He looked at the figure on the bed. Only ten
years, and yet at that time David had been vigorous,
seemed almost young. He had aged in that ten
years. On the bed he was an old man, a tired
old man at that. On that long ride he had been
tireless. He had taken the burden of the nightly
camps, and had hacked a trail with his hatchet across
snow fields while Dick, still weak but furiously protesting,
had been compelled to stand and watch.
Now, with the perspective of time behind him, and
with the clearly defined issue of David’s protest
against his return to the West, he went again over
the details of that winter and spring. Why had
they not taken Donaldson’s trail? Or gone
back to the ranch? Why, since Donaldson could
make it, had not other visitors come? Another
doctor, the night he almost died, and David sat under
the lamp behind the close-screened windows, and read
the very pocket prayer-book that now lay on the stand
beside the bed? Why had they burned his clothes,
and Donaldson brought a new outfit? Why did
Donaldson, for all his requests, never bring a razor,
so that when they struck the railroad, miles from
anywhere, they were both full bearded?
He brought himself up sharply. He had allowed
his imagination to run away with him. He had
been depicting a flight and no one who knew David
could imagine him in flight.
Nevertheless he was conscious of a new uneasiness
and anxiety. When David recovered sufficiently
he would go to Norada, as he had told Elizabeth, and
there he would find the Donaldsons, and clear up the
things that bothered him. After that—
He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity.
He remembered her at the theater the evening before,
lost in its fictitious emotions, its counterfeit drama.
He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found her
on the verge of tears.
“Just remember, they’re only acting,”
he had said.
“Yes. But life does do things like that
to people.”
“Not often. The theater deals in the dramatic
exceptions to life. You and I, plain bread and
butter people, come to see these things because we
get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them.”
“Doesn’t anything ever happen to the plain
bread and butter people?”
“A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they
drop it, butter side down, on the carpet.”
“But that is tragedy, isn’t it?”
He had had to acknowledge that it might be.
But he had been quite emphatic over the fact that
most people didn’t drop it.
After a long time he slept in his chair. The
spring wind came in through the opened window, and
fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book on the
stand.
XIII
The week that followed was an anxious one. David’s
physical condition slowly improved. The slight
thickness was gone from his speech, and he sipped
resignedly at the broths Lucy or the nurse brought
at regular intervals. Over the entire house there
hung all day the odor of stewing chicken or of beef
tea in the making, and above the doorbell was a white
card which said: “Don’t ring.
Walk in.”
