“And in spite of that the patient lived?” asked Miss Gregg, innocently.
Paying no heed to her, Dr. Lawton continued:
“Clive came to himself as sound mentally as ever he had been and with his memory entirely restored. He remembered everything. Even to Osmun’s sticking him away in the sanitarium at the other side of the world. His first impulse was to telegraph the good news to his twin. Then he got to thinking and to wondering. He couldn’t understand Oz’s queer actions toward him. And he meant to find the answer for himself.”
“That’s just like him!” commented Vail. “He would.”
“He didn’t want to give Oz a chance to build up some plausible lie or to interfere in any way with his getting home,” said Lawton. “At last, after all these years, he seems to have caught just an inkling of his precious twin brother’s real character. He made up his mind to come home unheralded and to find out how matters stood. It wasn’t normal or natural, he figured, for Oz to have taken him clear to California and put him in that sanitarium under an assumed name. There was mischief in it somewhere. He decided to find where.
“He had only the clothes he wore and his father’s big diamond ring—the one your great-uncle gave old Creede, you remember, Thax. Clive never wore it. But he used to carry it around his neck in a chamois bag because it had been his father’s pride. Well, as soon as he could walk again, he sneaked out of the sanitarium, beat his way to San Francisco on a freight, and hunted up a pawnbroker. The pawnbroker, of course, supposed he had stolen the ring, so he gave Clive only a fraction of its value. But it was enough cash to bring him east.
“He was still weak and shaky, and the long, hot, cross-continent ride didn’t strengthen him. In fact, he seems to have kept up on his nerve. He got to New York and thence to Stockbridge, and hired a taxi to bring him over to Aura. He knew he could trust the two old negroes at Rackrent Farm to tell him the truth about what was going on. For they were devoted to him from the time he was a baby. So he had the taxi drive him straight to the farm before hunting up Oz or any of the rest of us. And there, apparently, he walked straight in on Oz himself.
“That’s as far as he got—or, rather, as far as I’d let him get—in his story just now. For he grew so excited I was afraid he’d have a relapse. I didn’t even dare ask him what he meant that day by mumbling to us that Osmun had frozen to death. It’s queer he should have known, though. Unless—”
“Unless what?” urged Doris, as Lawton paused frowning.
He made no reply, but continued to stare frowningly at the floor.