Atlanta Tri Weekly Journal

THE BREAKING POINT
BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.
"Then, you didn't tell her about the woman in the case?"
"Certainly not. Why should I?"
Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at the lack of masculine understanding.
"Because, whether you think it or not, she will resent and hate that as she hates nothing else. Murder will be nothing to that. And she will have to know it some time."
He pondered her flat statement unhappy, standing by the window and looking out into the shaded street, and a man who had been standing, cigar in mouth, on a pavement across withdrew into the shadow of a tree box.
Outside, on the street, the man with the cigar struck a match and looked at his watch. Then he walked briskly toward the railway station. A half hour later he walked into the offices of the Times-Republican and to the night editor's desk.
"Hello, Bassett," said that gentleman. "We thought you were dead. Well, how about the sister in California? It was the Clark story, wasn't it?"
"Yes," said Bassett, non-committally.
"And it blew up on you! Well, there were others who were fooled, too. Well, you had a holiday, anyhow."
"Yes, I had a holiday," said Bassett, and going over to his own desk began to sort his vast accumulation of mail. Some time later he found the night editor at his elbow.
"Did you get anything on the Clark business at all?" he asked. "Williams thinks there's a page in it for Sunday, anyhow. You've been on the ground, and there's a human interest element in it. The last man who talked to Clark, the ranch today. That sort of thing."
Bassett went on doggedly sorting his mail.
"You take it from me," he said, "the story's dead, and so is Clark. The Donaldson woman was crazy. That's all."
David was brought home the next day, a shriveled 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.
Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David called Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.
"It is my hope," he said, "to carry on exactly as though Dick might walk in tomorrow and take his place again. As I hold to my belief in God, so I hold to my conviction that he will come back, and that before I--before long. But our friends will be asked where he is and what he is doing, and we would better agree on that beforehand. What we'd better say is simply that Dick was called away on business connected with some property in the west. They may not believe it, but they'll hardly disapprove it."
So the benevolent conspiracy to protect Dick Livingstone's name was arranged, and from that time on the four of them who were a party to it turned to the outside world an unbroken front of loyalty. Even to Minnie, anxious and red-eyed in her kitchen, Lucy gave the same explanation while she arranged David's tray.
"He has been detained in the west on business," Lucy said.
But Minnie did not immediately move.
"He'd better come soon if he wants to see Doctor David," she said, with twitching lips. "And I'll just say this, Mrs. Crosby. The talk that's going on in this town is something awful."
"I don't want to hear it," Lucy said firmly.
She ate alone, painfully remembering that last gay little feast before they started away. But before she sat down she did a touching thing. She rang the bell and called Minnie.
"After this, Minnie," she said, "we will always set Doctor Richard's place. Then, when he comes--"
Lucy found David moving about upstairs some time later, and when she went up she found him sitting in Dick's room, on a stiff chair inside the door. She stood beside him, but he did not say anything, and she went away.
That night David had a caller. All evening the bell had been ringing, and the card tray on the hat rack was filled with visiting cards. There were gifts, flowers and jellies and some squab from Mrs. Sayre. Lucy had seen no one, excusing herself on the ground of fatigue, but the man who called at 9 o'clock was not inclined to be turned away.
"You take this card up to Doctor Livingstone, anyhow," he said. "I'll wait."
We wrote in pencil on the card, placing it against the door post to do so, and passed it to Minnie. She calmly read it, and rather defiantly carried it off. But she came down quickly, touched by some contagion of expectation from the room upstairs.
"Hang your hat on the rack and go up."
So it was that David and the reporter met, for the first time, in David's old-fashioned chamber, with its walnut bed and the dresser with the marble top, and Dick's picture in his uniform on the mantel.
Bassett was shocked at the sight of David, shocked and alarmed. He was uncertain at first as to the wisdom of telling his startling story to an obviously sick man, but David's first words reassured him.
"Come in," he said. "You are the Bassett who was with Doctor Livingstone at Nevada?"
"Yes. I see you know about it."
"We know something, not everything."
Suddenly David's pose deserted him. He got up and stood very straight, searching eyes on his visitor. "Is he living?" he asked, in a low voice.
"I think so; I am not certain."
"Then, you don't know where he is?"
"No. He got away but you know that. Sit down, doctor. I've got a long story to tell."
"I'll get you to call my sister first," David said. "And tell her to get Harrison Miller. Mr. Miller is our neighbor, and he very kindly went west when I--when my health did not allow me to go."
While they waited David asked only one question.
"The report we have had is that he was in a stupor in the hotel, and the doctor who saw him--you got him, I think--said he appeared to have been drinking heavily. Is that true? He was not a drinking man."
"I am quite sure he had not."
There was another question in David's mind, but he did not put it. He sat, with the patience of his age and his new infirmity, waiting for Lucy to bring Harrison Miller.
During the recital that followed somewhat later, David did not move. He sat silent, his eyes closed, his face set.
"That's about all," Bassett finished. "He had been perfectly clear in his head all day, and it took head work to get over the pass. But, as I say, he had simply dropped ten years, and was back to the Lucas trouble. I tried everything I knew, used your name and would have used the young lady's, because sometimes that sort of thing strikes pretty deep, but I didn't know it. He was convinced after a while, but he was dazed, of course. He knew it, that is, but he couldn't comprehend it.
"I was done up, and I've cursed myself for it since, but I must have slept like the dead. I wakened once, early in the night, and he was still sitting by the fire, staring at it. I've forgotten to say that he had been determined all day to go back and give himself up, and the only way I prevented it was by telling him what a blow it would be to you and to the girl. I wakened once and said to him, 'Better get some sleep, old man.' He did not answer at once, and then he said: All right.' I was dozing off when he spoke again. He said, Where is Beverly Carlysle now? Had she married again?' She revived The Valley, and she's in New York with it.' I told him.
"When I wakened in the morning he was gone, but left a piece of paper in a cleft stick beside me, with directions for reaching the railroad,'and--well, here it is."
Bassett took from his pocketbook a note, and passed it over to David, who got out his spectacles with shaking hands and read it. It was on Dick's prescription paper, with his name at the top and the familiar R x below it. David read it aloud, his voice husky.
"Many thanks for everything, Bassett," he read. "I don't like to leave you, but you'll get out all right if you follow the map on the back of this. I've had all night to think things out, and I'm leaving you because you are safer without me. I realize now what you've known all day and kept from me. That woman at the hotel recognized me, and they are after me.
'I can't make up my mind what to do. Ultimately I think I'll go back and give myself up. I am a dead man, anyhow, to all who might have cared, but I've got to do one or two things first, and I want to think things over. One thing you've got a right to know. I hated Lucas, but it never entered my head to kill him. How it happened God only knows, I don't."
It was signed J. C.
Bassett broke the silence that followed the reading.
"I made every effort to find him. I had to work alone, you understand, and from the west side of the range, not to arouse suspicion. They were after me, too, you know. His horse, I heard, worked its way back a few days ago. It's a God-forsaken country, and if he lost his horse he was in it on foot, and without food. Of course there's a chance--"
Continued Thursday. Renew your subscription now, so as not to miss an installment of this splendid story.