The Breaking Point - Page 115/275

Dick had found it hard to leave Elizabeth, for she clung to him in her

grief with childish wistfulness. He found, too, that her family depended

on him rather than on Leslie Ward for moral support. It was to him that

Walter Wheeler looked for assurance that the father had had no indirect

responsibility for the son's death; it was to him that Jim's mother,

lying gray-faced and listless in her bed or on her couch, brought her

anxious questionings. Had Jim suffered? Could they have avoided it? And

an insistent demand to know who and what had been the girl who was with

him.

In spite of his own feeling that he would have to go to Norada quickly,

before David became impatient over his exile, Dick took a few hours to

find the answer to that question. But when he found it he could not

tell them. The girl had been a dweller in the shady byways of life, had

played her small unmoral part and gone on, perhaps to some place where

men were kinder and less urgent. Dick did not judge her. He saw her, as

her kind had been through all time, storm centers of the social world,

passively and unconsciously blighting, at once the hunters and the prey.

He secured her former address from the police, a three-story brick

rooming-house in the local tenderloin, and waited rather uncomfortably

for the mistress of the place to see him. She came at last, a big woman,

vast and shapeless and with an amiable loose smile, and she came in with

the light step of the overfleshed, only to pause in the doorway and to

stare at him.

"My God!" she said. "I thought you were dead!"

"I'm afraid you're mistaking me for some one else, aren't you?"

She looked at him carefully.

"I'd have sworn--" she muttered, and turning to the button inside the

door she switched on the light. Then she surveyed him again.

"What's your name?"

"Livingstone. Doctor Livingstone. I called--"

"Is that for me, or for the police?"

"Now see here," he said pleasantly. "I don't know who you are mistaking

me for, and I'm not hiding from the police. Here's my card, and I

have come from the family of a young man named Wheeler, who was killed

recently in an automobile accident."

She took the card and read it, and then resumed her intent scrutiny of

him.

"Well, you fooled me all right," she said at last. "I thought you

were--well, never mind that. What about this Wheeler family? Are they

going to settle with the undertaker? Because I tell you flat, I can't

and won't. She owed me a month's rent, and her clothes won't bring over

seventy-five or a hundred dollars."