The Breaking Point

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  XXXIV

  Dick had written his note, and placed it where Bassett would be certainto see it. Then he found his horse and led him for the first half mileor so of level ground before the trail began to descend. He mountedthere, for he knew the animal could find its way in the darkness wherehe could not.

  He felt no weariness and no hunger, although he had neither slept noreaten for thirty-odd hours, and as contrasted with the night before hishead was clear. He was able to start a train of thought and to follow itthrough consecutively for the first time in hours. Thought, however, waseasier than realization, and to add to his perplexity, he struggledto place Bassett and failed entirely. He remained a mysterious andincomprehensible figure, beginning and ending with the trail.

  Then he had an odd thought, that brought him up standing. He had onlyBassett'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 refusedto 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 forBassett and against himself; the unfamiliar clothing he wore, the padwith the name of Livingstone on it and the sign Rx, the other contentsof his pockets.

  He tried to orient himself in Bassett's story. A doctor. The devil'sirony of it! Some poor hack, losing sleep and bringing babies. Peddlingpills. Leading what Bassett had called a life of usefulness! That was acareer 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 hewas looking about for the snow of that earlier escape, and the next hewould remember, and the sense of panic would leave him. After all hemeant 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 uphe thrust it back fiercely. That something was the figure of BeverlyCarlysle, stooping over her husband's body. He would have died to saveher pain, and yet last night--no, it wasn't last night. It was years andyears 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 realdrink. He wanted alcohol. Suddenly he wanted all the liquor in theworld. The craving came on at dawn, and after that he kicked his wearyhorse on recklessly, so that it rocked and stumbled down the trail. Hehad only one thought after the frenzy seized him, and that was to get tocivilization and whisky. It was as though he saw in drunkenness his onlyescape from the unbearable. In all probability he would have killedboth his horse and himself in the grip of that sudden madness, butdeliverance came in the shape of a casual rider, a stranger who for amoment took up the shuttle, wove his bit of the pattern and passedon, to use his blow-pipe, his spirit lamp and his chemicals in someprospector's paradise among the mountains.

  When Dick heard somewhere ahead the creaking of saddle leather and therattle of harness he drew aside on the trail and waited. He had lostall caution in the grip of his craving, and all fear. A line of loadedburros rounded a point ahead and came toward him, picking their waydelicately with small deliberate feet and walking on the outer edge ofthe trail, after the way of pack animals the world over. Behind them wasa horseman, rifle in the scabbard on his saddle and spurs jingling. Dickwatched him with thirsty, feverish eyes as he drew near. He could hardlywait 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. Thenhe saw Dick's eyes, and reached reluctantly into his saddle bag. "I'vegot a quart here," he said. "I've traveled forty miles and spent ninedollars 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 amountinto it, steadying the horse the while.

  "Here," he said, and passed it over. "But you'd better cut it out afterthis. 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, andfor a queer moment he felt a sudden distaste for it. He had a revulsionthat 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 bettercut 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 theliquor in his mouth nauseated him. The craving had been mental habit,not physical need, and his body fought the poison rebelliously. Aftera 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 agreen meadow. Still overcome with his first real sleep he tumbled outof 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 faceburned from the sun, and his head ached violently. He was weak, too,from hunger, and the morning's dizziness persisted. Connected thoughtwas impossible, beyond the fact that if he did not get out soon, hewould be too weak to travel. Exhausted and on the verge of sunstroke, heset out on foot to find the trail.

  He traveled all night, and the dawn found him still moving, a mereautomaton of a man, haggard and shambling, no longer willing hisprogress, but somehow incredibly advancing. He found water and drank it,fell, got up, and still, right foot, left foot, he went on. Sometime during that advance he had found a trail, and he kept to itautomatically. He felt no surprise and no relief when he saw a cabin ina clearing and a woman in the doorway, watching him with curious eyes.He pulled himself together and made a final effort, but without muchinterest in the result.

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

  "I guess I can," she replied, not unamiably. "You look as though youneed it, and a wash, too. There's a basin and a pail of water on thatbench."

  But when she came out later to call him to breakfast she found himsitting 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 muchas spoke again.

  So it happened that the search went on. Wilkins from the east of therange, 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 lifewatched a woman moving in a lean-to kitchen, and was fed by a woman'shand.

  He forced himself to think of this small panorama of life that movedbefore him, rather than of himself. The woman was young, and pretty in aslovenly way. The man was much older, and silent. He was of better classthan the woman, and underlying his assumption of crudity there wereoccasional outcroppings of some cultural background. Not then, nor atany subsequent time, did he learn the story, if story there was. Hebegan to see them, however, not so much pioneers as refugees. The cabinwas, 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 paringpotatoes or watching a cooking pot for her. As he gained in strengthhe cut a little firewood. Always he sought something to keep him fromthinki
ng.

  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 timethat Bassett's story had been true, and that he was ten years older thanhe 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 wasstreaked with gray. The fact that his beard had grown added to theterrible maturity of the reflection he saw, and he sent the mirrorclattering to the ground.

  The other incident was later, and when he was fairly strong again. Theman was caught under a tree he was felling, and badly hurt. During thehour or so that followed, getting the tree cut away, and moving theinjured man to the cabin on a wood sledge, Dick had the feeling ofhelplessness of any layman in an accident. He was solicitous but clumsy.But when they had got the patient into his bed, quite automatically hefound himself making an investigation and pronouncing a verdict.

  Later he was to realize that this was the first peak of submergedmemory, rising above the flood. At the time all he felt was a greatcertainty. He must act quickly or the man would not live. And thatnight, with such instruments as he could extemporize, he operated. Therewas no time to send to a town.

  All night, after the operation, Dick watched by the bedside, the womanmoving back and forth restlessly. He got his only knowledge of thestory, 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. Andhe was glad of the respite, willing to drift until he got his bearings.Certain things had come back, more as pictures than realities. Thushe saw David clearly, Lucy dimly, Elizabeth not at all. But David camefirst; David in the buggy with the sagging springs, David's loud voiceand portly figure, David, steady and upright and gentle as a woman. Butthere was something wrong about David. He puzzled over that, but he waslearning not to try to force things, to let them come to the surfacethemselves.

  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 timehe made plans to get away, for whatever happened after that he knew hemust see David again. But all his thought led him to an impasse at thattime, and that impasse was the feeling that he was a criminal and afugitive, 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 wasstrong in him. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. That had beenhis father's belief, and well he remembered it. But during the driftingperiod 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 painfuland confused. There was the necessity for atonement, which involvedsurrender, and there was the call of David, and the insistent desire tosee 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 thestrongest. For by the very freshness of his released memories, it wasthe days before his flight from the ranch that seemed most recent, andhis life with David that was long ago, and blurred in its details as bythe passing of infinite time.

  When Elizabeth finally came back to him it was as something very gentleand remote, out of the long-forgotten past. Even his image of herwas blurred and shadowy. He could not hear the tones of her voice, orremember anything she had said. He could never bring her at will, ashe could David, for instance. She only came clearly at night, while heslept. Then the guard was down, and there crept into his dreams a smallfigure, infinitely loving and tender; but as he roused from sleep shechanged gradually into Beverly. It was Beverly's arms he felt around hisneck. Nevertheless he held to Elizabeth more completely than he knew,for the one thing that emerged from his misty recollection of her wasthat 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 knewthat she was lost to him, as David was lost. He could never go back toeither of them.

  As time went on he reached the point of making practical plans. He hadlost his pocketbook somewhere, probably during his wanderings afoot,and he had no money. He knew that the obvious course was to go to thenearest 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 hewould, eventually, but before he did that he would satisfy a cravingthat was in some ways like his desire for liquor that morning on thetrail. A reckless, mad, and irresistible impulse to see Beverly Lucasagain.

  In August he started for the railroad, going on foot and without money,his immediate destination the harvest fields of some distant ranch, hisobject to earn his train fare to New York.