Part 51

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.

XXIV

Bassett was astounded when he saw Dick's signature on the hotel register. It destroyed, in one line, every theory he held. That Judson Clark should return to Norada after his flight was incredible. Ten years was only ten years after all. It was not a lifetime. There were men in the town who had known Clark well.

Nevertheless for a time he held to his earlier conviction, even fought for it. He went so far as to wonder if Clark had come back for a tardy surrender. Men had done that before this, had carried a burden for years, had reached the breaking point, had broken. But he dismissed that. There had been no evidence of breaking in the young man in the office chair. He found himself thrown back, finally, on the story of the Wasson woman, and wondering if he would have to accept it after all.

The reaction from his certainty in the cabin to uncertainty again made him fretful and sleepless. It was almost morning before he relaxed on his hard hotel bed enough to sleep.

He wakened late, and telephoned down for breakfast. His confusion had not decreased with the night, and while he got painfully out of bed and prepared to shave and dress, his thoughts were busy. There was no doubt in his mind that, in spite of the growth of the town, the newcomer would be under arrest almost as soon as he made his appearance. A resemblance that could deceive Beverly Carlysle's brother could deceive others, and would. That he had escaped so long amazed him.

By the time he had bathed he had developed a sort of philosophic acceptance of the new situation. There would be no exclusive story now, no scoop. The events of the next few hours were for every man to read. He shrugged his shoulders as, partially dressed, he carried his shaving materials into the better light of his bedroom.

With his face partially lathered he heard a knock at the door, and sang out a not uncheerful “Come in.” It happened, then, that it was in his mirror that he learned that his visitor was not the waiter, but Livingstone himself. He had an instant of stunned amazement before he turned.