“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.

XXXI

“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.