“Very well,” he said. Then he hung up and stood still before he turned around:
“It isn't very good news,” he said. “I wish I could—Elizabeth!”
Elizabeth had crumpled up in a small heap on the floor.
All through the long night that followed, with the movement of feet through the halls, with her mother's door closing and the ghastly silence that followed it, with the dawn that came through the windows, the dawn that to Jim meant not a new day, but a new life beyond their living touch, all through the night Elizabeth was aware of two figures that came and went. One was Dick, quiet, tender and watchful. And one was of a heavy woman in a gaudy dress, her face old and weary in the morning light, who tended her with gentle hands.
She fell asleep as the light was brightening in the East, with Dick holding her hands and kneeling on the floor beside her bed.
It was not until the next day that they knew that Jim had not been alone. A girl who was with him had been pinned under the car and had died instantly.
Jim had woven his bit in the pattern and passed on. The girl was negligible; she was, she had been. That was all. But Jim's death added the last element to the impending catastrophe. It sent Dick West alone.
XXII
For several days after his visit to the Livingstone ranch Louis Bassett made no move to go to the cabin. He wandered around the town, made promiscuous acquaintances and led up, in careful conversations with such older residents as he could find, to the Clark and Livingstone families. Of the latter he learned nothing; of the former not much that he had not known before.