he added reflectively, "Jud Clark had the nerve for anything."

Bassett gave him a cigar and went out into the alley way that led
to the street. Once there, he stood still and softly whistled.
Jud Clark! If that was Judson Clark, he had the story of a lifetime.

For some time he walked the deserted streets of the city, thinking
and puzzling over the possibility of Gregory's being right.
Sometime after midnight he went back to the office and to the
filing room. There, for two hours, he sat reading closely old
files of the paper, going through them methodically and making
occasional brief notes in a memorandum. Then, at two o'clock he
put away the files, and sitting back, lighted a cigar.

It was all there; the enormous Clark fortune inherited by a boy who
had gone mad about this same Beverly Carlysle; her marriage to her
leading man, Howard Lucas; the subsequent killing of Lucas by Clark
at his Wyoming ranch, and Clark's escape into the mountains. The
sensational details of Clark's infatuation, the drama of a crime
and Clark's subsequent escape, and the later certainty of his death
in a mountain storm had filled the newspapers of the time for weeks.
Judson Clark had been famous, notorious, infamous and dead, all in
less than two years. A shameful and somehow a pitiful story.

But if Judson Clark had died, the story still lived. Every so often
it came up again. Three years before he had been declared legally
dead, and his vast estates, as provided by the will of old Elihu
Clark, had gone to universities and hospitals. But now and then
came a rumor. Jud Clark was living in India; he had a cattle ranch
in Venezuela; he had been seen on the streets of New Orleans.