"Donaldson," Dick repeated. "That was it. I couldn't remember her name.
The woman in the cabin. Maggie. And Jack. Jack Donaldson."
He got up, and was apparently dizzy, for he caught at the table.
"Look here," Bassett said, "let me give you a drink. You look all in."
But Dick shook his head.
"No, thanks just the same. I'll ask you to be plain with me, Bassett. I
am--I have become engaged to a girl, and--well, I want the story. That's
all."
And, when Bassett only continued to stare at him: "I suppose I've begun wrong end first. I forgot about how it must seem
to you. I dropped a block out of my life about ten years ago. Can't
remember it. I'm not proud of it, but it's the fact. What I'm trying to
do now is to fill in the gap. But I've got to, somehow. I owe it to the
girl."
When Bassett could apparently find nothing to say he went on: "You say I may be arrested if I go out on the street. And you rather
more than intimate that a woman named Beverly Carlysle is mixed up in it
somehow. I take it that I knew her."
"Yes. You knew her," Bassett said slowly. At the intimation in his tone
Dick surveyed him for a moment without speaking. His face, pale before,
took on a grayish tinge.
"I wasn't--married to her?"
"No. You didn't marry her. See here, Clark, this is straight goods, is
it? You're not trying to put something over on me? Because if you are,
you needn't. I'd about made up my mind to follow the story through for
my own satisfaction, and then quit cold on it. When a man's pulled
himself out of the mud as you have it's not my business to pull him
down. But I don't want you to pull any bunk."
Dick winced.
"Out of the mud!" he said. "No. I'm telling you the truth, Bassett. I
have some fragmentary memories, places and people, but no names, and
all of them, I imagine from my childhood. I pick up at a cabin in the
mountains, with snow around, and David Livingstone feeding me soup with
a tin spoon." He tried to smile and failed. His face twitched. "I could
stand it for myself," he said, "but I've tied another life to mine, like
a cursed fool, and now you speak of a woman, and of arrest. Arrest! For
what?"