The Breaking Point (19 page)

One day he happened on a short, heavy-set man, the sheriff, who had lost
his office on the strength of Jud Clark's escape, and had now recovered
it. Bassett had brought some whisky with him, and on the promise of a
drink lured Wilkins to his room. Over his glass the sheriff talked.

"All this newspaper stuff lately about Jud Clark being alive is dead
wrong," he declared, irritably. "Maggie Donaldson was crazy. You can
ask the people here about her. They all know it. Those newspaper fellows
descended on us here with a tooth-brush apiece and a suitcase full of
liquor, and thought they'd get something. Seemed to think we'd hold out
on them unless we got our skins full. But there isn't anything to hold
out. Jud Clark's dead. That's all."

"Sure he's dead," Bassett agreed, amiably. "You found his horse, didn't
you?"

"Yes. Dead. And when you find a man's horse dead in the mountains in a
blizzard, you don't need any more evidence. It was five months before
you could see a trail up the Goat that winter."

Bassett nodded, rose and poured out another drink.

"I suppose," he observed casually, "that even if Clark turned up now, it
would be hard to convict him, wouldn't it?"

The sheriff considered that, holding up his glass.

"Well, yes and no," he said. "It was circumstantial evidence, mostly.
Nobody saw it done. The worst thing against him was his running off."

"How about witnesses?"

"Nobody actually saw it done. John Donaldson came the nearest, and he's
dead. Lucas's wife was still alive, the last I heard, and I reckon the
valet is floating around somewhere."

"I suppose if he did turn up you'd make a try for it." Bassett stared at
the end of his cigar.

"We'd make a try for it, all right," Wilkins said somberly. "There are
some folks in this county still giving me the laugh over that case."

The next day Bassett hired a quiet horse, rolled in his raincoat two
days' supply of food, strapped it to the cantle of his saddle, and rode
into the mountains. He had not ridden for years, and at the end of the
first hour he began to realize that he was in for a bad time. By noon
he was so sore that he could hardly get out of the saddle, and so stiff
that once out, he could barely get back again. All morning the horse
had climbed, twisting back and forth on a narrow canyon trail, grunting
occasionally, as is the way of a horse on a steep grade. All morning
they had followed a roaring mountain stream, descending in small
cataracts from the ice fields far above. And all morning Bassett had
been mentally following that trail as it had been ridden ten years
ago by a boy maddened with fear and drink, who drove his horse forward
through the night and the blizzard, with no objective and no hope.

He found it practically impossible to connect this frenzied fugitive
with the quiet man in his office chair at Haverly, the man who was or
was not Judson Clark. He lay on a bank at noon and faced the situation
squarely, while his horse, hobbled, grazed with grotesque little forward
jumps in an upland meadow. Either Dick Livingstone was Clark, or he
was the unknown occasional visitor at the Livingstone Ranch. If he
were Clark, and if that could be proved, there were two courses open to
Bassett. He could denounce him to the authorities and then spring
the big story of his career. Or he could let things stand. From a
professional standpoint the first course attracted him, as a man he
began to hate it. The last few days had shed a new light on Judson
Clark. He had been immensely popular; there were men in the town who
told about trying to save him from himself. He had been extravagant, but
he had also been generous. He had been "a good kid," until liberty and
money got hold of him. There had been more than one man in the sheriff's
posse who hadn't wanted to find him.

He was tempted to turn back. The mountains surrounded him, somber and
majestically still. They made him feel infinitely small and rather
impertinent, as though he had come to penetrate the secrets they never
yielded. He had almost to fight a conviction that they were hostile.

After an hour or so he determined to go on. Let them throw him over a
gorge if they so determined. He got up, grunting, and leading the horse
beside a boulder, climbed painfully into the saddle. To relieve his
depression he addressed the horse:

"It would be easier on both of us if you were two feet narrower in the
beam, old dear," he said.

Nevertheless, he made good time. By six o'clock he knew that he must
have made thirty odd miles, and that he must be near the cabin. Also
that it was going to be bitterly cold that night, under the snow fields,
and that he had brought no wood axe. The deep valley was purple with
twilight by seven, and he could scarcely see the rough-drawn trail map
he had been following. And the trail grew increasingly bad. For the last
mile or two the horse took its own way.

It wandered on, through fords and out of them, under the low-growing
branches of scrub pine, brushing his bruised legs against rocks. He had
definitely decided that he had missed the cabin when the horse turned
off the trail, and he saw it.

It was built of rough logs, the chinks once closed with mud which had
fallen away. The door stood open, and his entrance into its darkness was
followed by the scurrying of many little feet. Bassett unstrapped his
raincoat from the saddle with fingers numb with cold, and flung it to
the ground. He uncinched and removed the heavy saddle, hobbled his horse
and removed the bridle, and turned him loose with a slap on the flank.

"For the love of Mike, don't go far, old man," he besought him. And was
startled by the sound of his own voice.

By the light of his candle lantern the prospects were extremely poor.
The fir branches in the double-berthed bunk were dry and useless, the
floor was crumbling under his feet, and the roof of the lean-to had
fallen in and crushed the rusty stove. In the cabin itself some one had
recently placed a large flat stone in a corner for a fireplace, with two
slabs to back it, and above it had broken out a corner of the roof as
a chimney. Bassett thought he saw the handwork of some enterprising
journalist, and smiled grimly.

He set to work with the resource of a man who had learned to take what
came, threw the dry bedding onto the slab and set a match to it, brought
in portions of the lean-to roof for further supply for the fire, opened
a can of tomatoes and set it on the edge of the hearth to heat, and
sliced bacon into his diminutive frying-pan.

It was too late for any examination that night. He ate his supper from
the rough table, drawing up to it a broken chair, and afterwards brought
in more wood for his fire. Then, with a lighted cigar, and with his
boots steaming on the hearth, he sat in front of the blaze and fell into
deep study.

He was aching in every muscle when he finally stretched out on the bare
boards of the lower bunk. While he slept small furry noses appeared in
the openings in the broken floor, to be followed by little bodies that
moved cautiously out into the open. He roused once and peered over the
edge of the bunk. Several field mice were basking in front of the dying
embers of the fire, and two were sitting on his boots. He grinned at
them and lay back again, but he found himself fully awake and very
uncomfortable. He lay there, contemplating his own folly, and demanding
of himself almost fiercely what he had expected to get out of all this
effort and misery. For ten years or so men had come here. Wilkins had
come, for one, and there had been others. And had found nothing, and had
gone away. And now he was there, the end of the procession, to look for
God knows what.

He pulled the raincoat up around his shoulders, and lay back stiffly.
Then—he was not an imaginative man—he began to feel that eyes were
staring at him, furtive, hidden eyes, intently watching him.

Without moving he began to rake the cabin with his eyes, wall to wall,
corner to corner. He turned, cautiously, and glanced at the door into
the lean-to. It gaped, cavernous and empty. But the sense of being
watched persisted, and when he looked at the floor the field mice had
disappeared.

He began gradually to see more clearly as his eyes grew accustomed to
the semi-darkness, and he felt, too, that he could almost locate the
direction of the menace. For as a menace he found himself considering
it. It was the broken, windowless East wall, opposite the bunk.

After a time the thing became intolerable. He reached for his revolver,
and getting quickly out of the bunk, ran to the doorway and threw open
the door, to find himself peering into a blackness like a wall, and to
hear a hasty crunching of the underbrush that sounded like some animal
in full flight.

With the sounds, and his own movement, the terror died. The cold night
air on his face, the feel of the pine needles under his stockinged
feet, brought him back to sense and normality. Some creature of the
wilderness, a deer or a bear, perhaps, had been moving stealthily
outside the cabin, and it was sound he had heard, not a gaze he had
felt. He was rather cynically amused at himself. He went back into the
cabin, closed the door, and stooped to turn his boots over before the
fire.

It was while he was stooping that he heard a horse galloping off along
the trail.

He did not go to sleep again. Now and then he considered the possibility
of its having been his own animal, somehow freed of the rope and
frightened by the same thing that had frightened him. But when with the
first light he went outside, his horse, securely hobbled, was grazing on
the scant pasture not far away.

Before he cooked his breakfast he made a minute examination of the
ground beneath the East wall, but the earth was hard, and a broken
branch or two might have been caused by his horse. He had no skill in
woodcraft, and in the broad day his alarm seemed almost absurd. Some
free horse on the range had probably wandered into the vicinity of the
cabin, and had made off again on a trot. Nevertheless, he made up
his mind not to remain over another night, but to look about after
breakfast, and then to start down again.

He worked on his boots, dry and hard after yesterday's wetting, fried
his bacon and dropped some crackers into the sizzling fat, and ate
quickly. After that he went out to the trail and inspected it. He had
an idea that range horses were mostly unshod, and that perhaps the trail
would reveal something. But it was unused and overgrown. Not until he
had gone some distance did he find anything. Then in a small bare spot
he found in the dust the imprints of a horse's shoes, turned down the
trail up which he had come.

Even then he was slow to read into the incident anything that related to
himself or to his errand. He went over the various contingencies of the
trail: a ranger, on his way to town; a forest fire somewhere; a belated
hound from the newspaper pack. He was convinced now that human eyes had
watched him for some time through the log wall the night before, but he
could not connect them with the business in hand.

He set resolutely about his business, which was to turn up, somehow,
some way, a proof of the truth of Maggie Donaldson's dying statement. To
begin with then he accepted that statement, to find where it would lead
him, and it led him, eventually, to the broken-down stove under the
fallen roof of the lean-to.

He deliberately set himself to work, at first, to reconstruct the life
in the cabin. Jud would have had the lower bunk, David the upper. The
skeleton of a cot bed in the lean-to would have been Maggie's. But none
of them yielded anything.

Very well. Having accepted that they lived here, it was from here that
the escape was made. They would have started the moment the snow was
melted enough to let them get out, and they would have taken, not the
trail toward the town, but some other and circuitous route toward the
railroad. But there had been things to do before they left. They would
have cleared the cabin of every trace of occupancy; the tin cans,
Clark's clothing, such bedding as they could not carry. The cans must
have been a problem; the clothes, of course, could have been burned.
But there were things, like buttons, that did not burn easily. Clark's
watch, if he wore one, his cuff links. Buried?

It occurred to him that they might have disposed of some of the
unburnable articles under the floor, and he lifted a rough board or two.
But to pursue the search systematically he would have needed a pickaxe,
and reluctantly he gave it up and turned his attention to the lean-to
and the buried stove.

The stove lay in a shallow pit, filled with ancient ashes and crumbled
bits of wood from the roof. It lay on its side, its sheet-iron sides
collapsed, its long chimney disintegrated. He was in a heavy sweat
before he had uncovered it and was able to remove it from its bed of
ashes and pine needles. This done, he brought his candle-lantern and
settled himself cross-legged on the ground.

His first casual inspection of the ashes revealed nothing. He set to
work more carefully then, picking them up by handfuls, examining and
discarding. Within ten minutes he had in a pile beside him some burned
and blackened metal buttons, the eyelets and a piece of leather from a
shoe, and the almost unrecognizable nib of a fountain pen.

He sat with them in the palm of his hand. Taken alone, each one was
insignificant, proved nothing whatever. Taken all together, they assumed
vast proportions, became convincing, became evidence.

Late that night he descended stiffly at the livery stable, and turned
his weary horse over to a stableman.

"Looks dead beat," said the stableman, eyeing the animal.

"He's got nothing on me," Bassett responded cheerfully. "Better give him
a hot bath and put him to bed. That's what I'm going to do."

He walked back to the hotel, glad to stretch his aching muscles. The
lobby was empty, and behind the desk the night clerk was waiting for the
midnight train. Bassett was wide awake by that time, and he went back to
the desk and lounged against it.