"For things to come back to me," said Colter simply. "I think things are beginning to get clearer. Just now when we talked," he waved his hand, "doors opened all around me. I felt myself back in myself. The true me—I—you see, I am in much better health."
The man stood there irresolute, the eyes wavering in their intensity of attempted remembrance, some look of assurance and confidence alternating with the old shifting look of dread and dismay that at moments still swept the fine drawn face. It was this look of shifting dread that had always kept the lawyer suspicious. What had this man done that could give to strong eyes like that the averted haunted look they sometimes held? His manner changing with a half apologetic smile, he turned to his visitor.
"I take it you've been a scientific man, college-bred. Have you by any chance a degree?" Shipman almost laughed as he asked it.
The other knit his brows, and returned the look earnestly.
"Would you believe me if—if I tell you what I have come to believe, what I think is possible, would you think me crazy?"
Then a slow sense of what had been of the man's horror dawned on the lawyer. "If amnesia were true, if one were dimly conscious of one's life paths and had somehow, somewhere been swept out of these paths, and there were no landmark to help one go back, why then," the grim mouth shut on the doubts. Shipman nodded. There was something in the nod that the other man in his helpless gentleness comprehended. The nod said, "I don't believe you. I don't trust you, but I won't take advantage of you." It was hardly akin to Sard's whole-souled trust.
One arm crossed behind him, Colter began pacing restlessly up and down the small space where the tree-chopping and wood-sawing had made a little theatre. He spoke rapidly, disconnectedly. "I have come to believe that I have been a college man. I even believe that I have had certain honors. There have been achievements along scientific lines. I can so far remember nothing in sequence back of the day Miss Bogart found me. Since that I have a perfect power of memory." The man halted and seemed to wait with a strained patience for things to pour in on the open sensitive plate of his healing memory. At last, fishing in an inner pocket, he held out a little book bound in green vellum. It was very worn and had evidently been constantly read. "I have always had this book, wherever I have been. For months it was the one real thing. It was here, tucked back in a sort of envelope in the cover, that a week ago I found an old letter from a man I once knew. When I try to connect my memories with this man something profoundly horrible sweeps me, and—and I grow full of panic."
Watts, with suspicions he could not control, reached out for the book. At the same time he looked for anything that might further identify this mysterious Colter. He peered almost with anger into a face so fine and tempered in its sad look of opaque visions. Turning the opening leaves, Shipman read in the little book, "Oxford, December 25, 19—to M. L. from his fellow gypsy, Tarrant."
"Tarrant. Tarrant," the name arrested the lawyer. He turned sobered eyes upon Colter. "Who is Tarrant?" he asked. Watts, with an annoyed expression, wrinkled his brows. Where in thunder had he heard that name Tarrant?
"I do not know," said Colter, "yet somehow, I believe it is someone I have known."