"Saunders!" he said chokingly, "Saunders, the damned fool! He's given it
away."
He staggered to a chair, and ran a handkerchief across his shaking lips.
"He told Bassett, of the Times-Republican," he managed to say. "Do
you--do you know what that means? And Bassett got Clark's automobile
number. He said so."
He looked up at her, his face twitching. "They're hound dogs on a scent,
Bev. They'll get the story, and blow it wide open."
"You know I'm prepared for that. I have been for ten years."
"I know." He was suddenly emotional. He reached out and took her hand.
"Poor old Bev!" he said. "After the way you've come back, too. It's a
damned shame."
She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one thing, and better
balanced always. She let him stroke her hand, standing near him with her
eyes absent and a little hard.
"I'd better make sure that was Jud first," he offered, after a time,
"and then warn him."
"Why?"
"Bassett will be after him."
"No!" she commanded sharply. "No, Fred. You let the thing alone. You've
built up an imaginary situation, and you're not thinking straight.
Plenty of things might happen. What probably has happened is that this
Bassett is at home and in bed."
She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went back to the hotel.
But, alone later on in her suite in the Ardmore she did not immediately
go to bed. She put on a dressing gown and stood for a long time by her
window, looking out. Instead of the city lights, however, she saw a
range of snow-capped mountains, and sheltered at their foot the Clark
ranch house, built by the old millionaire as a place of occasional
refuge from the pressure of his life. There he had raised his fine
horses, and trained them for the track. There, when late in life he
married, he had taken his wife for their honeymoon and two years later,
for the birth of their son. And there, when she died, he had returned
with the child, himself broken and prematurely aged, to be killed by one
of his own stallions when the boy was fifteen.
Six years his own master, Judson had been twenty-one to her twenty, when
she first met him. Going the usual pace, too, and throwing money right
and left. He had financed her as a star, ransacking Europe for her
stage properties, and then he fell in love with her. She shivered as she
remembered it. It had been desperate and terrible, because she had cared
for some one else.