"You mean Dick shot him?"
"Yes. You understand, don't you," he added anxiously, "that he doesn't
remember doing it?"
In spite of his anxiety he was forced to marvel at the sublime faith
with which she made her comment, through lips that had gone white.
"Then it was either an accident, or he deserved shooting," she said. But
she inquired, he thought with difficulty, "Did he die?"
He could not lie to her. "Yes," he said.
She closed her eyes, but a moment later she was fighting her valiant
fight again for Dick.
"But they let him go," she protested. "Men do shoot in the West, don't
they? There must have been a reason for it. You know Dick as well as I
do. He couldn't do a wrong thing."
He let that pass. "Nothing was done about it at the time," he said.
"And Dick came here and lived his useful life among us. He wouldn't have
known the man's name if he heard it. But do you see, sweetheart, where
this is taking us? He went back, and they tried to get him, for a thing
he didn't remember doing."
"Father!" she said, and went very white. "Is that where he is? In
prison?"
He tried to steady his voice.
"No, dear. He escaped into the mountains. But you can understand his
silence. You can understand, too, that he may feel he cannot come back
to us, with this thing hanging over him. What we have to do now is to
find him, and to tell him that it makes no difference. That he has his
place in the world waiting for him, and that we are waiting too."
When it was all over, her questions and his sometimes stumbling replies,
he saw that out of it all the one thing that mattered vitally to her was
that Dick was only a fugitive, and not dead. But she said, just before
they went, arm in arm, up the stairs: "It is queer in one way, father. It isn't like him to run away."
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."