n his preparations for battle. He felt less apprehension now in case
he fell asleep, to waken among those he had loved long since and lost
awhile. After a few moments his eyes closed, and Lucy went back to her
bed and crawled into it.
It was, however, Harrison Miller who took the statement that morning.
Lucy's cramped old hand wrote too slowly for David's impatience.
Harrison Miller took it, on hotel stationery, covering the carefully
numbered pages with his neat, copper-plate writing. He wrote with an
impassive face, but with intense interest, for by that time he knew
Dick's story.
Never, in his orderly bachelor life, of daily papers and a flower garden
and political economy at night, had he been so close to the passions of
men to love and hate and the disorder they brought with them.
XXXI
"My brother, Henry Livingstone, was not a strong man," David dictated.
"He had the same heart condition I have, but it developed earlier. After
he left college he went to Arizona and bought a ranch, and there he
met and chummed with Elihu Clark, who had bought an old mine and was
reworking it. Henry loaned him a small amount of money at that time, and
a number of years later in return for that, when Henry's health failed,
Clark, who had grown wealthy, bought him a ranch in Wyoming at Dry
River, not far from Clark's own property.
"Henry had been teaching in an Eastern university, and then taken up
tutoring. We saw little of him. He was a student, and he became almost a
recluse. I saw less of him than ever after Clark gave him the ranch.
"In the spring of 1910 Henry wrote me that he was not well, and I went
out to see him. He seemed worried and was in bad shape physically. Elihu
Clark had died five years before, and left him a fair sum of money,
fifty thousand dollars, but he was living in a way which made me think
he was not using it. The ranch buildings were dilapidated, and there was
nothing but the barest necessities in the house.
"I taxed Henry with miserliness, and he then told me that the money was
not his, but left to him to be used for an illegitimate son of Clark's,
born before his marriage, the child of a small rancher's daughter named
Hattie Burgess. The Burgess girl had gone to Omaha for its birth, and
the story was not known. In early years Clark had paid the child's board
through his lawyer to an Omaha woman named Hines, and had later sent him
to college. The Burgess girl married a Swede named Thorwal
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