He put his arm around his wife and held her to him.
“Don’t worry about Jim, mother,”
he said. “He’s all right fundamentally.
He’s going through the bad time between being
a boy and being a man. He’s a good boy.”
He watched her moving up the stairs, his eyes tender
and solicitous. To him she was just “mother.”
He had never thought of another woman in all their
twenty-four years together.
Elizabeth waited near him, her eyes on his face.
“Is it Dick?” she asked in a low tone.
“Yes.”
“You don’t mind, daddy, do you?”
“I only want you to be happy,” he said
rather hoarsely. “You know that, don’t
you?”
She nodded, and turned up her face to be kissed.
He knew that she had no doubt whatever that this
interview was to seal her to Dick Livingstone for
ever and ever. She fairly radiated happiness
and confidence. He left her standing there going
back to the living-room closed the door.
Louis Bassett, when he started to the old Livingstone
ranch, now the Wasson place, was carefully turning
over in his mind David’s participation in the
escape of Judson Clark. Certain phases of it
were quite clear, provided one accepted the fact that,
following a heavy snowfall, an Easterner and a tenderfoot
had gone into the mountains alone, under conditions
which had caused the posse after Judson Clark to turn
back and give him up for dead.
Had Donaldson sent him there, knowing he was a medical
man? If he had, would Maggie Donaldson not have
said so? She had said “a man outside that
she had at first thought was a member of the searching
party.” Evidently, then, Donaldson had
not prepared her to expect medical assistance.
Take the other angle. Say David Livingstone
had not been sent for. Say he knew nothing of
the cabin or its occupants until he stumbled on them.
He had sold the ranch, distributed his brother’s
books, and apparently the townspeople at Dry River
believed that he had gone back home. Then what
had taken him, clearly alone and having certainly
given the impression of a departure for the East, into
the mountains? To hunt? To hunt what, that
he went about it secretly and alone?
Bassett was inclined to the Donaldson theory, finally.
John Donaldson would have been wanting a doctor,
and not wanting one from Norada. He might have
heard of this Eastern medical man at Dry River, have
gone to him with his story, even have taken him part
of the way. The situation was one that would
have a certain appeal. It was possible, anyhow:
But instead of clarifying the situation Bassett’s
visit at the Wasson place brought forward new elements
which fitted neither of the hypotheses in his mind.
To Wasson himself, whom he met on horseback on the
road into the ranch, he gave the same explanation
he had given to the store-keeper’s wife.
Wasson was a tall man in chaps and a Stetson, and
he was courteously interested.
