Dr. Lawton shifted his position in such a way as to bring his angular shoulder between his face and that of his tormentor. Then he went on:
“He was badly wounded. A bit of bone splinter pressed down on the brain—if part of my audience can grasp such simple language as that—completely destroying memory. After the Armistice, Osmun made a search for him and found him in a base hospital, not only in precarious bodily health but entirely lacking in recollection of any past event. He did not so much as recall his own name. He didn’t recognize Oz or know where he was nor how he got there.”
“Poor old Clive!” muttered Vail.
“Oz brought him back to America. For some reason that I can’t even guess—it was at that point Clive began to get feverish and incoherent—Oz smuggled him across the Continent and ‘planted’ him in a sanitarium up in Northern California. He placed him there under another name, paying for his keep, of course, and leaving word that every care was to be taken of him. The sanitarium doctors held out absolutely no hope for his mental recovery, though his physical health began to improve almost at once.”
“To judge by the way he looks now,” commented Vail, “his physical health has gone pretty far in the opposite direction since then.”
“It’s had enough setbacks to make it do that,” said the doctor. “But he’ll pull through finely now. He’s turned the corner.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” apologized Thaxton. “Fire away.”
“Well, with Clive disposed of—presumably for life—Osmun comes back here to Aura,” proceeded Lawton. “And here for some reason I can’t make out, he elects to be both himself and Clive. His own long illness—trench fever, laymen call it—had left him partly bald. He stopped in New York and had a wigmaker-artist build him a toupée that corrected the only difference in appearance between Clive and himself. To make the change still greater he bought those thick-lensed specs. I have tested them. The lenses are of plain glass, slightly smoked. And he cultivated a limp and a sag of the shoulder. Then he embarked on his Jekyll-Hyde career among us.”
“It didn’t seem possible when you people told me about it first,” said Doris, as the doctor paused again for dramatic effect. “But the more I’ve thought it over the easier it seemed. You see, their faces were just alike. They both knew the same people and the same places and Osmun knew every bit of Clive’s history and associations and tastes and mannerisms. The only things he had to keep remembering all the time were the disguise and the shoulder and the limp and to take that horrid rasp out of his voice when he impersonated Clive. He— Go on, please, doctor. I’m sorry I interrupted again.”
“That’s all I actually know about Osmun’s part in it,” resumed the doctor. “And a lot of that is only deduction. But I do know about Clive. At the sanitarium he had tried to walk out through a door in the dark. The door proved to be a second story window. Clive landed on his head in the courtyard below. They picked him up for dead. Then they found he was still breathing, but his skull was bashed in. There was just one chance in three that a major operation might save him. There was no time to communicate with Osmun, even if he had given them his right name and address—which he had not. So they operated. The operation was a success—”