She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one
thing, and better balanced always. She let him
stroke her hand, standing near him with her eyes absent
and a little hard.
“I’d better make sure that was Jud first,”
he offered, after a time, “and then warn him.”
“Why?”
“Bassett will be after him.”
“No!” she commanded sharply. “No,
Fred. You let the thing alone. You’ve
built up an imaginary situation, and you’re not
thinking straight. Plenty of things might happen.
What probably has happened is that this Bassett is
at home and in bed.”
She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went
back to the hotel. But, alone later on in her
suite in the Ardmore she did not immediately go to
bed. She put on a dressing gown and stood for
a long time by her window, looking out. Instead
of the city lights, however, she saw a range of snow-capped
mountains, and sheltered at their foot the Clark ranch
house, built by the old millionaire as a place of
occasional refuge from the pressure of his life.
There he had raised his fine horses, and trained
them for the track. There, when late in life
he married, he had taken his wife for their honeymoon
and two years later, for the birth of their son.
And there, when she died, he had returned with the
child, himself broken and prematurely aged, to be
killed by one of his own stallions when the boy was
fifteen.
Six years his own master, Judson had been twenty-one
to her twenty, when she first met him. Going
the usual pace, too, and throwing money right and
left. He had financed her as a star, ransacking
Europe for her stage properties, and then he fell in
love with her. She shivered as she remembered
it. It had been desperate and terrible, because
she had cared for some one else.
Standing by the window, she wondered as she had done
over and over again for ten years, what would have
happened if, instead of marrying Howard, she had married
Judson Clark? Would he have settled down?
She had felt sometimes that in his wildest moments
he was only playing a game that amused him; that the
hard-headed part of him inherited from his father
sometimes stood off and watched, with a sort of interested
detachment, the follies of the other. That he
played his wild game with his tongue in his cheek.
She left the window, turned out the lights and got
into her bed. She was depressed and lonely, and
she cried a little. After a time she remembered
that she had not put any cream on her face. She
crawled out again and went through the familiar motions
in the dark.
Dick rose the next morning with a sense of lightness
and content that sent him singing into his shower.
In the old stable which now housed both Nettie and
the little car Mike was washing them both with indiscriminate
wavings of the hose nozzle, his old pipe clutched
in his teeth. From below there came up the odors
of frying sausages and of strong hot coffee.
