The Breaking Point Part 45

There was another question in David's mind, but he did not put it. He sat, with the patience of his age and his new infirmity, waiting for Lucy to bring Harrison Miller, and had it not been for the trembling of his hands Ba.s.sett would have thought him calm and even placid.

During the recital that followed somewhat later David did not move. He sat silent, his eyes closed, his face set.

"That's about all," Ba.s.sett finished. "He had been perfectly clear in his head all day, and it took headwork to get over the pa.s.s. But, as I say, he had simply dropped ten years, and was back to the Lucas trouble.

I tried everything I knew, used your name and would have used the young lady's, because sometimes that sort of thing strikes pretty deep, but I didn't know it. He was convinced after a while, but he was dazed, of course. He knew it, that is, but he couldn't comprehend it.

"I was done up, and I've cursed myself for it since, but I must have slept like the dead. I wakened once, early in the night, and he was still sitting by the fire, staring at it. I've forgotten to say that he had been determined all day to go back and give himself up, and the only way I prevented it was by telling him what a blow it would be to you and to the girl. I wakened once and said to him, 'Better get some sleep, old man.' He did not answer at once, and then he said, 'All right.' I was dozing off when he spoke again. He said, 'Where is Beverly Carlysle now?

Has she married again?' 'She's revived "The Valley," and she's in New York with it,' I told him.

"When I wakened in the morning he was gone, but he'd left a piece of paper in a cleft stick beside me, with directions for reaching the railroad, and--well, here it is."

Ba.s.sett took from his pocket-book a note, and pa.s.sed it over to David, who got out his spectacles with shaking hands and read it. It was on d.i.c.k's prescription paper, with his name at the top and the familiar Rx below it. David read it aloud, his voice husky.

"Many thanks for everything, Ba.s.sett," he read. "I don't like to leave you, but you'll get out all right if you follow the map on the back of this. I've had all night to think things out, and I'm leaving you because you are safer without me. I realize now what you've known all day and kept from me. That woman at the hotel recognized me, and they are after me.

"I can't make up my mind what to do. Ultimately I think I'll go back and give myself up. I am a dead man, anyhow, to all who might have cared, but I've got to do one or two things first, and I want to think things over. One thing you've got a right to know. I hated Lucas, but it never entered my head to kill him. How it happened G.o.d only knows. I don't."

It was signed "J. C."

Ba.s.sett broke the silence that followed the reading.

"I made every effort to find him. I had to work alone, you understand, and from the west side of the range, not to arouse suspicion. They were after me, too, you know. His horse, I heard, worked its way back a few days ago. It's a forsaken country, and if he lost his horse he was in it on foot and without food. Of course there's a chance--"

His voice trailed off. In the stillness David sat, touching with tender tremulous fingers what might be d.i.c.k's last message, and gazing at the picture of d.i.c.k in his uniform. He knew what they all thought, that d.i.c.k was dead and that he held his final words in his hands, but his militant old spirit refused to accept that silent verdict. d.i.c.k might be dead to them, but he was living. He looked around the room defiantly, resentfully. Of all of them he was the only one to have faith, and he was bound to a chair. He knew them. They would sit down supinely and grieve, while time pa.s.sed and d.i.c.k fought his battle alone.

No, by G.o.d, he would not be bound to a chair. He raised himself and stood, swaying on his shaking legs.

"You've given up," he said scornfully. "You make a few days' search, and then you quit. It's easy to say he's dead, and so you say he's dead. I'm going out there myself, and I'll make a search--"

He collapsed into the chair again, and looked at them with shamed, appealing eyes. Ba.s.sett was the first to break the silence, speaking in a carefully emotionless tone.

"I haven't given up for a minute. I've given up the search, because he's beyond finding just now. Either he's got away, or he is--well, beyond help. We have to go on the hypothesis that he got away, and in that case sooner or later you'll hear from him. He's bound to remember you in time. The worst thing is this charge against him."

"He never killed Howard Lucas," David said, in a tone of conviction.

"Harrison, read Mr. Ba.s.sett my statement to you."

Ba.s.sett took the statement home with him that night, and studied it carefully. It explained a great deal that had puzzled him before; Mrs.

Wa.s.son's story and David's arrival at the mountain cabin. But most of all it explained why the Thorwald woman had sent him after d.i.c.k. She knew then, in spite of her protests to David, that Jud Clark had not killed Lucas.

He paced the floor for an hour or two, sunk in thought, and then unlocked a desk drawer and took out his bankbook. He had saved a little money. Not much, but it would carry him over if he couldn't get another leave of absence. He thought, as he put the book away and prepared for bed, that it was a small price to pay for finding Clifton Hines and saving his own soul.

x.x.xIV

d.i.c.k had written his note, and placed it where Ba.s.sett 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.

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 Ba.s.sett and failed entirely. He remained a mysterious and incomprehensible figure, beginning and ending with the trail.

Then he had an odd thought, that brought him up standing. He had only Ba.s.sett's word for the story. Perhaps Ba.s.sett was lying to him, or mad.

He rode on after a moment, considering that, but there was something, not in Ba.s.sett's circ.u.mstantial narrative but in himself, that refused to accept that loophole of escape. He could not have told what it was.

And, with his increasing clarity, he began to make out the case for Ba.s.sett 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.

He tried to orient himself in Ba.s.sett's story. A doctor. The devil's irony of it! Some poor hack, losing sleep and bringing babies. Peddling pills. Leading what Ba.s.sett had called a life of usefulness! That was a career for you, a pill peddler. G.o.d!

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.

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.

It was unbearable that she had gone on hating him, all this time.

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 pa.s.sed on, to use his blow-pipe, his spirit lamp and his chemicals in some prospector's paradise among the mountains.

When d.i.c.k 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. d.i.c.k watched him with thirsty, feverish eyes as he drew near. He could hardly wait to put his question.

"Happen to have a drink about you, partner?" he called.

The man stopped his horse and grinned.

"Pretty early in the morning for a drink, isn't it?" he inquired. Then he saw d.i.c.k'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."

"You wouldn't care to sell it, I suppose?"

"The bottle? Not on your life."

He untied a tin cup from his saddle and carefully poured a fair amount into it, steadying the horse the while.

"Here," he said, and pa.s.sed it over. "But you'd better cut it out after this. It's bad medicine. You've got two good drinks there. Be careful."

d.i.c.k took the cup and looked at the liquor. The odor a.s.sailed 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 pa.s.sed the cup back.

"You've traveled a long way for it," he said, "and I needed it, I guess.

If you'll let me pay for it--"

"Forget it," said the man amiably, and started his horse. "But better cut it out, first chance you get. It's bad medicine."

He rode on after his vanishing pack, and d.i.c.k 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 pa.s.sed, 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.

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.

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.

"I wonder if you could give me some food?" he said. "I have lost my horse and I've been wandering all night."