f I know.
Look at the facts! He's supposed to be dead. Ten years dead. His money's
been split up a dozen ways from the ace. Then--I knew him, you know--I
don't think even he would have the courage to come here and sit through
a performance. Although," he added reflectively, "Jud Clark had the
nerve for anything."

Bassett gave him a cigar and went out into the alley way that led to the
street. Once there, he stood still and softly whistled. Jud Clark! If
that was Judson Clark, he had the story of a lifetime.

For some time he walked the deserted streets of the city, thinking and
puzzling over the possibility of Gregory's being right. Sometime after
midnight he went back to the office and to the filing room. There, for
two hours, he sat reading closely old files of the paper, going through
them methodically and making occasional brief notes in a memorandum.
Then, at two o'clock he put away the files, and sitting back, lighted a
cigar.

It was all there; the enormous Clark fortune inherited by a boy who had
gone mad about this same Beverly Carlysle; her marriage to her leading
man, Howard Lucas; the subsequent killing of Lucas by Clark at his
Wyoming ranch, and Clark's escape into the mountains. The sensational
details of Clark's infatuation, the drama of a crime and Clark's
subsequent escape, and the later certainty of his death in a mountain
storm had filled the newspapers of the time for weeks. Judson Clark had
been famous, notorious, infamous and dead, all in less than two years. A
shameful and somehow a pitiful story.

But if Judson Clark had died, the story still lived. Every so often it
came up again. Three years before he had been declared legally dead, and
his vast estates, as provided by the will of old Elihu Clark, had gone
to universities and hospitals. But now and then came a rumor. Jud Clark
was living in India; he had a cattle ranch in Venezuela; he had been
seen on the streets of New Orleans.

Bassett ran over the situation in his mind.

First then, grant that Clark was still living and had been in the
theater that night. It became necessary to grant other things. To grant,
for instance, that Clark was capable of sitting, with a girl beside him,
through a performance by the woman for whom he had wrecked his life, of
a play he had once known from the opening line to the tag. To grant that
he could laugh and applaud, and at the drop of the curtain go calmly
away, with such memories behind him as must