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David was brought home the next day, a shrivelled and aged David, but
with a fighting fire in his eyes and a careful smile at the station for
the group of friends who met him.
David had decided on a course and meant to follow it. That course was to
protect Dick's name, and to keep the place he had made in the world open
for him. Not even to Lucy had he yet breathed the terror that was with
him day and night, that Dick had reached the breaking point and had gone
back. But he knew it was possible. Lauler had warned him against shocks
and trouble, and looking back David could see the gradually accumulating
pressure against that mental wall of Dick's subconscious building;
overwork and David's illness, his love affair and Jim Wheeler's tragedy,
and coming on top of that, in some way he had not yet learned, the
knowledge that he was Judson Clark and a fugitive from the law. The work
of ten years perhaps undone.
Both David and Lucy found the home-coming painful. Harrison Miller rode
up with them from the station, and between him and Doctor Reynolds David
walked into his house and was assisted up the stairs. At the door of
Dick's room he stopped and looked in, and then went on, his face set and
rigid. He would not go to bed, but sat in his chair while about him went
on the bustle of the return, the bringing up of trunks and bags; but
the careful smile was gone, and his throat, now so much too thin for his
collar, worked convulsively.
He had got Harrison Miller's narrative from him on the way from the
station, and it had only confirmed his suspicions.
"He had been in a stupor all day," Miller related, "and was being
cared for by a man named Bassett. I daresay that's the man Gregory had
referred to. He may have become suspicious of Bassett. I don't know. But
a chambermaid recognized him as he was making his escape, and raised an
alarm. He got a horse out of the courtyard of the hotel, and not a sign
of him has been found since."
"It wasn't Bassett who raised the alarm?"
"No, apparently not. The odd thing is that this Bassett disappeared,
too, the same night. I called up his paper yesterday, but he hasn't
shown up."
And with some small amplifications, that is all there was to it.
Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David
called Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.