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.
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.
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!
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 passed on, to use his blow-pipe, his spirit lamp and his chemicals in some prospector's paradise among the mountains.
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.
"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 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."
"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 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."
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.
"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 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.
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."
"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."
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.
"I'm sorry," he said, dully, "I tried to lift it, but I'm about all in."
"You'd better come in. I've made some coffee."
He could not rise. He could not even raise his hands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 cu
t 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.
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.
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:
"I deserved this, but he didn't. I took him away from his wife."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
XXXV
The summer passed slowly. To David and Elizabeth it was a long waiting, but with this difference, that David was kept alive by hope, and that Elizabeth felt sometimes that hope was killing her. To David each day was a new day, and might hold Dick. To Elizabeth, after a time, each day was but one more of separation.
Doctor Reynolds had become a fixture in the old house, but he was not like Dick. He was a heavy, silent young man, shy of intruding into the family life and already engrossed in a budding affair with the Rossiter girl. David tolerated him, but with a sort of smouldering jealousy increased by the fact that he had introduced innovations David resented; had for instance moved Dick's desk nearer the window, and instead of doing his own laboratory work had what David considered a damnably lazy fashion of sending his little tubes, carefully closed with cotton, to a hospital in town.
David found the days very long and infinitely sad. He wakened each morning to renewed hope, watched for the postman from his upper window, and for Lucy's step on the stairs with the mail. His first glimpse of her always told him the story. At the beginning he had insisted on talking about Dick, but he saw that it hurt her, and of late they had fallen into the habit of long silences.
The determination to live on until that return which he never ceased to expect only carried him so far, however. He felt no incentive to activity. There were times when he tried Lucy sorely, when she felt that if he would only move about, go downstairs and attend to his office practice, get out into the sun and air, he would grow stronger. But there were times, too, when she felt that only the will to live was carrying him on.
Nothing further had developed, so far as they knew. The search had been abandoned. Lucy was no longer so sure as she had been that the house was under surveillance, against Dick's possible return. Often she lay in her bed and faced the conviction that Dick was dead. She had never understood the talk that at first had gone on about her, when Bassett and Harrison Miller, and once or twice the psycho-analyst David had consulted in town, had got together in David's bedroom. The mind was the mind, and Dick was Dick. This thing about habit, over which David pored at night when he should have been sleeping, or brought her in to listen to, with an air of triumphant vindication, meant nothing to her.
A man properly trained in right habits of thinking and of action could not think wrong and go wrong, David argued. He even went further. He said that love was a habit, and that love would bring Dick back to him. That he could not forget them.
She believed that, of course, if he still lived. But hadn't Mr. Bassett, who seemed so curiously mixed in the affair, been out again to Norada without result? No, it was all over, and she felt that it would be a comfort to know where he lay, and to bring him back to some well-loved and tended grave.
Elizabeth came often to see them. She looked much the same as ever, although she was very slender and her smile rather strained, and she and David would have long talks together. She always felt rather like an empty vessel when she went in, but David filled her with hope and sent her away cheered and visibly brighter to her long waiting. She rather avoided Lucy, for Lucy's fears lay in her face and were like a shadow over her spirit. She came across her one day putting Dick's clothing away in camphor, and the act took on an air of finality that almost crushed her.
So far they had kept from her Dick's real identity, but certain things they had told her. She knew that he had gone back, in some strange way, to the years before he came to Haverly, and that he had temporarily forgotten everything since. But they had told her too, and seemed to believe themselves, that it was only temporary.
At first the thought had been more than she could bear. But she had to live her life, and in such a way as to hide her fears. Perhaps it was good for her, the necessity of putting up a bold front, to join the
conspiracy that was to hold Dick's place in the world against the hope of his return. And she still went to the Sayre house, sure that there at least there would be no curious glances, no too casual questions. She could not be sure of that even at home, for Nina was constantly conjecturing.
"I sometimes wonder-" Nina began one day, and stopped.
"Wonder what?"
"Oh, well, I suppose I might as well go on. Do you ever think that if Dick had gone back, as they say he has, that there might be somebody else?"
"Another girl, you mean?"
"Yes. Some one he knew before."
Nina was watching her. Sometimes she almost burst with the drama she was suppressing. She had been a small girl when Judson Clark had disappeared, but even at twelve she had known something of the story. She wanted frantically to go about the village and say to them: "Do you know who has been living here, whom you used to patronize? Judson Clark, one of the richest men in the world!" She built day dreams on that foundation. He would come back, for of course he would be found and acquitted, and buy the Sayre place perhaps, or build a much larger one, and they would all go to Europe in his yacht. But she knew now that the woman Leslie had sent his flowers to had loomed large in Dick's past, and she both hated and feared her. Not content with having given her, Nina, some bad hours, she saw the woman now possibly blocking her ambitions for Elizabeth.
"What I'm getting at is this," she said, examining her polished nails critically. "If it does turn out that there was somebody, you'd have to remember that it was all years and years ago, and be sensible."
"I only want him back," Elizabeth said. "I don't care how he comes, so he comes."
Louis Bassett had become a familiar figure in the village life by that time. David depended on him with a sort of wistful confidence that set him to grinding his teeth occasionally in a fury at his own helplessness. And, as the extent of the disaster developed, as he saw David failing and Lucy ageing, and when in time he met Elizabeth, the feeling of his own guilt was intensified.
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