He knew them all. This house was named Los Robles. It was less than ten miles from the Palitos viaduct. Her name was Clare—Clare Ingolls. The doctor’s name was Brandt. He had a wound in his head, but the skull was not fractured. There were three coloured servants, but the only one he had seen was Lena, who helped to nurse him and was tall and bronze-coloured and Amazonian and very happy. His left shin was broken in one place, his right in three. It was known immediately that the wreck of the train was the work of saboteurs. Los Robles had been built by and belonged to Waldemar Ingolls, the father of Clare. Altinger had received his letter. Altinger was in New York and had telephoned two or three times to ask how he was and tell him not to worry and offered to have him moved to a San Francisco hospital, but the Ingolls had preferred to keep him. This room where he lay was called the big guest-room. He was here because at the sound and news of the wreck the whole scattered community of the countryside had turned out to see and help and there had been a shortage of ambulances in this lonely place and Waldemar Ingolls had found him near the dead woman whom he had pulled out from beneath the wreckage. Clare’s mother was not alive. Dr. Brandt was very pleased with his progress. No one had known his name until he had been able to tell them it was Jorgensen: they thought he must somehow have lost his purse or wallet, to have nothing on him at all which gave any clue to his identity. Waldemar Ingolls was a tall, lean giant of a man: he had iron-grey hair and a deeply tanned face and hard, direct grey eyes which looked very straight at you and were always softening suddenly and wrinkling at their corners when he smiled or laughed, which was often, but never without reason. Several newspaper reporters had called at the house to see the wreck-victim, but had been turned away. . . .
All this and more he knew—and he knew also that he had not betrayed himself.
Without wanting or struggle the time-sense returned to him. At one instant it was not there, at the next the grid-lines of the chart—the lines which ruled life from seconds to centuries—were firmly superimposed upon his being again.
Propped against his pillows, he was finishing his first meal of the day, and at the far end of the big room Lena was busy with broom and dustcloths, every now and then a little snatch of tuneful humming would break from her lips, only to be instantly suppressed as a possible source of annoyance to the invalid.
Otto stared before him, a frown creasing deeply into his forehead. He said, turning his head a little:
“Please, how long have I been here?”
He had spoken to Lena many times upon many days before this, and she had answered. But there must have been a new quality in his voice, for she stared at him and ceased her work and came across the room to stand by the bed and look down at him with her hands on her hips and a wondering smile upon her face.
“Landsakes, Mizr Johnson!” she said happily “You sure’s a powerful lot mended!”
Otto did not understand a word of this. So he smiled up at her and tried again. He said:
“How long have I been here? Is it . . . many days?”
Lena concentrated upon this problem: she cast down her eyes and moved her lips, and with a small rustling sound the fingers of both hands beat out rapid scales upon the sides of her starched apron.
“It’s full twenty days, Mizr Johnson. . . .” She retired within herself for further calculation. “No! no,
“Three weeks!” said Otto—and frowned again with amazement and dismay and the effort of relegating all the fillings-in upon the map to their relative places within the grid-hnes of the time-chart.
“Please,” he said. “What is the date of the month? To-day?”
She told him—and continued to stand looking down at him with a widening smile which managed to combine without effort the pleasant emotions of maternal pride, clinical satisfaction, response to male attraction, and broad human sympathy.
“H’mn!” He grunted, and repeated the date and wrestled with his stiffly working mind to discover why the existence of a figure upon the calendar should fill him with sick foreboding.
And then there came the sound of the door opening and footsteps and the quick, decisive, pleasantly harsh voice of Waldemar Ingolls.
“Morning,” it said. “How d’you feel?”