Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Mystery fiction; Wills -- Fiction
“That’s all I actually know about Osmun’s part in it,” resumed the
doctor. “And a lot of that is only deduction. But I do know about
Clive. At the sanitarium he had tried to walk out through a door in
the dark. The door proved to be a second story window. Clive landed
on his head in the courtyard below. They picked him up for dead. Then
they found he was still breathing, but his skull was bashed in. There
was just one chance in three that a major operation might save him.
There was no time to communicate with Osmun, even if he had given them
his right name and address--which he had not. So they operated. The
operation was a success--”
“And in spite of that the patient lived?” asked Miss Gregg, innocently.
Paying no heed to her, Dr. Lawton continued:
“Clive came to himself as sound mentally as ever he had been and with
his memory entirely restored. He remembered everything. Even to Osmun’s
sticking him away in the sanitarium at the other side of the world. His
first impulse was to telegraph the good news to his twin. Then he got
to thinking and to wondering. He couldn’t understand Oz’s queer actions
toward him. And he meant to find the answer for himself.”
“That’s just like him!” commented Vail. “He would.”
“He didn’t want to give Oz a chance to build up some plausible lie or
to interfere in any way with his getting home,” said Lawton. “At last,
after all these years, he seems to have caught just an inkling of his
precious twin brother’s real character. He made up his mind to come
home unheralded and to find out how matters stood. It wasn’t normal or
natural, he figured, for Oz to have taken him clear to California and
put him in that sanitarium under an assumed name. There was mischief in
it somewhere. He decided to find where.
“He had only the clothes he wore and his father’s big diamond ring--the
one your great-uncle gave old Creede, you remember, Thax. Clive never
wore it. But he used to carry it around his neck in a chamois bag
because it had been his father’s pride. Well, as soon as he could walk
again, he sneaked out of the sanitarium, beat his way to San Francisco
on a freight, and hunted up a pawnbroker. The pawnbroker, of course,
supposed he had stolen the ring, so he gave Clive only a fraction of
its value. But it was enough cash to bring him east.
“He was still weak and shaky, and the long, hot, cross-continent ride
didn’t strengthen him. In fact, he seems to have kept up on his nerve.
He got to New York and thence to Stockbridge, and hired a taxi to
bring him over to Aura. He knew he could trust the two old negroes at
Rackrent Farm to tell him the truth about what was going on. For they
were devoted to him from the time he was a baby. So he had the taxi
drive him straight to the farm before hunting up Oz or any of the rest
of us. And there, apparently, he walked straight in on Oz himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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