He confirmed this before starting West by visiting some of the offices of the leading papers and looking up old friends. The Clark story was dead for the time. They had run a lot of pictures of him, however, and some one might turn him up eventually, but a scent was pretty cold in ten years. The place had changed, too. Oil had been discovered five years ago, and the old settlers had, a good many of them, cashed in and moved away. The town had grown like all oil towns.
Bassett was fairly content. He took the night train out of Chicago and spent the next day crossing Nebraska, fertile, rich and interesting. On the afternoon of the second day he left the train and took a branch line toward the mountains and Norada, and from that time on he became an urbane, interested and generally cigar-smoking interrogation point.
“Railroad been here long?” he asked the conductor.
“Four years.”
“Norada must have been pretty isolated before that.”
“Thirty miles in a coach or a Ford car.”
“I was reading the other day,” said Bassett, “about the Judson Clark case. Have a cigar? Got time to sit down?”
“You a newspaper man?”
“Oil well supplies,” said Bassett easily. “Well, in this article it seemed some woman or other had made a confession. It sounded fishy to me.”
“Well, I'll tell you about that.” The conductor sat down and bit off the end of his cigar. “I knew the Donaldsons well, and Maggie Donaldson was an honest woman. But I'll tell you how I explain the thing. Donaldson died, and that left her pretty much alone. The executors of the Clark estate kept her on the ranch, but when the estate was settled three years ago she had to move. That broke her all up. She's always said he wasn't dead. She kept the house just as it was, and my wife says she had his clothes all ready and everything.”