s hand."

An idea occurred to me.

"Worth," I asked, "did you see that 1920 volume when you were here last
night?"

He looked a little startled, and I prompted,

"Were you too excited to have noticed a detail like that?"

"I wasn't excited; not in the sense of being confused," he spoke slowly.
"The book was there; he'd been writing in it. I remember looking at it
and thinking that as soon as I was gone, he'd sit down in his chair and
put every damn' word of our row into it. That was his way. The seamy
side of Santa Ysobel life's recorded in those books. I always
understood they amounted to a pack of neighborhood dynamite."

"Got to find that last book," I said.

He nodded listlessly. I went to it, giving that room such a searching as
would have turned out a bent pin, had one been mislaid in it. I even
took down from the shelves books of similar size to see if the lost
volume had been slipped into a camouflaging cover--all to no good. It
wasn't there. And when I had finished I was positive of two things; the
study had no other entrance than the apparent ones, and the diary of
1920 had been removed from the room since Worth saw it there the night
before. I reached for one of the other volumes. Worth spoke again in a
sort of dragging voice,

"What do you want to look at them for, Jerry?"

"It's not idle curiosity," I told him, a bit pricked.

"I know it's not that." The old, affectionate tone went right to my
heart. "But if you're thinking you'll find in them any explanation of my
father's taking his own life, I'm here to tell you you're mistaken.
Plenty there, no doubt, to have driven a tender hearted man off the
earth.... He was different." Eyeing the book in my hand, the boy blurted
with sudden heat, "Those damn' diaries have been wife and child and meat
and drink to him. They were his reason for living--not dying!"

"Start me right in regard to your father, Worth," I urged anxiously.
"It's important."

The boy gave me his shoulder and continued to stare down into the fire,
as he said at last, slowly,

"I would rather leave him alone, Jerry."

I knew it would be useless to insist. Never then or thereafter did I
hear him say more of his father's character. At that, he could hardly
have told more in an hour's talk.

At random, I took the volume that covered the year in which, as I
remembered, Thomas Gilbert's wife had secured her divorce from him.
Neatly and carefully written in a script as readable as