She could not eat.
Nevertheless when she herself admitted a new patient for Dick that
afternoon, she had no premonition of trouble. She sent him into the
waiting-room, a tall, robust and youngish man, perhaps in his late
thirties, and went quietly on her way to her sitting-room, and to her
weekly mending.
On the other hand, Louis Bassett was feeling more or less uncomfortable.
There was an air of peace and quiet respectability about the old house,
a domestic odor of baking cake, a quietness and stability that somehow
made his errand appear absurd. To connect it with Judson Clark and his
tumultuous past seemed ridiculous.
His errand, on the surface, was a neuralgic headache.
When, hat in hand, he walked into Dick's consulting room, he had made up
his mind that he would pay the price of an overactive imagination for a
prescription, walk out again, and try to forget that he had let a chance
resemblance carry him off his feet.
But, as he watched the man who sat across from him, tilted back in his
swivel chair, he was not so sure. Here was the same tall figure, the
heavy brown hair, the features and boyish smile of the photograph he had
seen the night before. As Judson Clark might have looked at thirty-two
this man looked.
He made his explanation easily. Was in town for the day. Subject to
these headaches. Worse over the right eye. No, he didn't wear glasses;
perhaps he should.
It wasn't Clark. It couldn't be. Jud Clark sitting there tilted back
in an old chair and asking questions as to the nature of his fictitious
pain! Impossible. Nevertheless he was of a mind to clear the slate and
get some sleep that night, and having taken his prescription and paid
for it, he sat back and commenced an apparently casual interrogation.
"Two names on your sign, I see. Father and son, I suppose?"
"Doctor David Livingstone is my uncle."
"I should think you'd be in the city. Limitations to this sort of thing,
aren't there?"
"I like it," said Dick, with an eye on the office clock.
"Patients are your friends, of course. Born and raised here, I suppose?"
"Not exactly. I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming. My father had a ranch
out there."
Bassett shot a glance at him, but Dick was calm and faintly smiling.
"Wyoming!" the reporter commented. "That's a long way from here.
Anywhere near the new oil fields?"
"Not far from Norada. That's the oil center," Dick offered,
good-naturedly. He rose, and glanced again at the clock. "If those
headaches continue you'd better have your eyes examined."