The Breaking Point (27 page)

As though his intent gaze had roused the sleeper, Bassett opened his
eyes, at first drowsily, then wide awake. He raised himself on his
elbow and listened, as though for some far-off sound, and his face was
strained and anxious. But the night was silent, and he relaxed and slept
again.

Something that had been forming itself in Dick's mind suddenly
crystallized into conviction. He rose and walked to the edge of the
mountain wall and stood there listening. When he went back to the
fire he felt in his pockets, found a small pad and pencil, and bending
forward to catch the light, commenced to write... At dawn Bassett
wakened. He was stiff and wretched, and he grunted as he moved. He
turned over and surveyed the small plateau. It was empty, except for his
horse, making its continuous, hopeless search for grass.

David was enjoying his holiday. He lay in bed most of the morning,
making the most of his one after-breakfast cigar and surrounded by
newspaper and magazines. He had made friends of the waiter who brought
his breakfast, and of the little chambermaid who looked after his room,
and such conversations as this would follow:

"Well, Nellie," he would say, "and did you go to the dance on the pier
last night?"

"Oh, yes, doctor."

"Your gentleman friend showed up all right, then?"

"Oh, yes. He didn't telephone because he was on a job out of town."

Here perhaps David would lower his voice, for Lucy was never far away.

"Did you wear the flowers?"

"Yes, violets. I put one away to remember you by. It was funny at first.
I wouldn't tell him who gave them to me."

David would chuckle delightedly.

"That's right," he would say. "Keep him guessing, the young rascal. We
men are kittle cattle, Nellie, kittle cattle!"

Even the valet unbent to him, and inquired if the doctor needed a man at
home to look after him and his clothes. David was enormously tickled.

"Well," he said, with a twinkle in his eye. "I'll tell you how I manage
now, and then you'll see. When I want my trousers pressed I send them
downstairs and then I wait in my bathrobe until they come back. I'm a
trifle better off for boots, but you'd have to knock Mike, my hired man,
unconscious before he'd let you touch them."

The valet grinned understandingly.

"Of course, there's my nephew," David went on, a little note of pride in
his voice. "He's become engaged recently, and I notice he's bought some
clothes. But still I don't think even he will want anybody to hold his
trousers while he gets into them."

David chuckled over that for a long time after the valet had gone.

He was quite happy and contented. He spent all afternoon in a roller
chair, conversing affably with the man who pushed him, and now and
then when Lucy was out of sight getting out and stretching his legs. He
picked up lost children and lonely dogs, and tried his eye in a shooting
gallery, and had hard work keeping off the roller coasters and out of
the sea.

Then, one day, when he had been gone some time, he was astonished on
entering his hotel to find Harrison Miller sitting in the lobby. David
beamed with surprise and pleasure.

"You old humbug!" he said. "Off on a jaunt after all! And the contempt
of you when I was shipped here!"

Harrison Miller was constrained and uncomfortable. He had meant to see
Lucy first. She was a sensible woman, and she would know just what David
could stand, or could not. But David did not notice his constraint; took
him to his room, made him admire the ocean view, gave him a cigar, and
then sat down across from him, beaming and hospitable.

"Suffering Crimus, Miller," he said. "I didn't know I was homesick until
I saw you. Well, how's everything? Dick's letters haven't been much, and
we haven't had any for several days."

Harrison Miller cleared his throat. He knew that David had not been
told of Jim Wheeler's death, but that Lucy knew. He knew too from Walter
Wheeler that David did not know that Dick had gone west. Did Lucy know
that, or not? Probably yes. But he considered the entire benevolent
conspiracy an absurdity and a mistake. It was making him uncomfortable,
and most of his life had been devoted to being comfortable.

He decided to temporize.

"Things are about the same," he said. "They're going to pave Chisholm
Street. And your Mike knocked down the night watchman last week. I got
him off with a fine."

"I hope he hasn't been in my cellar. He's got a weakness, but
then—How's Dick? Not overworking?"

"No. He's all right."

But David was no man's fool. He began to see something strange in
Harrison's manner, and he bent forward in his chair.

"Look here, Harrison," he said, "there's something the matter with you.
You've got something on your mind."

"Well, I have and I haven't. I'd like to see Lucy, David, if she's
about."

"Lucy's gadding. You can tell me if you can her. What is it? Is it about
Dick?"

"In a way, yes."

"He's not sick?"

"No. He's all right, as far as I know. I guess I'd better tell you,
David. Walter Wheeler has got some sort of bee in his bonnet, and he
got me to come on. Dick was pretty tired and—well, one or two things
happened to worry him. One was that Jim Wheeler—you'll get this sooner
or later—was in an automobile accident, and it did for him."

David had lost some of his ruddy color. It was a moment before he spoke.

"Poor Jim," he said hoarsely. "He was a good boy, only full of life. It
will be hard on the family."

"Yes," Harrison Miller said simply.

But David was resentful, too. When his friends were in trouble he wanted
to know about it. He was somewhat indignant and not a little hurt. But
he soon reverted to Dick.

"I'll go back and send him off for a rest," he said. "I'm as good as
I'll ever be, and the boy's tired. What's the bee in Wheeler's bonnet?"

"Look here, David, you know your own business best, and Wheeler didn't
feel at liberty to tell me very much. But he seemed to think you were
the only one who could tell us certain things. He'd have come himself,
but it's not easy for him to leave the family just now. Dick went away
just after Jim's funeral. He left a young chap named Reynolds in his
place, and, I believe, in order not to worry you, some letters to be
mailed at intervals."

"Went where?" David asked, in a terrible voice.

"To a town called Norada, in Wyoming. Near his old home somewhere. And
the Wheelers haven't heard anything from him since the day he got there.
That's three weeks ago. He wrote Elizabeth the night he got there, and
wired her at the same time. There's been nothing since."

David was gripping the arms of his chair with both hands, but he forced
himself to calmness.

"I'll go to Norada at once," he said. "Get a time-table, Harrison, and
ring for the valet."

"Not on your life you won't. I'm here to do that, when I've got
something to go on. Wheeler thought you might have heard from him. If
you hadn't, I was to get all the information I could and then start.
Elizabeth's almost crazy. We wired the chief of police of Norada
yesterday."

"Yes!" David said thickly. "Trust your friends to make every damned
mistake possible! You've set the whole pack on his trail." And then he
fell back in his chair, and gasped, "Open the window!"

When Lucy came in, a half hour later, she found David on his bed with
the hotel doctor beside him, and Harrison Miller in the room. David was
fighting for breath, but he was conscious and very calm. He looked up at
her and spoke slowly and distinctly.

"They've got Dick, Lucy," he said.

He looked aged and pinched, and entirely hopeless. Even after his heart
had quieted down and he lay still among his pillows, he gave no evidence
of his old fighting spirit. He lay with his eyes shut, relaxed and
passive. He had done his best, and he had failed. It was out of his
hands now, and in the hands of God. Once, as he lay there, he prayed. He
said that he had failed, and that now he was too old and weak to fight.
That God would have to take it on, and do the best He could. But he
added that if God did not save Dick and bring him back to happiness,
that he, David, was through.

Toward morning he wakened from a light sleep. The door into Lucy's room
was open and a dim light was burning beyond it. David called her, and by
her immediate response he knew she had not been sleeping.

"Yes, David," she said, and came padding in in her bedroom slippers
and wadded dressing-gown, a tragic figure of apprehension, determinedly
smiling. "What do you want?"

"Sit down, Lucy."

When she had done so he put out his hand, fumbling for hers. She was
touched and alarmed, for it was a long while since there had been any
open demonstration of affection between them. David was silent for a
time, absorbed in thought. Then:

"I'm not in very good shape, Lucy. I suppose you know that. This old
pump of mine has sprung a leak or something. I don't want you to worry
if anything happens. I've come to the time when I've got a good many
over there, and it will be like going home."

Lucy nodded. Her chin quivered. She smoothed his hand, with its high
twisted veins.

"I know, David," she said. "Mother and father, and Henry, and a good
many friends. But I need you, too. You're all I have, now that Dick—"

"That's why I called you. If I can get out there, I'll go. And I'll put
up a fight that will make them wish they'd never started anything. But
if I can't, if I—" She felt his fingers tighten on her hand. "If Hattie
Thorwald is still living, we'll put her on the stand. If I can't go,
for any reason, I want you to see that she is called. And you know where
Henry's statement is?"

"In your box, isn't it?"

"Yes. Have the statement read first, and then have her called to
corroborate it. Tell the story I have told you—or no, I'll dictate it
to you in the morning, and sign it before witnesses. Jake and Bill will
testify too."

He felt easier in his mind after that. He had marshalled his forces and
begun his preparations for battle. He felt less apprehension now in case
he fell asleep, to waken among those he had loved long since and lost
awhile. After a few moments his eyes closed, and Lucy went back to her
bed and crawled into it.

It was, however, Harrison Miller who took the statement that morning.
Lucy's cramped old hand wrote too slowly for David's impatience.
Harrison Miller took it, on hotel stationery, covering the carefully
numbered pages with his neat, copper-plate writing. He wrote with an
impassive face, but with intense interest, for by that time he knew
Dick's story.

Never, in his orderly bachelor life, of daily papers and a flower garden
and political economy at night, had he been so close to the passions of
men to love and hate and the disorder they brought with them.

"My brother, Henry Livingstone, was not a strong man," David dictated.
"He had the same heart condition I have, but it developed earlier. After
he left college he went to Arizona and bought a ranch, and there he
met and chummed with Elihu Clark, who had bought an old mine and was
reworking it. Henry loaned him a small amount of money at that time, and
a number of years later in return for that, when Henry's health failed,
Clark, who had grown wealthy, bought him a ranch in Wyoming at Dry
River, not far from Clark's own property.

"Henry had been teaching in an Eastern university, and then taken up
tutoring. We saw little of him. He was a student, and he became almost a
recluse. I saw less of him than ever after Clark gave him the ranch.

"In the spring of 1910 Henry wrote me that he was not well, and I went
out to see him. He seemed worried and was in bad shape physically. Elihu
Clark had died five years before, and left him a fair sum of money,
fifty thousand dollars, but he was living in a way which made me think
he was not using it. The ranch buildings were dilapidated, and there was
nothing but the barest necessities in the house.

"I taxed Henry with miserliness, and he then told me that the money was
not his, but left to him to be used for an illegitimate son of Clark's,
born before his marriage, the child of a small rancher's daughter named
Hattie Burgess. The Burgess girl had gone to Omaha for its birth, and
the story was not known. In early years Clark had paid the child's board
through his lawyer to an Omaha woman named Hines, and had later sent him
to college. The Burgess girl married a Swede named Thorwald. The boy was
eight years older than Judson, Clark's legitimate son.

"After the death of his wife Elihu Clark began to think about the child,
especially after Judson became a fair-sized boy. He had the older boy,
who went by the name of Hines, sent to college, and in summer he stayed
at Henry's tutoring school. Henry said the boy was like the Burgess
family, blonde and excitable and rather commonplace. He did not get on
well at college, and did not graduate. So far as he knew, Clark never
saw him.

"The boy himself believed that he was an orphan, and that the Hines
woman had adopted him as a foundling. But on the death of the woman he
found that she had no estate, and that a firm of New York attorneys had
been paying his college bills.

"He had spent considerable time with Henry, one way and another, and
he began to think that Henry knew who he was. He thought at first that
Henry was his father, and there was some trouble. In order to end it
Henry finally acknowledged that he knew who the father was, and after
that he had no peace. Clifton—his name was Clifton Hines—attacked
Henry once, and if it had not been for the two men on the place he would
have hurt him.

"Henry began to give him money. Clark had left the fifty thousand for
the boy with the idea that Henry should start him in business with it.
But he only turned up wild-cat schemes that Henry would not listen to.
He did not know how Henry got the money, or from where. He thought for a
long time that Henry had saved it.