Shortly after that Dick said he would go to his room. He was still pale,
but his eyes looked bright and feverish, and Bassett went with him,
uneasily conscious that something was not quite right. Dick spoke only
once on the way.
"My head aches like the mischief," he said, and his voice was dull and
lifeless.
He did not want Bassett to go with him, but Bassett went, nevertheless.
Dick's statement, that he meant to surrender himself, had filled him
with uneasiness. He determined, following him along the hall, to keep a
close guard on him for the next few hours, but beyond that, just then,
he did not try to go. If it were humanly possible he meant to smuggle
him out of the town and take him East. But he had an uneasy conviction
that Dick was going to be ill. The mind did strange things with the
body.
Dick sat down on the edge of the bed.
"My head aches like the mischief," he repeated. "Look in that grip and
find me some tablets, will you? I'm dizzy."
He made an effort and stretched out on the bed. "Good Lord," he
muttered, "I haven't had such a headache since--"
His voice trailed off. Bassett, bending over the army kit bag in the
corner, straightened and looked around. Dick was suddenly asleep and
breathing heavily.
For a long time the reporter sat by the side of the bed, watching him
and trying to plan some course of action. He was overcome by his own
responsibility, and by the prospect of tragedy that threatened. That
Livingstone was Clark, and that he would insist on surrendering himself
when he wakened, he could no longer doubt. His mind wandered back to
that day when he had visited the old house as a patient, and from that
along the strange road they had both come since then. He reflected, not
exactly in those terms, that life, any man's life, was only one thread
in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle
the one thread was to interfere with all the others. David Livingstone,
the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed,
Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell how many others, all
threads.
He swore in a whisper.
The maid tapped at the door. He opened it an inch or so and sent her
off. In view of his new determination even the maid had become a danger.
She was the same elderly woman who looked after his own bedroom, and
she might have known Clark. Just what Providence had kept him from
recognition before this he did not know, but it could not go on
indefinitely.