The Breaking Point (26 page)

"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?