“Henry had been teaching in an Eastern university, and then taken up tutoring.  We saw little of him.  He was a student, and he became almost a recluse.  I saw less of him than ever after Clark gave him the ranch.

“In the spring of 1910 Henry wrote me that he was not well, and I went out to see him.  He seemed worried and was in bad shape physically.  Elihu Clark had died five years before, and left him a fair sum of money, fifty thousand dollars, but he was living in a way which made me think he was not using it.  The ranch buildings were dilapidated, and there was nothing but the barest necessities in the house.

“I taxed Henry with miserliness, and he then told me that the money was not his, but left to him to be used for an illegitimate son of Clark’s, born before his marriage, the child of a small rancher’s daughter named Hattie Burgess.  The Burgess girl had gone to Omaha for its birth, and the story was not known.  In early years Clark had paid the child’s board through his lawyer to an Omaha woman named Hines, and had later sent him to college.  The Burgess girl married a Swede named Thorwald.  The boy was eight years older than Judson, Clark’s legitimate son.

“After the death of his wife Elihu Clark began to think about the child, especially after Judson became a fair-sized boy.  He had the older boy, who went by the name of Hines, sent to college, and in summer he stayed at Henry’s tutoring school.  Henry said the boy was like the Burgess family, blonde and excitable and rather commonplace.  He did not get on well at college, and did not graduate.  So far as he knew, Clark never saw him.

“The boy himself believed that he was an orphan, and that the Hines woman had adopted him as a foundling.  But on the death of the woman he found that she had no estate, and that a firm of New York attorneys had been paying his college bills.

“He had spent considerable time with Henry, one way and another, and he began to think that Henry knew who he was.  He thought at first that Henry was his father, and there was some trouble.  In order to end it Henry finally acknowledged that he knew who the father was, and after that he had no peace.  Clifton—­his name was Clifton Hines—­attacked Henry once, and if it had not been for the two men on the place he would have hurt him.

“Henry began to give him money.  Clark had left the fifty thousand for the boy with the idea that Henry should start him in business with it.  But he only turned up wild-cat schemes that Henry would not listen to.  He did not know how Henry got the money, or from where.  He thought for a long time that Henry had saved it.

“I’d better say here that Henry was fond of Clifton, although he didn’t approve of him.  He’d never married, and the boy was like a son to him for a good many years.  He didn’t have him at the ranch much, however, for he was a Burgess through and through and looked like them.  And he was always afraid that somehow the story would get out.