ad been different. The pictures were mostly
superimposed on it; it was their background. Himself standing on the
mountain looking down at it, and his father pointing to it; the tutor
who was afraid of horses, sitting at a big table in a great wood-ceiled
and wood-paneled room; a long gallery or porch along one side of the
building and rooms added on to the house so that one had to go along the
gallery to reach them; a gun-room full of guns.

When, much later, Dick was able calmly to review that day, he found his
recollection of it confused by the events that followed, but one thing
stood out as clearly as his later knowledge of the almost incredible
fact that for one entire day and for the evening of another, he had
openly appeared in Norada and had not been recognized. That fact was his
discovery that the Livingstone ranch house had no place in his memory
whatever.

He had hired a car and a driver, a driver who asserted that this was
the old Livingstone ranch house. And it bore no resemblance, not the
faintest, to the building he remembered. It did not lie where it should
have lain. The mountains were too far behind it. It was not the house.
The fields were not the proper fields. It was wrong, all wrong.

He went no closer than the highway, because it was not necessary. He
ordered the car to turn and go back, and for the first and only time he
was filled with bitter resentment against David. David had fooled him.
He sat beside the driver, his face glowering and his eyes hot, and let
his indignation burn in him like a flame.

Hours afterwards he had, of course, found excuses for David. Accepted
them, rather, as a part of the mystery which wrapped him about. But they
had no effect on the decision he made during that miserable ride back to
Norada, when he determined to see the man Bassett and get the truth out
of him if he had to choke it out.

XXIV

Bassett was astounded when he saw Dick's signature on the hotel
register. It destroyed, in one line, every theory he held. That Judson
Clark should return to Norada after his flight was incredible. Ten years
was only ten years after all. It was not a lifetime. There were men in
the town who had known Clark well.

Nevertheless for a time he held to his earlier conviction, even fought
for it. He went so far as to wonder if Clark had come back for a tardy
surrender. Men had done that before this, had carried a burden for
years, had reached the breaking point, had b