“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.
