The Breaking Point (10 page)

A detailed description of Judson Clark, and a photograph of him
accompanied the story. Bassett re-read the article carefully, and
swore a little, under his breath. If he had needed confirmation of
his suspicions, it lay to his hand. But the situation had changed over
night. There would be a search for Clark now, as wide as the knowledge
of his disappearance. Local police authorities would turn him up in
every city from Maine to the Pacific coast. Even Europe would be on the
lookout and South America.

But it was not the police he feared so much as the press. Not all of the
papers, but some of them, would go after that story, and send their best
men on it. It offered not so much a chance of solution as an opportunity
to revive the old dramatic story. He could see, when he closed his eyes,
the local photographers climbing to that cabin and later sending its
pictures broadcast, and divers gentlemen of the press, eager to
pit their wits against ten years of time and the ability of a once
conspicuous man to hide from the law, packing their suitcases for
Norada.

No, he couldn't stop now. He would go on, like the others, and with this
advantage, that he was morally certain he could lay his hands on Clark
at any time. But he would have to prove his case, connect it. Who, for
instance, was the other man in the cabin? He must have known who the boy
was who lay in that rough bunk, delirious. Must have suspected anyhow.
That made him, like the Donaldsons, accessory after the fact, and
criminally liable. Small chance of him coming out with any confession.
Yet he was the connecting link. Must be.

On his third reading the reporter began to visualize the human elements
of the fight to save the boy; he saw moving before him the whole pitiful
struggle; the indomitable ranch manager, his heart-breaking struggle
with the blizzard, the shooting of his horse, the careful disarming of
suspicion, and later the intrepid woman, daring that night ride through
snow that had sent the posse back to its firesides to the boy, locked in
the cabin and raving.

His mind was busy as he packed his suitcase. Already he had forgotten
his compunctions of the early morning; he moved about methodically,
calculating roughly what expense money he would need, and the line of
attack, if any, required at the office. Between Norada and that old
brick house at Haverly lay his story. Ten years of it. He was closing
his bag when he remembered the little girl in the blue dress, at the
theater. He straightened and scowled. After a moment he snapped the bag
shut. Damn it all, if Clark had chosen to tie up with a girl, that was on
Clark's conscience, not his.

But he was vaguely uncomfortable.

"It's a queer world, Joe," he observed to the waiter, who had come in
for the breakfast dishes.

"Yes, sir. It is that," said Joe.

DURING all the long night Dick sat by David's bedside. Earlier in
the evening there had been a consultation; David had suffered a light
stroke, but there was no paralysis, and the prognosis was good. For this
time, at least, David had escaped, but there must be no other time. He
was to be kept quiet and free from worry, his diet was to be carefully
regulated, and with care he still had long years before him.

David slept, his breathing heavy and slow. In the morning there would
be a nurse, but that night Dick, having sent Lucy to bed, himself
kept watch. On the walnut bed lay Doctor David's portly figure, dimly
outlined by the shaded lamp, and on a chair drawn close sat Dick.

He was wide-awake and very anxious, but as time went on and no untoward
symptoms appeared, as David's sleep seemed to grow easier and more
natural, Dick's thoughts wandered. They went to Elizabeth first, and
then on and on from that starting point, through the years ahead. He saw
the old house with Elizabeth waiting in it for his return; he saw both
their lives united and flowing on together, with children, with small
cares, with the routine of daily living, and behind it all the two of
them, hand in hand.

Then his mind turned on himself. How often in the past ten years it had
done that! He had sat off, with a sort of professional detachment,
and studied his own case. With the entrance into his world of the new
science of psycho-analysis he had made now and then small, not very
sincere, attempts to penetrate the veil of his own unconscious devising.
Not very sincere, for with the increase of his own knowledge of the mind
he had learned that behind such conditions as his lay generally,
deeply hidden, the desire to forget. And that behind that there lay,
acknowledged or not, fear.

"But to forget what?" he used to say to David, when the first text-books
on the new science appeared, and he and David were learning the
new terminology, Dick eagerly and David with contemptuous snorts of
derision. "To forget what?"

"You had plenty to forget," David would say, stolidly. "I think this
man's a fool, but at that—you'd had your father's death, for one thing.
And you'd gone pretty close to the edge of eternity yourself. You'd
fought single-handed the worst storm of ten years, you came out of it
with double pneumonia, and you lay alone in that cabin about fifty-six
hours. Forget! You had plenty to forget."

It had never occurred to Dick to doubt David's story. It did not, even
now. He had accepted it unquestioningly from the first, supplemented the
shadowy childish memories that remained to him with it, and gradually
co-ordinating the two had built out of them his house of the past.

Thus, the elderly man whom he dimly remembered was not only his father;
he was David's brother. And he had died. It was the shock of that death,
according to David, that had sent him into the mountains, where David
had followed and nursed him back to health.

It was quite simple, and even explicable by the new psychology. Not that
he had worried about the new psychology in those early days. He had
been profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious. It had been too much
trouble even to think.

True, he had brought over from those lost years certain instincts and a
few mental pictures. He had had a certain impatience at first over the
restrictions of comparative poverty; he had had to learn the value of
money. And the pictures he retained had had a certain opulence which the
facts appeared to contradict. Thus he remembered a large ranch house,
and innumerable horses, grazing in meadows or milling in a corral. But
David had warned him early that there was no estate; that his future
depended entirely on his own efforts.

Then the new life had caught and held him. For the first time he had
mothering and love. Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern to which
he meant to conform. He was happy and contented.

Now and then, in the early days, he had been conscious of a desire to go
back and try to reconstruct his past again. Later on he knew that if
he were ever to fill up the gap in his life, it would be easier in that
environment of once familiar things. But in the first days he had been
totally dependent on David, and money was none too plentiful. Later on,
as the new life took hold, as he went to medical college and worked at
odd clerical jobs in vacations to help pay his way, there had been
no chance. Then the war came, and on his return there had been the
practice, and his knowledge that David's health was not what it should
have been.

But as time went on he was more and more aware that there was in him a
peculiar shrinking from going back, an almost apprehension. He knew more
of the mind than he had before, and he knew that not physical hardship,
but mental stress, caused such lapses as his. But what mental stress had
been great enough for such a smash? His father's death?

Strain and fear, said the new psychology. Fear? He had never found
himself lacking in courage. Certainly he would have fought a man who
called him a coward. But there was cowardice behind all such conditions
as his; a refusal of the mind to face reality. It was weak. Weak. He
hated himself for that past failure of his to face reality.

But that night, sitting by David's bed, he faced reality with a
vengeance. He was in love, and he wanted the things that love should
bring to a normal man. He felt normal. He felt, strengthened by love,
that he could face whatever life had to bring, so long as also it
brought Elizabeth.

Painfully he went back over his talk with David the preceding Sunday
night.

"Don't be a fool," David had said. "Go ahead and take her, if she'll
have you. And don't be too long about it. I'm not as young as I used to
be."

"What I feel," he had replied, "is this: I don't know, of course, if she
cares." David had grunted. "I do know I'm going to try to make her care,
if it—if it's humanly possible. But I'd like to go back to the ranch
again, David, before things go any further."

"Why?"

"I'd like to fill the gap. Attempt it anyhow."

What he was thinking about, as he sat by David's bedside, was David's
attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it,
offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a
dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear.
David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose
eyes never wavered, nor his courage!

"You let well enough alone, Dick," he had finished. "You've got
everything you want. And a medical man can't afford to go gadding about.
When people want him they want him."

But he had noticed that David had been different, since. He had taken to
following him with his faded old eyes, had even spoken once of retiring
and turning all the work over to him. Was it possible that David did not
want him to go back to Norada?

He bent over and felt the sick man's pulse. It was stronger, not so
rapid. The mechanical act took him back to his first memory of David.

He had been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David,
beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling his
pulse. He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now that he
had been very ill. The cabin had been a small and lonely one, with
snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold. During the day
a woman kept up the fire. Her name was Maggie, and she moved about the
cabin like a thin ghost. At night she slept in a lean-to shed and David
kept the fire going. A man who seemed to know him well—John Donaldson,
he learned, was his name—was Maggie's husband, and every so often he
came, about dawn, and brought food and supplies.

After a long time, as he grew stronger, Maggie had gone away, and David
had fried the bacon and heated the canned tomatoes or the beans. Before
she left she had written out a recipe for biscuits, and David would
study over it painstakingly, and then produce a panfull of burned and
blackened lumps, over which he would groan and agonize.

He himself had been totally incurious. He had lived a sort of animal
life of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative excursions
around the room on legs that shook when he walked. The snows came and
almost covered the cabin, and David had read a great deal, and talked at
intervals. David had tried to fill up the gap in his mind. That was how
he learned that David was his father's brother, and that his father had
recently died.

Going over it all now, it had certain elements that were not clear. They
had, for instance, never gone back to the ranch at all. With the first
clearing of the snow in the spring John Donaldson had appeared again,
leading two saddled horses and driving a pack animal, and they had
started off, leaving him standing in the clearing and gazing after them.
But they had not followed Donaldson's trail. They had started West, over
the mountains, and David did not know the country. Once they were lost
for three days.

He looked at the figure on the bed. Only ten years, and yet at that time
David had been vigorous, seemed almost young. He had aged in that ten
years. On the bed he was an old man, a tired old man at that. On that
long ride he had been tireless. He had taken the burden of the nightly
camps, and had hacked a trail with his hatchet across snow fields while
Dick, still weak but furiously protesting, had been compelled to stand
and watch.

Now, with the perspective of time behind him, and with the clearly
defined issue of David's protest against his return to the West, he went
again over the details of that winter and spring. Why had they not taken
Donaldson's trail? Or gone back to the ranch? Why, since Donaldson
could make it, had not other visitors come? Another doctor, the night
he almost died, and David sat under the lamp behind the close-screened
windows, and read the very pocket prayer-book that now lay on the stand
beside the bed? Why had they burned his clothes, and Donaldson brought
a new outfit? Why did Donaldson, for all his requests, never bring a
razor, so that when they struck the railroad, miles from anywhere, they
were both full bearded?

He brought himself up sharply. He had allowed his imagination to run
away with him. He had been depicting a flight and no one who knew David
could imagine him in flight.

Nevertheless he was conscious of a new uneasiness and anxiety. When
David recovered sufficiently he would go to Norada, as he had told
Elizabeth, and there he would find the Donaldsons, and clear up the
things that bothered him. After that—

He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity. He remembered her
at the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious emotions, its
counterfeit drama. He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found her
on the verge of tears.

"Just remember, they're only acting," he had said.

"Yes. But life does do things like that to people."

"Not often. The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life. You
and I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things because
we get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them."