When Wilkins had disappeared around the angle of the staircase Bassett went to a chair and sat down. He felt sick, and his knees were trembling. Something had happened, a search for Clark room by room perhaps, and the discovery had been made.
He was totally unable to think or to plan. With Dick well they could perhaps have made a run for it. The fire-escape stood ready. But as things were—The murmuring among the crowd at the foot of the stairs ceased, and he looked up. Wilkins was on the staircase, searching the lobby with his eyes. When he saw Bassett he came quickly down and confronted him, his face angry and suspicious.
“You're mixed up in this somehow,” he said sharply. “You might as well come over with the story. We'll get him. He can't get out of this town.”
With the words, and the knowledge that in some incredible fashion Dick had made his escape, Bassett's mind reacted instantly.
“What's eating you, Wilkins?” he demanded. “Who got away? I couldn't get that tongue-tied bell-hop to tell me. Thought it was a fire.”
“Don't stall, Bassett. You've had Jud Clark hidden upstairs in three-twenty all day.”
Bassett got up and towered angrily over the sheriff. The crowd had turned and was watching.
“In three-twenty?” he said. “You're crazy. Jud Clark! Let me tell you something. I don't know what you've got in your head, but three-twenty is a Doctor Livingstone from near my home town. Well known and highly respected, too. What's more, he's a sick man, and if he's got away, as you say, it's because he is delirious. I had a doctor in to see him an hour ago. I've just arranged for a room at the hospital for him. Does that look as though I've been hiding him?”
The positiveness of his identification and his indignation resulted in a change in Wilkins' manner.
“I'll ask you to stay here until I come back.” His tone was official, but less suspicious. “We'll have him in a half hour. It's Clark all right. I'm not saying you knew it was Clark, but I want to ask you some questions.”
He went out, and Bassett heard him shouting an order in the street. He went to the street door, and realized that a search was going on, both by the police and by unofficial volunteers. Men on horseback clattered by to guard the borders of the town, and in the vicinity of the hotel searchers were investigating yards and alleyways.
Bassett himself was helpless. He stood by, watching the fire of his own igniting, conscious of the curious scrutiny of the few hotel loungers who remained, and expecting momentarily to hear of Dick's capture. It must come eventually, he felt sure. As to how Dick had been identified, or by what means he had escaped, he was in complete ignorance; and an endeavor to learn by establishing the former entente cordiale between the room clerk and himself was met by a suspicious glance and what amounted to a snub. He went back to his chair against the wall and sat there, waiting for the end.
It was an hour before the sheriff returned, and he came in scowling.
“I'll see you now,” he said briefly, and led the way back to the hotel office behind the desk. Bassett's last hope died when he saw sitting there, pale but composed, the elderly maid. The sheriff lost no time.
“Now I'll tell you what we know about your connection with this case, Bassett,” he said. “You engaged a car to take you both to the main line to-night. You paid off Clark's room as well as your own this afternoon. When you found he was sick you canceled your going. That's true, isn't it?”
“It is. I've told you I knew him at home, but not as Clark.”
“I'll let that go. You intended to take the midnight on the main line, but you ordered a car instead of using the branch road.”
“Livingstone was sick. I thought it would be easier. That's all.” His voice sharpened. “You can't drag me into this, Sheriff. In the first place I don't believe it was Clark, or he wouldn't have come here, of all places on the earth. I didn't even know he was here, until he came into my room this morning.”
“Why did he come into your room?”
“He had seen that I was registered. He said he felt sick. I took him back and put him to bed. To-night I got a doctor.”
The sheriff felt in his pocket and produced a piece of paper. Bassett's morale was almost destroyed when he saw that it was Gregory's letter to David.
“I'll ask you to explain this. It was on Clark's bed.”
Bassett took it and read it slowly. He was thinking hard.
“I see,” he said. “Well, that explains why he came here. He was too sick to talk when I saw him. You see, this is not addressed to him, but to his uncle, David Livingstone. David Livingstone is a brother of Henry Livingstone, who died some years ago at Dry River. This refers to a personal matter connected with the Livingstone estate.”
The sheriff took the letter and reread it. He was puzzled.
“You're a good talker,” he acknowledged grudgingly. He turned to the maid.
“All right, Hattie,” he said. “We'll have that story again. But just a minute.” He turned to the reporter. “Mrs. Thorwald here hasn't seen Lizzie Lazarus, the squaw. Lizzie has been sitting in my office ever since noon. Now, Hattie.”
Hattie moistened her dry lips.
“It was Jud Clark, all right,” she said. “I knew him all his life, off and on. But I wish I hadn't screamed. I don't believe he killed Lucas, and I never will. I hope he gets away.”
She eyed the sheriff vindictively, but he only smiled grimly.
“What did I tell you?” he said to Bassett. “Hell with the women—that was Jud Clark. And we'll get him, Hattie. Don't worry. Go on.”
She looked at Bassett.
“When you left me, I sat outside the door, as you said. Then I heard him moving, and I went in. The room was not very light, and I didn't know him at first. He sat up in bed and looked at me, and he said, 'Why, hello, Hattie Thorwald.' That's my name. I married a Swede. Then he looked again, and he said, 'Excuse me, I thought you were a Mrs. Thorwald, but I see now you're older.' I recognized him then, and I thought I was going to faint. I knew he'd be arrested the moment it was known he was here. I said, 'Lie down, Mr. Jud. You're not very well.' And I closed the door and locked it. I was scared.”
Her voice broke; she fumbled for a handkerchief. The sheriff glanced at Bassett.
“Now where's your Livingstone story?” he demanded. “All right, Hattie. Let's have it.”
“I said, 'For God's sake, Mr. Jud, lie still, until I think what to do. The sheriff's likely downstairs this very minute.' And then he went queer and wild. He jumped off the bed and stood listening and staring, and shaking all over. 'I've got to get away,' he said, very loud. 'I won't let them take me. I'll kill myself first!' When I put my hand on his arm he threw it off, and he made for the door. I saw then that he was delirious with fever, and I stood in front of the door and begged him not to go out. But he threw me away so hard that that I fell, and I screamed.”
“And then what?”
“That's all. If I hadn't been almost out of my mind I'd never have told that it was Jud Clark. That'll hang on me dying day.”
An hour or so later Bassett went back to his room in a state of mental and nervous exhaustion. He knew that from that time on he would be under suspicion and probably under espionage, and he proceeded methodically, his door locked, to go over his papers. His notebook and the cuttings from old files relative to the Clark case he burned in his wash basin and then carefully washed the basin. That done, his attendance on a sick man, and the letter found on the bed was all the positive evidence they had to connect him with the case. He had had some thought of slipping out by the fire-escape and making a search for Dick on his own account, but his lack of familiarity with his surroundings made that practically useless.
At midnight he stretched out on his bed without undressing, and went over the situation carefully. He knew nothing of the various neuroses which affect the human mind, but he had a vague impression that memory when lost did eventually return, and Dick's recognition of the chambermaid pointed to such a return. He wondered what a man would feel under such conditions, what he would think. He could not do it. He abandoned the effort finally, and lay frowning at the ceiling while he considered his own part in the catastrophe. He saw himself, following his training and his instinct, leading the inevitable march toward this night's tragedy, planning, scheming, searching, and now that it had come, lying helpless on his bed while the procession of events went on past him and beyond his control.
When an automobile engine back-fired in the street below he went sick with fear.
He made the resolution then that was to be the guiding motive for his life for the next few months, to fight the thing of his own creating to a finish. But with the resolution newly made he saw the futility of it. He might fight, would fight, but nothing could restore to Dick Livingstone the place he had made for himself in the world. He might be saved from his past, but he could not be given a future.
All at once he was aware that some one was working stealthily at the lock of the door which communicated with a room beyond. He slid cautiously off the bed and went to the light switch, standing with a hand on it, and waited. The wild thought that it might be Livingstone was uppermost in his mind, and when the door creaked open and closed again, that was the word he breathed into the darkness.
“No,” said a woman's voice in a whisper. “It's the maid, Hattie. Be careful. There's a guard at the top of the stairs.”
He heard her moving to his outer door, and he knew that she stood there, listening, her head against the panel. When she was satisfied she slipped, with the swiftness of familiarity with her surroundings, to the stand beside his bed, and turned on the lamp. In the shaded light he saw that she wore a dark cape, with its hood drawn over her head. In some strange fashion the maid, even the woman, was lost, and she stood, strange, mysterious, and dramatic in the little room.
“If you found Jud Clark, what would you do with him?” she demanded. From beneath the hood her eyes searched his face. “Turn him over to Wilkins and his outfit?”
“I think you know better than that.”
“Have you got any plan?”
“Plan? No. They've got every outlet closed, haven't they? Do you know where he is?”
“I know where he isn't, or they'd have him by now. And I know Jud Clark. He'd take to the mountains, same as he did before. He's got a good horse.”
“A horse!”
“Listen. I haven't told this, and I don't mean to. They'll learn it in a couple of hours, anyhow. He got out by a back fire-escape—they know that. But they don't know he took Ed Rickett's black mare. They think he's on foot. I've been down there now, and she's gone. Ed's shut up in a room on the top floor, playing poker. They won't break up until about three o'clock and he'll miss his horse then. That's two hours yet.”
Bassett tried to see her face in the shadow of the hood. He was puzzled and suspicious at her change of front, more than half afraid of a trap.
“How do I know you are not working with Wilkins?” he demanded. “You could have saved the situation to-night by saying you weren't sure.”
“I was upset. I've had time to think since.”
He was forced to trust her, eventually, although the sense of some hidden motive, some urge greater than compassion, persisted in him.
“You've got some sort of plan for me, then? I can't follow him haphazard into the mountains at night, and expect to find him.”
“Yes. He was delirious when he left. That thing about the sheriff being after him—he wasn't after him then. Not until I gave the alarm. He's delirious, and he thinks he's back to the night he—you know. Wouldn't he do the same thing again, and make for the mountains and the cabin? He went to the cabin before.”
Bassett looked at his watch. It was half past twelve.
“Even if I could get a horse I couldn't get out of the town.”
“You might, on foot. They'll be trailing Rickett's horse by dawn. And if you can get out of town I can get you a horse. I can get you out, too, I think. I know every foot of the place.”
A feeling of theatrical unreality was Bassett's chief emotion during the trying time that followed. The cloaked and shrouded figure of the woman ahead, the passage through two dark and empty rooms by pass key to an unguarded corridor in the rear, the descent of the fire-escape, where they stood flattened against the wall while a man, possibly one of the posse, rode in, tied his horse and stamped in high heeled boots into the building, and always just ahead the sure movement and silent tread of the woman, kept his nerves taut and increased his feeling of the unreal.
At the foot of the fire-escape the woman slid out of sight noiselessly, but under Bassett's feet a tin can rolled and clattered. Then a horse snorted close to his shoulder, and he was frozen with fright. After that she gave him her hand, and led him through an empty outbuilding and another yard into a street.
At two o'clock that morning Bassett, waiting in a lonely road near what he judged to be the camp of a drilling crew, heard a horse coming toward him and snorting nervously as it came and drew back into the shadows until he recognized the shrouded silhouette leading him.
“It belongs to my son,” she said. “I'll fix it with him to-morrow. But if you're caught you'll have to say you came out and took him, or you'll get us all in trouble.”
She gave him careful instructions as to how to find the trail, and urged him to haste.
“If you get him,” she advised, “better keep right on over the range.”
He paused, with his foot in the stirrup.
“You seem pretty certain he's taken to the mountains.”
“It's your only chance. They'll get him anywhere else.”
He mounted and prepared to ride off. He would have shaken hands with her, but the horse was still terrified at her shrouded figure and veered and snorted when she approached. “However it turns out,” he said, “you've done your best, and I'm grateful.”
The horse moved off and left her standing there, her cowl drawn forward and her hands crossed on her breast. She stood for a moment, facing toward the mountains, oddly monkish in outline and posture. Then she turned back toward the town.
Dick had picked up life again where he had left it off so long before. Gone was David's house built on the sands of forgetfulness. Gone was David himself, and Lucy. Gone not even born into his consciousness was Elizabeth. The war, his work, his new place in the world, were all obliterated, drowned in the flood of memories revived by the shock of Bassett's revelations.
Not that the breaking point had revealed itself as such at once. There was confusion first, then stupor and unconsciousness, and out of that, sharply and clearly, came memory. It was not ten years ago, but an hour ago, a minute ago, that he had stood staring at Howard Lucas on the floor of the billiard room, and had seen Beverly run in through the door.
“Bev!” he was saying. “Bev! Don't look like that!”
He moved and found he was in bed. It had been a dream. He drew a long breath, looked about the room, saw the woman and greeted her. But already he knew he had not been dreaming. Things were sharpening in his mind. He shuddered and looked at the floor, but nobody lay there. Only the horror in his mind, and the instinct to get away from it. He was not thinking at all, but rising in him was not only the need for flight, but the sense of pursuit. They were after him. They would get him. They must never get him alive.
Instinct and will took the place of thought, and whatever closed chamber in his brain had opened, it clearly influenced his physical condition. He bore all the stigmata of prolonged and heavy drinking; his nerves were gone; he twitched and shook. When he got down the fire-escape his legs would scarcely hold him.
The discovery of Ed Rickett's horse in the courtyard, saddled and ready, fitted in with the brain pattern of the past.
Like one who enters a room for the first time, to find it already familiar, for a moment he felt that this thing that he was doing he had done before. Only for a moment. Then partial memory ceased, and he climbed into the saddle, rode out and turned toward the mountains and the cabin. By that strange quality of the brain which is called habit, although the habit be of only one emphatic precedent, he followed the route he had taken ten years before. How closely will never be known. Did he stop at this turn to look back, as he had once before? Did he let his horse breathe there? Not the latter, probably, for as, following the blind course that he had followed ten years before, he left the town and went up the canyon trail, he was riding as though all the devils of hell were behind him.
One thing is certain. The reproduction of the conditions of the earlier flight, the familiar associations of the trail, must have helped rather than hindered his fixation in the past. Again he was Judson Clark, who had killed a man, and was flying from himself and from pursuit.
Before long his horse was in acute distress, but he did not notice it. At the top of the long climb the animal stopped, but he kicked him on recklessly. He was as unaware of his own fatigue, or that he was swaying in the saddle, until galloping across a meadow the horse stumbled and threw him.
He lay still for some time; not hurt but apparently lacking the initiative to get up again. He had at that period the alternating lucidity and mental torpor of the half drunken man. But struggling up through layers of blackness at last there came again the instinct for flight, and he got on the horse and set off.
The torpor again overcame him and he slept in the saddle. When the horse stopped he roused and kicked it on. Once he came up through the blackness to the accompaniment of a great roaring, and found that the animal was saddle deep in a ford, and floundering badly among the rocks. He turned its head upstream, and got it out safely.
Toward dawn some of the confusion was gone, but he firmly fixed in the past. The horse wandered on, head down, occasionally stopping to seize a leaf as it passed, and once to drink deeply at a spring. Dick was still not thinking—there was something that forbade him to think—but he was weak and emotional. He muttered:
“Poor Bev! Poor old Bev!”
A great wave of tenderness and memory swept over him. Poor Bev! He had made life hell for her, all right. He had an almost uncontrollable impulse to turn the horse around, go back and see her once more. He was gone anyhow. They would get him. And he wanted her to know that he would have died rather than do what he had done.
The flight impulse died; he felt sick and very cold, and now and then he shook violently. He began to watch the trail behind him for the pursuit, but without fear. He seemed to have been wandering for a thousand black nights through deep gorges and over peaks as high as the stars, and now he wanted to rest, to stop somewhere and sleep, to be warm again. Let them come and take him, anywhere out of this nightmare.
With the dawn still gray he heard a horse behind and below him on the trail up the cliff face. He stopped and sat waiting, twisted about in his saddle, his expression ugly and defiant, and yet touchingly helpless, the look of a boy in trouble and at bay. The horseman came into sight on the trail below, riding hard, a middle-aged man in a dark sack suit and a straw hat, an oddly incongruous figure and manifestly weary. He rode bent forward, and now and again he raised his eyes from the trail and searched the wall above with bloodshot, anxious eyes.
On the turn below Dick, Bassett saw him for the first time, and spoke to him in a quiet voice.
“Hello, old man,” he said. “I began to think I was going to miss you after all.”
His scrutiny of Dick's face had rather reassured him. The delirium had passed, apparently. Dishevelled although he was, covered with dust and with sweat from the horse, Livingstone's eyes were steady enough. As he rode up to him, however, he was not so certain. He found himself surveyed with a sort of cool malignity that startled him.
“Miss me!” Livingstone sneered bitterly. “With every damned hill covered by this time with your outfit! I'll tell you this. If I'd had a gun you'd never have got me alive.”
Bassett was puzzled and slightly ruffled.
“My outfit! I'll tell you this, son, I've risked my neck half the night to get you out of this mess.”
“God Almighty couldn't get me out of this mess,” Dick said somberly.
It was then that Bassett saw something not quite normal in his face, and he rode closer.
“See here, Livingstone,” he said, in a soothing tone, “nobody's going to get you. I'm here to keep them from getting you. We've got a good start, but we'll have to keep moving.”
Dick sat obstinately still, his horse turned across the trail, and his eyes still suspicious and unfriendly.
“I don't know you,” he said doggedly. “And I've done all the running away I'm going to do. You go back and tell Wilkins I'm here and to come and get me. The sooner the better.” The sneer faded, and he turned on Bassett with a depth of tragedy in his eyes that frightened the reporter. “My God,” he said, “I killed a man last night! I can't go through life with that on me. I'm done, I tell you.”
“Last night!” Some faint comprehension began to dawn in Bassett's mind, a suspicion of the truth. But there was no time to verify it. He turned and carefully inspected the trail to where it came into sight at the opposite rim of the valley. When he was satisfied that the pursuit was still well behind them he spoke again.
“Pull yourself together, Livingstone,” he said, rather sharply. “Think a bit. You didn't kill anybody last night. Now listen,” he added impressively. “You are Livingstone, Doctor Richard Livingstone. You stick to that, and think about it.”
But Dick was not listening, save to some bitter inner voice, for suddenly he turned his horse around on the trail. “Get out of the way,” he said, “I'm going back to give myself up.”
He would have done it, probably, would have crowded past Bassett on the narrow trail and headed back toward capture, but for his horse. It balked and whirled on the ledge, but it would not pass Bassett. Dick swore and kicked it, his face ugly and determined, but it refused sullenly. He slid out of the saddle then and tried to drag it on, but he was suddenly weak and sick. He staggered. Bassett was off his horse in a moment and caught him. He eased him onto a boulder, and he sat there, his shoulders sagging and his whole body twitching.
“Been drinking my head off,” he said at last. “If I had a drink now I'd straighten out.” He tried to sit up. “That's what's the matter with me. I'm funking, of course, but that's not all. I'd give my soul for some whisky.”'
“I can get you a drink, if you'll come on about a mile,” Bassett coaxed. “At the cabin you and I talked about yesterday.”
“Now you're talking.” Dick made an effort and got to his feet, shaking off Bassett's assisting arm. “For God's sake keep your hands off me,” he said irritably. “I've got a hangover, that's all.”
He got into his saddle without assistance and started off up the trail. Bassett once more searched the valley, but it was empty save for a deer drinking at the stream far below. He turned and followed.
He was fairly hopeless by that time, what with Dick's unexpected resistance and the change in the man himself. He was dealing with something he did not understand, and the hypothesis of delirium did not hold. There was a sort of desperate sanity in Dick's eyes. That statement, now, about drinking his head off—he hadn't looked yesterday like a drinking man. But now he did. He was twitching, his hands shook. On the rock his face had been covered with a cold sweat. What was that the doctor yesterday had said about delirium tremens? Suppose he collapsed? That meant capture.
He did not need to guide Dick to the cabin. He turned off the trail himself, and Bassett, following, saw him dismount and survey the ruin with a puzzled face. But he said nothing. Bassett waiting outside to tie the horses came in to find him sitting on one of the dilapidated chairs, staring around, but all he said was:
“Get me that drink, won't you? I'm going to pieces.” Bassett found his tin cup where he had left it on a shelf and poured out a small amount of whisky from his flask.
“This is all we have,” he explained. “We'll have to go slow with it.”
It had an almost immediate effect. The twitching grew less, and a faint color came into Dick's face. He stood up and stretched himself. “That's better,” he said. “I was all in. I must have been riding that infernal horse for years.”
He wandered about while the reporter made a fire and set the coffee pot to boil. Bassett, glancing up once, saw him surveying the ruined lean-to from the doorway, with an expression he could not understand. But he did not say anything, nor did he speak again until Bassett called him to get some food. Even then he was laconic, and he seemed to be listening and waiting.
Once something startled the horses outside, and he sat up and listened.
“They're here!” he said.
“I don't think so,” Bassett replied, and went to the doorway. “No,” he called back over his shoulder, “you go on and finish. I'll watch.”
“Come back and eat,” Dick said surlily.
He ate very little, but drank of the coffee. Bassett too ate almost nothing. He was pulling himself together for the struggle that was to come, marshaling his arguments for flight, and trying to fathom the extent of the change in the man across the small table.
Dick put down his tin cup and got up. He was strong again, and the nightmare confusion of the night had passed away. Instead of it there was a desperate lucidity and a courage born of desperation. He remembered it all distinctly; he had killed Howard Lucas the night before. Before long Wilkins or some of his outfit would ride up to the door, and take him back to Norada. He was not afraid of that. They would always think he had run away because he was afraid of capture, but it was not that. He had run away from Bev's face. Only he had not got away from it. It had been with him all night, and it was with him now.
But he would have to go back. He couldn't be caught like a rat in a trap. The Clarks didn't run away. They were fighters. Only the Clarks didn't kill. They fought, but they didn't murder.
He picked up his hat and went to the door.
“Well, you've been mighty kind, old man,” he said. “But I've got to go back. I ran last night like a scared kid, but I'm through with that sort of foolishness.”
“I'd give a good bit,” Bassett said, watching him, “to know what made you run last night. You were safe where you were.”
“I don't know what you are talking about,” Dick said drearily. “I didn't run from them. I ran to get away from something.” He turned away irritably. “You wouldn't understand. Say I was drunk. I was, for that matter. I'm not over it yet.”
Bassett watched him.
“I see,” he said quietly. “It was last night, was it, that this thing happened?”
“You know it, don't you?”
“And, after it happened, do you remember what followed?”
“I've been riding all night. I didn't care what happened. I knew I'd run into a whale of a blizzard, but I—”
He stopped and stared outside, to where the horses grazed in the upland meadow, knee deep in mountain flowers. Bassett, watching him, saw the incredulity in his eyes, and spoke very gently.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “you are right. Try to understand what I am saying, and take it easy. You rode into a blizzard, right enough. But that was not last night. It was ten years ago.”
Had Bassett had some wider knowledge of Dick's condition he might have succeeded better during that bad hour that followed. Certainly, if he had hoped that the mere statement of fact and its proof would bring results, he failed. And the need for haste, the fear of the pursuit behind them, made him nervous and incoherent.
He had first to accept the incredible, himself—that Dick Livingstone no longer existed, that he had died and was buried deep in some chamber of an unconscious mind. He made every effort to revive him, to restore him into the field of consciousness, but without result. And his struggle was increased in difficulty by the fact that he knew so little of Dick's life. David's name meant nothing, apparently, and it was the only name he knew. He described the Livingstone house; he described Elizabeth as he had seen her that night at the theater. Even Minnie. But Dick only shook his head. And until he had aroused some instinct, some desire to live, he could not combat Dick's intention to return and surrender.
“I understand what you are saying,” Dick would say. “I'm trying to get it. But it doesn't mean anything to me.”
He even tried the war.
“War? What war?” Dick asked. And when he heard about it he groaned.
“A war!” he said. “And I've missed it!”
But soon after that he got up, and moved to the door.
“I'm going back,” he said.
“Why?”
“They're after me, aren't they?”
“You're forgetting again. Why should they be after you now, after ten years?”
“I see. I can't get it, you know. I keep listening for them.”
Bassett too was listening, but he kept his fears to himself.
“Why did you do it?” he asked finally.
“I was drunk, and I hated him. He married a girl I was crazy about.”
Bassett tried new tactics. He stressed the absurdity of surrendering for a crime committed ten years before and forgotten.
“They won't convict you anyhow,” he urged. “It was a quarrel, wasn't it? I mean, you didn't deliberately shoot him?”
“I don't remember. We quarreled. Yes. I don't remember shooting him.”
“What do you remember?”
Dick made an effort, although he was white to the lips.
“I saw him on the floor,” he said slowly, and staggered a little.
“Then you don't even know you did it.”
“I hated him.”
But Bassett saw that his determination to surrender himself was weakening. Bassett fought it with every argument he could summon, and at last he brought forward the one he felt might be conclusive.
“You see, you've not only made a man's place in the world, Clark, as I've told you. You've formed associations you can't get away from. You've got to think of the Livingstones, and you told me yesterday a shock would kill the old man. But it's more than that. There's a girl back in your town. I think you were engaged to her.”
But if he had hoped to pierce the veil with that statement he failed. Dick's face flushed, and he went to the door of the cabin, much as he had gone to the window the day before. He did not look around when he spoke.
“Then I'm an unconscionable cad,” he said. “I've only cared for one woman in my life. And I've shipwrecked her for good.”
“You mean—”
“You know who I mean.”
Sometime later Bassett got on his horse and rode out to a ledge which commanded a long stretch of trail in the valley below. Far away horsemen were riding along it, one behind the other, small dots that moved on slowly but steadily. He turned and went back to the cabin.
“We'd better be moving,” he said, “and it's up to you to say where. You've got two choices. You can go back to Norada and run the chance of arrest. You know what that means. Without much chance of a conviction you will stand trial and bring wretchedness to the people who stood by you before and who care for you now. Or you can go on over the mountains with me and strike the railroad somewhere to the West. You'll have time to think things over, anyhow. They've waited ten years. They can wait longer.”
To his relief Dick acquiesced. He had become oddly passive; he seemed indeed not greatly interested. He did not even notice the haste with which Bassett removed the evidences of their meal, or extinguished the dying fire and scattered the ashes. Nor, when they were mounted, the care with which they avoided the trail. He gave, when asked, information as to the direction of the railroad at the foot of the western slope of the range, and at the same instigation found a trail for them some miles beyond their starting point. But mostly he merely followed, in a dead silence.
They made slow progress. Both horses were weary and hungry, and the going was often rough and even dangerous. But for Dick's knowledge of the country they would have been hopelessly lost. Bassett, however, although tortured with muscular soreness, felt his spirits rising as the miles were covered, and there was no sign of the pursuit.
By mid-afternoon they were obliged to rest their horses and let them graze, and the necessity of food for themselves became insistent. Dick stretched out and was immediately asleep, but the reporter could not rest. The magnitude of his undertaking obsessed him. They had covered perhaps twenty miles since leaving the cabin, and the railroad was still sixty miles away. With fresh horses they could have made it by dawn of the next morning, but he did not believe their jaded animals could go much farther. The country grew worse instead of better. A pass ahead, which they must cross, was full of snow.
He was anxious, too, as to Dick's physical condition. The twitching was gone, but he was very pale and he slept like a man exhausted and at his physical limit. But the necessity of crossing the pass before nightfall or of waiting until dawn to do it drove Bassett back from an anxious reconnoitering of the trail at five o'clock, to rouse the sleeping man and start on again.
Near the pass, however, Dick roused himself and took the lead.
“Let me ahead, Bassett,” he said peremptorily. “And give your horse his head. He'll take care of you if you give him a chance.”
Bassett was glad to fall back. He was exhausted and nervous. The trail frightened him. It clung to the side of a rocky wall, twisting and turning on itself; it ran under milky waterfalls of glacial water, and higher up it led over an ice field which was a glassy bridge over a rushing stream beneath. To add to their wretchedness mosquitoes hung about them in voracious clouds, and tiny black gnats which got into their eyes and their nostrils and set the horses frantic.
Once across the ice field Dick's horse fell and for a time could not get up again. He lay, making ineffectual efforts to rise, his sides heaving, his eyes rolling in distress. They gave up then, and prepared to make such camp as they could.
With the setting of the sun it had grown bitterly cold, and Bassett was forced to light a fire. He did it under the protection of the mountain wall, and Dick, after unsaddling his fallen horse, built a rough shelter of rocks against the wind. After a time the exhausted horse got up, but there was no forage, and the two animals stood disconsolate, or made small hopeless excursions, noses to the ground, among the moss and scrub pines.
Before turning in Bassett divided the remaining contents of the flask between them, and his last cigarettes. Dick did not talk. He sat, his back to the shelter, facing the fire, his mind busy with what Bassett knew were bitter and conflicting thoughts. Once, however, as the reporter was dozing off, Dick spoke.
“You said I told you there was a girl,” he said. “Did I tell you her name?”
“No.”
“All right. Go to sleep. I thought if I heard it it might help.”
Bassett lay back and watched him.
“Better get some sleep, old man,” he said.
He dozed, to waken again cold and shivering. The fire had burned low, and Dick was sitting near it, unheeding, and in a deep study. He looked up, and Bassett was shocked at the quiet tragedy in his face.
“Where is Beverly Carlysle now?” he asked. “Or do you know?”
“Yes. I saw her not long ago.”
“Is she married again?”
“No. She's revived 'The Valley,' and she's in New York with it.”
Dick slept for only an hour or so that night, but as he slept he dreamed. In his dream he was at peace and happy, and there was a girl in a black frock who seemed to be a part of that peace. When he roused, however, still with the warmth of his dream on him, he could not summon her. She had slipped away among the shadows of the night.
He sat by the fire in the grip of a great despair. He had lost ten years out of his life, his best years. And he could not go back to where he had left off. There was nothing to go back to but shame and remorse. He looked at Bassett, lying by the fire, and tried to fit him into the situation. Who was he, and why was he here? Why had he ridden out at night alone, into unknown mountains, to find him?
As though his intent gaze had roused the sleeper, Bassett opened his eyes, at first drowsily, then wide awake. He raised himself on his elbow and listened, as though for some far-off sound, and his face was strained and anxious. But the night was silent, and he relaxed and slept again.
Something that had been forming itself in Dick's mind suddenly crystallized into conviction. He rose and walked to the edge of the mountain wall and stood there listening. When he went back to the fire he felt in his pockets, found a small pad and pencil, and bending forward to catch the light, commenced to write... At dawn Bassett wakened. He was stiff and wretched, and he grunted as he moved. He turned over and surveyed the small plateau. It was empty, except for his horse, making its continuous, hopeless search for grass.