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<h2> XXXIV </h2>
<p>Dick had written his note, and placed it where Bassett would be certain to
see it. Then he found his horse and led him for the first half mile or so
of level ground before the trail began to descend. He mounted there, for
he knew the animal could find its way in the darkness where he could not.</p>
<p>He felt no weariness and no hunger, although he had neither slept nor
eaten for thirty-odd hours, and as contrasted with the night before his
head was clear. He was able to start a train of thought and to follow it
through consecutively for the first time in hours. Thought, however, was
easier than realization, and to add to his perplexity, he struggled to
place Bassett and failed entirely. He remained a mysterious and
incomprehensible figure, beginning and ending with the trail.</p>
<p>Then he had an odd thought, that brought him up standing. He had only
Bassett's word for the story. Perhaps Bassett was lying to him, or mad. He
rode on after a moment, considering that, but there was something, not in
Bassett's circumstantial narrative but in himself, that refused to accept
that loophole of escape. He could not have told what it was.</p>
<p>And, with his increasing clarity, he began to make out the case for
Bassett and against himself; the unfamiliar clothing he wore, the pad with
the name of Livingstone on it and the sign Rx, the other contents of his
pockets.</p>
<p>He tried to orient himself in Bassett's story. A doctor. The devil's irony
of it! Some poor hack, losing sleep and bringing babies. Peddling pills.
Leading what Bassett had called a life of usefulness! That was a career
for you, a pill peddler. God!</p>
<p>But underlying all his surface thinking was still the need of flight, and
he was continually confusing it with the earlier one. One moment he was
looking about for the snow of that earlier escape, and the next he would
remember, and the sense of panic would leave him. After all he meant to
surrender eventually. It did not matter if they caught him.</p>
<p>But, like the sense of flight, there was something else in his mind,
something that he fought down and would not face. When it came up he
thrust it back fiercely. That something was the figure of Beverly
Carlysle, stooping over her husband's body. He would have died to save her
pain, and yet last night—no, it wasn't last night. It was years and
years ago, and all this time she had hated him.</p>
<p>It was unbearable that she had gone on hating him, all this time.</p>
<p>He was very thirsty, and water did not satisfy him. He wanted a real
drink. He wanted alcohol. Suddenly he wanted all the liquor in the world.
The craving came on at dawn, and after that he kicked his weary horse on
recklessly, so that it rocked and stumbled down the trail. He had only one
thought after the frenzy seized him, and that was to get to civilization
and whisky. It was as though he saw in drunkenness his only escape from
the unbearable. In all probability he would have killed both his horse and
himself in the grip of that sudden madness, but deliverance came in the
shape of a casual rider, a stranger who for a moment took up the shuttle,
wove his bit of the pattern and passed on, to use his blow-pipe, his
spirit lamp and his chemicals in some prospector's paradise among the
mountains.</p>
<p>When Dick heard somewhere ahead the creaking of saddle leather and the
rattle of harness he drew aside on the trail and waited. He had lost all
caution in the grip of his craving, and all fear. A line of loaded burros
rounded a point ahead and came toward him, picking their way delicately
with small deliberate feet and walking on the outer edge of the trail,
after the way of pack animals the world over. Behind them was a horseman,
rifle in the scabbard on his saddle and spurs jingling. Dick watched him
with thirsty, feverish eyes as he drew near. He could hardly wait to put
his question.</p>
<p>"Happen to have a drink about you, partner?" he called.</p>
<p>The man stopped his horse and grinned.</p>
<p>"Pretty early in the morning for a drink, isn't it?" he inquired. Then he
saw Dick's eyes, and reached reluctantly into his saddle bag. "I've got a
quart here," he said. "I've traveled forty miles and spent nine dollars to
get it, but I guess you need some."</p>
<p>"You wouldn't care to sell it, I suppose?"</p>
<p>"The bottle? Not on your life."</p>
<p>He untied a tin cup from his saddle and carefully poured a fair amount
into it, steadying the horse the while.</p>
<p>"Here," he said, and passed it over. "But you'd better cut it out after
this. It's bad medicine. You've got two good drinks there. Be careful."</p>
<p>Dick took the cup and looked at the liquor. The odor assailed him, and for
a queer moment he felt a sudden distaste for it. He had a revulsion that
almost shook him. But he drank it down and passed the cup back.</p>
<p>"You've traveled a long way for it," he said, "and I needed it, I guess.
If you'll let me pay for it—"</p>
<p>"Forget it," said the man amiably, and started his horse. "But better cut
it out, first chance you get. It's bad medicine."</p>
<p>He rode on after his vanishing pack, and Dick took up the trail again. But
before long he began to feel sick and dizzy. The aftertaste of the liquor
in his mouth nauseated him. The craving had been mental habit, not
physical need, and his body fought the poison rebelliously. After a time
the sickness passed, and he slept in the saddle. He roused once, enough to
know that the horse had left the trail and was grazing in a green meadow.
Still overcome with his first real sleep he tumbled out of the saddle and
stretched himself out on the ground. He slept all day, lying out in the
burning sun, his face upturned to the sky.</p>
<p>When he wakened it was twilight, and the horse had disappeared. His face
burned from the sun, and his head ached violently. He was weak, too, from
hunger, and the morning's dizziness persisted. Connected thought was
impossible, beyond the fact that if he did not get out soon, he would be
too weak to travel. Exhausted and on the verge of sunstroke, he set out on
foot to find the trail.</p>
<p>He traveled all night, and the dawn found him still moving, a mere
automaton of a man, haggard and shambling, no longer willing his progress,
but somehow incredibly advancing. He found water and drank it, fell, got
up, and still, right foot, left foot, he went on. Some time during that
advance he had found a trail, and he kept to it automatically. He felt no
surprise and no relief when he saw a cabin in a clearing and a woman in
the doorway, watching him with curious eyes. He pulled himself together
and made a final effort, but without much interest in the result.</p>
<p>"I wonder if you could give me some food?" he said. "I have lost my horse
and I've been wandering all night."</p>
<p>"I guess I can," she replied, not unamiably. "You look as though you need
it, and a wash, too. There's a basin and a pail of water on that bench."</p>
<p>But when she came out later to call him to breakfast she found him sitting
on the bench and the pail overturned on the ground.</p>
<p>"I'm sorry," he said, dully, "I tried to lift it, but I'm about all in."</p>
<p>"You'd better come in. I've made some coffee."</p>
<p>He could not rise. He could not even raise his hands.</p>
<p>She called her husband from where he was chopping wood off in the trees,
and together they got him into the house. It was days before he so much as
spoke again.</p>
<p>So it happened that the search went on. Wilkins from the east of the
range, and Bassett from the west, hunted at first with furious energy,
then spasmodically, then not at all, while Dick lay in a mountain cabin,
on the bed made of young trees, and for the second time in his life
watched a woman moving in a lean-to kitchen, and was fed by a woman's
hand.</p>
<p>He forced himself to think of this small panorama of life that moved
before him, rather than of himself. The woman was young, and pretty in a
slovenly way. The man was much older, and silent. He was of better class
than the woman, and underlying his assumption of crudity there were
occasional outcroppings of some cultural background. Not then, nor at any
subsequent time, did he learn the story, if story there was. He began to
see them, however, not so much pioneers as refugees. The cabin was, he
thought, a haven to the man and a prison to the woman.</p>
<p>But they were uniformly kind to him, and for weeks he stayed there, slowly
readjusting. In his early convalescence he would sit paring potatoes or
watching a cooking pot for her. As he gained in strength he cut a little
firewood. Always he sought something to keep him from thinking.</p>
<p>Two incidents always stood out afterwards in his memory of the cabin. One
was the first time he saw himself in a mirror. He knew by that time that
Bassett's story had been true, and that he was ten years older than he
remembered himself to be. He thought he was in a measure prepared. But he
saw in the glass a man whose face was lined and whose hair was streaked
with gray. The fact that his beard had grown added to the terrible
maturity of the reflection he saw, and he sent the mirror clattering to
the ground.</p>
<p>The other incident was later, and when he was fairly strong again. The man
was caught under a tree he was felling, and badly hurt. During the hour or
so that followed, getting the tree cut away, and moving the injured man to
the cabin on a wood sledge, Dick had the feeling of helplessness of any
layman in an accident. He was solicitous but clumsy. But when they had got
the patient into his bed, quite automatically he found himself making an
investigation and pronouncing a verdict.</p>
<p>Later he was to realize that this was the first peak of submerged memory,
rising above the flood. At the time all he felt was a great certainty. He
must act quickly or the man would not live. And that night, with such
instruments as he could extemporize, he operated. There was no time to
send to a town.</p>
<p>All night, after the operation, Dick watched by the bedside, the woman
moving back and forth restlessly. He got his only knowledge of the story,
such as it was, then when she said once:</p>
<p>"I deserved this, but he didn't. I took him away from his wife."</p>
<p>He had to stay on after that, for the woman could not be left alone. And
he was glad of the respite, willing to drift until he got his bearings.
Certain things had come back, more as pictures than realities. Thus he saw
David clearly, Lucy dimly, Elizabeth not at all. But David came first;
David in the buggy with the sagging springs, David's loud voice and portly
figure, David, steady and upright and gentle as a woman. But there was
something wrong about David. He puzzled over that, but he was learning not
to try to force things, to let them come to the surface themselves.</p>
<p>It was two or three days later that he remembered that David was ill, and
was filled with a sickening remorse and anxiety. For the first time he
made plans to get away, for whatever happened after that he knew he must
see David again. But all his thought led him to an impasse at that time,
and that impasse was the feeling that he was a criminal and a fugitive,
and that he had no right to tie up innocent lives with his. Even a letter
to David might incriminate him.</p>
<p>Coupled with his determination to surrender, the idea of atonement was
strong in him. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. That had been
his father's belief, and well he remembered it. But during the drifting
period he thrust it back, into that painful niche where he held Beverly,
and the thing he would not face.</p>
<p>That phase of his readjustment, then, when he reached it, was painful and
confused. There was the necessity for atonement, which involved surrender,
and there was the call of David, and the insistent desire to see Beverly
again, which was the thing he would not face. Of the three, the last,
mixed up as it was with the murder and its expiation, was the strongest.
For by the very freshness of his released memories, it was the days before
his flight from the ranch that seemed most recent, and his life with David
that was long ago, and blurred in its details as by the passing of
infinite time.</p>
<p>When Elizabeth finally came back to him it was as something very gentle
and remote, out of the long-forgotten past. Even his image of her was
blurred and shadowy. He could not hear the tones of her voice, or remember
anything she had said. He could never bring her at will, as he could
David, for instance. She only came clearly at night, while he slept. Then
the guard was down, and there crept into his dreams a small figure,
infinitely loving and tender; but as he roused from sleep she changed
gradually into Beverly. It was Beverly's arms he felt around his neck.
Nevertheless he held to Elizabeth more completely than he knew, for the
one thing that emerged from his misty recollection of her was that she
cared for him. In a world of hate and bitterness she cared.</p>
<p>But she was never real to him, as the other woman was real. And he knew
that she was lost to him, as David was lost. He could never go back to
either of them.</p>
<p>As time went on he reached the point of making practical plans. He had
lost his pocketbook somewhere, probably during his wanderings afoot, and
he had no money. He knew that the obvious course was to go to the nearest
settlement and surrender himself and he played with the thought, but even
as he did so he knew that he would not do it. Surrender he would,
eventually, but before he did that he would satisfy a craving that was in
some ways like his desire for liquor that morning on the trail. A
reckless, mad, and irresistible impulse to see Beverly Lucas again.</p>
<p>In August he started for the railroad, going on foot and without money,
his immediate destination the harvest fields of some distant ranch, his
object to earn his train fare to New York.</p>
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