“I'm not hiding behind her skirts,” Dick said shortly. “And there's nothing incriminating in what you say. She saw me as a fugitive, and she sent me a warning. That's all.”
“Easy, easy, old man. I'm not pinning anything on her. But I want, if you don't mind, to carry this through. I have every reason to believe that, some time before you got to Norada, the Thorwald woman was on my trail. I know that I was followed to the cabin the night I stayed there, and that she got a saddle horse from her son that night, her son by Thorwald, either for herself or some one else.”
“All right. I accept that, tentatively.”
“That means that she knew I was coming to Norada. Think a minute; I'd kept my movements quiet, but Beverly Carlysle knew, and her brother. When they warned David they warned her.”
“I don't believe it.”
“If you had killed Lucas,” Bassett asserted positively, “the Thorwald woman would have let the sheriff get you, and be damned to you. She had no reason to love you. You'd kept her son out of what she felt was his birthright.”
He got up and opened a table drawer.
“I've got a copy of the coroner's inquest here. It will bear going over. And it may help you to remember, too. We needn't read it all. There's a lot that isn't pertinent.”
He got out a long envelope, and took from it a number of typed pages, backed with a base of heavy paper.
“'Inquest in the Coroner's office on the body of Howard Lucas,'” he read. “'October 10th, 1911.' That was the second day after. 'Examination of witnesses by Coroner Samuel J. Burkhardt. Mrs. Lucas called and sworn.'” He glanced at Dick and hesitated. “I don't know about this to-night, Livingstone. You look pretty well shot to pieces.”