“His wife!” The surprise was plain enough in my voice. And this seemed, just for a second, to surprise him, too.
“You knew,” he said, “that he had married?”
I explained that I hadn’t seen Corey for several years, and added that I had, however, understood that he was thinking of settling down. It put, I could see, a different face upon what he had to tell, for he seemed to adjust himself, as if he must now go back to something he had thought already understood between us.
“You didn’t know, then,” he said, “that he was dead?”
Dead! Corey dead! So that was what he had to tell. There sprang up in my mind a vague, indefinite vision of something heroic in connection with the Great War. When, I asked, and where did he die?
“A little over three months ago, in Europe. I was his executor.”
There was something in the way he made his last statement which lent it a kind of special importance. And it proved, indeed, in the end, the fact of supreme importance. And here, as if it were due me, he told me his name—Ewing; and I told him mine.
“Yes,” he said. “I made a trip to New York to see a man who’d been with him before he died. He brought a message from Corey. Queer,” he said, “that message. He must have been—a little off, you know, at the last.”
It was clear that something had occurred on his trip to New York which had puzzled him then, and continued, in spite of his explanation, to puzzle him still. It was evident in the way he went back, presently, to the beginning, as if he were stating a problem or building up a case.
He began by saying that he supposed nobody in Dubuque ever had understood Corey—“and yet”—he faced me—“you wouldn’t say he was hard to understand?”