Part 53

“Concerning my uncle, or myself?”

“Are you trying to put it over on me that you don't know?”

“That's what I'm trying to do,” Dick said, with a sort of grave patience.

The reporter liked courage when he saw it, and he was compelled to a sort of reluctant admiration.

“You've got your courage with you,” he observed. “How long do you suppose it will be after you set foot on the streets of this town before you're arrested? How do you know I won't send for the police myself?”

“I know damned well you won't,” Dick said grimly. “Not before I'm through with you. You've chosen to interest yourself in me. I suppose you don't deny the imputation in that letter. You'll grant that I have a right to know who and what you are, and just what you are interested in.”

“Right-o,” the reporter said cheerfully, glad to get to grips; and to stop a fencing that was getting nowhere. “I'm connected with the Times-Republican, in your own fair city. I was in the theater the night Gregory recognized you. Verbum sap.”

“This Gregory is the 'G'?”

“Oh, quit it, Clark,” Bassett said, suddenly impatient. “That letter's the last proof I needed. Gregory wrote it after he'd seen David Livingstone. He wouldn't have written it if he and the old man hadn't come to an understanding. I've been to the cabin. My God, man, I've even got the parts of your clothing that wouldn't burn! You can thank Maggie Donaldson for that.”

“Donaldson,” Dick repeated. “That was it. I couldn't remember her name. The woman in the cabin. Maggie. And Jack. Jack Donaldson.”

He got up, and was apparently dizzy, for he caught at the table.

“Look here,” Bassett said, “let me give you a drink. You look all in.”

But Dick shook his head.

“No, thanks just the same. I'll ask you to be plain with me, Bassett. I am--I have become engaged to a girl, and--well, I want the story. That's all.”

And, when Bassett only continued to stare at him:

“I suppose I've begun wrong end first. I forgot about how it must seem to you. I dropped a block out of my life about ten years ago. Can't remember it. I'm not proud of it, but it's the fact. What I'm trying to do now is to fill in the gap. But I've got to, somehow. I owe it to the girl.”

When Bassett could apparently find nothing to say he went on:

“You say I may be arrested if I go out on the street. And you rather more than intimate that a woman named Beverly Carlysle is mixed up in it somehow. I take it that I knew her.”

“Yes. You knew her,” Bassett said slowly. At the intimation in his tone Dick surveyed him for a moment without speaking. His face, pale before, took on a grayish tinge.

“I wasn't--married to her?”

“No. You didn't marry her. See here, Clark, this is straight goods, is it? You're not trying to put something over on me? Because if you are, you needn't. I'd about made up my mind to follow the story through for my own satisfaction, and then quit cold on it. When a man's pulled himself out of the mud as you have it's not my business to pull him down. But I don't want you to pull any bunk.”

Dick winced.

“Out of the mud!” he said. “No. I'm telling you the truth, Bassett. I have some fragmentary memories, places and people, but no names, and all of them, I imagine from my childhood. I pick up at a cabin in the mountains, with snow around, and David Livingstone feeding me soup with a tin spoon.” He tried to smile and failed. His face twitched. “I could stand it for myself,” he said, “but I've tied another life to mine, like a cursed fool, and now you speak of a woman, and of arrest. Arrest! For what?”

“Suppose,” Bassett said after a moment, “suppose you let that go just now, and tell me more about this--this gap. You're a medical man. You've probably gone into your own case pretty thoroughly. I'm accepting your statement, you see. As a matter of fact it must be true, or you wouldn't be here. But I've got to know what I'm doing before I lay my cards on the table. Make it simple, if you can. I don't know your medical jargon.”

Dick did his best. The mind closed down now and then, mainly from a shock. No, there was no injury required. He didn't think he had had an injury. A mental shock would do it, if it were strong enough. And fear. It was generally fear. He had never considered himself braver than the other fellow, but no man liked to think that he had a cowardly mind. Even if things hadn't broken as they had, he'd have come back before he went to the length of marriage, to find out what it was he had been afraid of. He paused then, to give Bassett a chance to tell him, but the reporter only said: “Go on, you put your cards on the table, and then I'll lay mine out.”

Dick went on. He didn't blame Bassett. If there was something that was in his line of work, he understood. At the same time he wanted to save David anything unpleasant. (The word “unpleasant” startled Bassett, by its very inadequacy.) He knew now that David had built up for him an identity that probably did not exist, but he wanted Bassett to know that there could never be doubt of David's high purpose and his essential fineness.

“Whatever I was before.” he finished simply, “and I'll get that from you now, if I am any sort of a man at all it is his work.”

He stood up and braced himself. It had been clear to Bassett for ten minutes that Dick was talking against time, against the period of revelation. He would have it, but he was mentally bracing himself against it.