dick, having sent Lucy to bed, himself kept watch. On the walnut bed lay Doctor David's portly figure, dimly outlined by the shaded lamp, and on a chair drawn close sat Dick.

He was wide-awake and very anxious, but as time went on and no untoward symptoms appeared, as David's sleep seemed to grow easier and more natural, Dick's thoughts wandered. They went to Elizabeth first, and then on and on from that starting point, through the years ahead. He saw the old house with Elizabeth waiting in it for his return; he saw both their lives united and flowing on together, with children, with small cares, with the routine of daily living, and behind it all the two of them, hand in hand.

Then his mind turned on himself. How often in the past ten years it had done that! He had sat off, with a sort of professional detachment, and studied his own case. With the entrance into his world of the new science of psycho-analysis he had made now and then small, not very sincere, attempts to penetrate the veil of his own unconscious devising. Not very sincere, for with the increase of his own knowledge of the mind he had learned that behind such conditions as his lay generally, deeply hidden, the desire to forget. And that behind that there lay, acknowledged or not, fear.

“But to forget what?” he used to say to David, when the first text-books on the new science appeared, and he and David were learning the new terminology, Dick eagerly and David with contemptuous snorts of derision. “To forget what?”

“You had plenty to forget,” David would say, stolidly. “I think this man's a fool, but at that--you'd had your father's death, for one thing. And you'd gone pretty close to the edge of eternity yourself. You'd fought single-handed the worst storm of ten years, you came out of it with double pneumonia, and you lay alone in that cabin about fifty-six hours. Forget! You had plenty to forget.”

It had never occurred to Dick to doubt David's story. It did not, even now. He had accepted it unquestioningly from the first, supplemented the shadowy childish memories that remained to him with it, and gradually co-ordinating the two had built out of them his house of the past.

Thus, the elderly man whom he dimly remembered was not only his father; he was David's brother. And he had died. It was the shock of that death, according to David, that had sent him into the mountains, where David had followed and nursed him back to health.

It was quite simple, and even explicable by the new psychology. Not that he had worried about the new psychology in those early days. He had been profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious. It had been too much trouble even to think.

True, he had brought over from those lost years certain instincts and a few mental pictures. He had had a certain impatience at first over the restrictions of comparative poverty; he had had to learn the value of money. And the pictures he retained had had a certain opulence which the facts appeared to contradict. Thus he remembered a large ranch house, and innumerable horses, grazing in meadows or milling in a corral. But David had warned him early that there was no estate; that his future depended entirely on his own efforts.

Then the new life had caught and held him. For the first time he had mothering and love. Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern to which he meant to conform. He was happy and contented.

Now and then, in the early days, he had been conscious of a desire to go back and try to reconstruct his past again. Later on he knew that if he were ever to fill up the gap in his life, it would be easier in that environment of once familiar things. But in the first days he had been totally dependent on David, and money was none too plentiful. Later on, as the new life took hold, as he went to medical college and worked at odd clerical jobs in vacations to help pay his way, there had been no chance. Then the war came, and on his return there had been the practice, and his knowledge that David's health was not what it should have been.

But as time went on he was more and more aware that there was in him a peculiar shrinking from going back, an almost apprehension. He knew more of the mind than he had before, and he knew that not physical hardship, but mental stress, caused such lapses as his. But what mental stress had been great enough for such a smash? His father's death?

Strain and fear, said the new psychology. Fear? He had never found himself lacking in courage. Certainly he would have fought a man who called him a coward. But there was cowardice behind all such conditions as his; a refusal of the mind to face reality. It was weak. Weak. He hated himself for that past failure of his to face reality.

But that night, sitting by David's bed, he faced reality with a vengeance. He was in love, and he wanted the things that love should bring to a normal man. He felt normal. He felt, strengthened by love, that he could face whatever life had to bring, so long as also it brought Elizabeth.

Painfully he went back over his talk with David the preceding Sunday night.

“Don't be a fool,” David had said. “Go ahead and take her, if she'll have you. And don't be too long about it. I'm not as young as I used to be.”

“What I feel,” he had replied, “is this: I don't know, of course, if she cares.” David had grunted. “I do know I'm going to try to make her care, if it--if it's humanly possible. But I'd like to go back to the ranch again, David, before things go any further.”

“Why?”

“I'd like to fill the gap. Attempt it anyhow.”

What he was thinking about, as he sat by David's bedside, was David's attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear. David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose eyes never wavered, nor his courage!

“You let well enough alone, Dick,” he had finished. “You've got everything you want. And a medical man can't afford to go gadding about. When people want him they want him.”