The Breaking Point (25 page)

When an automobile engine back-fired in the street below he went sick
with fear.

He made the resolution then that was to be the guiding motive for his
life for the next few months, to fight the thing of his own creating to
a finish. But with the resolution newly made he saw the futility of
it. He might fight, would fight, but nothing could restore to Dick
Livingstone the place he had made for himself in the world. He might be
saved from his past, but he could not be given a future.

All at once he was aware that some one was working stealthily at
the lock of the door which communicated with a room beyond. He slid
cautiously off the bed and went to the light switch, standing with a
hand on it, and waited. The wild thought that it might be Livingstone
was uppermost in his mind, and when the door creaked open and closed
again, that was the word he breathed into the darkness.

"No," said a woman's voice in a whisper. "It's the maid, Hattie. Be
careful. There's a guard at the top of the stairs."

He heard her moving to his outer door, and he knew that she stood
there, listening, her head against the panel. When she was satisfied she
slipped, with the swiftness of familiarity with her surroundings, to the
stand beside his bed, and turned on the lamp. In the shaded light he saw
that she wore a dark cape, with its hood drawn over her head. In some
strange fashion the maid, even the woman, was lost, and she stood,
strange, mysterious, and dramatic in the little room.

"If you found Jud Clark, what would you do with him?" she demanded. From
beneath the hood her eyes searched his face. "Turn him over to Wilkins
and his outfit?"

"I think you know better than that."

"Have you got any plan?"

"Plan? No. They've got every outlet closed, haven't they? Do you know
where he is?"

"I know where he isn't, or they'd have him by now. And I know Jud Clark.
He'd take to the mountains, same as he did before. He's got a good
horse."

"A horse!"

"Listen. I haven't told this, and I don't mean to. They'll learn it in
a couple of hours, anyhow. He got out by a back fire-escape—they know
that. But they don't know he took Ed Rickett's black mare. They think
he's on foot. I've been down there now, and she's gone. Ed's shut up in
a room on the top floor, playing poker. They won't break up until about
three o'clock and he'll miss his horse then. That's two hours yet."

Bassett tried to see her face in the shadow of the hood. He was puzzled
and suspicious at her change of front, more than half afraid of a trap.

"How do I know you are not working with Wilkins?" he demanded. "You
could have saved the situation to-night by saying you weren't sure."

"I was upset. I've had time to think since."

He was forced to trust her, eventually, although the sense of some
hidden motive, some urge greater than compassion, persisted in him.

"You've got some sort of plan for me, then? I can't follow him haphazard
into the mountains at night, and expect to find him."

"Yes. He was delirious when he left. That thing about the sheriff being
after him—he wasn't after him then. Not until I gave the alarm. He's
delirious, and he thinks he's back to the night he—you know. Wouldn't
he do the same thing again, and make for the mountains and the cabin? He
went to the cabin before."

Bassett looked at his watch. It was half past twelve.

"Even if I could get a horse I couldn't get out of the town."

"You might, on foot. They'll be trailing Rickett's horse by dawn. And if
you can get out of town I can get you a horse. I can get you out, too, I
think. I know every foot of the place."

A feeling of theatrical unreality was Bassett's chief emotion during the
trying time that followed. The cloaked and shrouded figure of the woman
ahead, the passage through two dark and empty rooms by pass key to an
unguarded corridor in the rear, the descent of the fire-escape, where
they stood flattened against the wall while a man, possibly one of the
posse, rode in, tied his horse and stamped in high heeled boots into the
building, and always just ahead the sure movement and silent tread of
the woman, kept his nerves taut and increased his feeling of the unreal.

At the foot of the fire-escape the woman slid out of sight noiselessly,
but under Bassett's feet a tin can rolled and clattered. Then a horse
snorted close to his shoulder, and he was frozen with fright. After
that she gave him her hand, and led him through an empty outbuilding and
another yard into a street.

At two o'clock that morning Bassett, waiting in a lonely road near what
he judged to be the camp of a drilling crew, heard a horse coming toward
him and snorting nervously as it came and drew back into the shadows
until he recognized the shrouded silhouette leading him.

"It belongs to my son," she said. "I'll fix it with him to-morrow. But
if you're caught you'll have to say you came out and took him, or you'll
get us all in trouble."

She gave him careful instructions as to how to find the trail, and urged
him to haste.

"If you get him," she advised, "better keep right on over the range."

He paused, with his foot in the stirrup.

"You seem pretty certain he's taken to the mountains."

"It's your only chance. They'll get him anywhere else."

He mounted and prepared to ride off. He would have shaken hands with
her, but the horse was still terrified at her shrouded figure and
veered and snorted when she approached. "However it turns out," he said,
"you've done your best, and I'm grateful."

The horse moved off and left her standing there, her cowl drawn forward
and her hands crossed on her breast. She stood for a moment, facing
toward the mountains, oddly monkish in outline and posture. Then she
turned back toward the town.

Dick had picked up life again where he had left it off so long before.
Gone was David's house built on the sands of forgetfulness. Gone was
David himself, and Lucy. Gone not even born into his consciousness
was Elizabeth. The war, his work, his new place in the world, were all
obliterated, drowned in the flood of memories revived by the shock of
Bassett's revelations.

Not that the breaking point had revealed itself as such at once. There
was confusion first, then stupor and unconsciousness, and out of that,
sharply and clearly, came memory. It was not ten years ago, but an hour
ago, a minute ago, that he had stood staring at Howard Lucas on the
floor of the billiard room, and had seen Beverly run in through the
door.

"Bev!" he was saying. "Bev! Don't look like that!"

He moved and found he was in bed. It had been a dream. He drew a long
breath, looked about the room, saw the woman and greeted her. But
already he knew he had not been dreaming. Things were sharpening in his
mind. He shuddered and looked at the floor, but nobody lay there. Only
the horror in his mind, and the instinct to get away from it. He was not
thinking at all, but rising in him was not only the need for flight, but
the sense of pursuit. They were after him. They would get him. They must
never get him alive.

Instinct and will took the place of thought, and whatever closed chamber
in his brain had opened, it clearly influenced his physical condition.
He bore all the stigmata of prolonged and heavy drinking; his nerves
were gone; he twitched and shook. When he got down the fire-escape his
legs would scarcely hold him.

The discovery of Ed Rickett's horse in the courtyard, saddled and ready,
fitted in with the brain pattern of the past.

Like one who enters a room for the first time, to find it already
familiar, for a moment he felt that this thing that he was doing he
had done before. Only for a moment. Then partial memory ceased, and he
climbed into the saddle, rode out and turned toward the mountains and
the cabin. By that strange quality of the brain which is called habit,
although the habit be of only one emphatic precedent, he followed the
route he had taken ten years before. How closely will never be known.
Did he stop at this turn to look back, as he had once before? Did he let
his horse breathe there? Not the latter, probably, for as, following the
blind course that he had followed ten years before, he left the town and
went up the canyon trail, he was riding as though all the devils of hell
were behind him.

One thing is certain. The reproduction of the conditions of the earlier
flight, the familiar associations of the trail, must have helped rather
than hindered his fixation in the past. Again he was Judson Clark, who
had killed a man, and was flying from himself and from pursuit.

Before long his horse was in acute distress, but he did not notice it.
At the top of the long climb the animal stopped, but he kicked him on
recklessly. He was as unaware of his own fatigue, or that he was swaying
in the saddle, until galloping across a meadow the horse stumbled and
threw him.

He lay still for some time; not hurt but apparently lacking the
initiative to get up again. He had at that period the alternating
lucidity and mental torpor of the half drunken man. But struggling up
through layers of blackness at last there came again the instinct for
flight, and he got on the horse and set off.

The torpor again overcame him and he slept in the saddle. When the
horse stopped he roused and kicked it on. Once he came up through the
blackness to the accompaniment of a great roaring, and found that the
animal was saddle deep in a ford, and floundering badly among the rocks.
He turned its head upstream, and got it out safely.

Toward dawn some of the confusion was gone, but he firmly fixed in the
past. The horse wandered on, head down, occasionally stopping to seize a
leaf as it passed, and once to drink deeply at a spring. Dick was still
not thinking—there was something that forbade him to think-but he was
weak and emotional. He muttered:

"Poor Bev! Poor old Bev!"

A great wave of tenderness and memory swept over him. Poor Bev! He
had made life hell for her, all right. He had an almost uncontrollable
impulse to turn the horse around, go back and see her once more. He was
gone anyhow. They would get him. And he wanted her to know that he would
have died rather than do what he had done.

The flight impulse died; he felt sick and very cold, and now and then he
shook violently. He began to watch the trail behind him for the pursuit,
but without fear. He seemed to have been wandering for a thousand black
nights through deep gorges and over peaks as high as the stars, and now
he wanted to rest, to stop somewhere and sleep, to be warm again. Let
them come and take him, anywhere out of this nightmare.

With the dawn still gray he heard a horse behind and below him on the
trail up the cliff face. He stopped and sat waiting, twisted about
in his saddle, his expression ugly and defiant, and yet touchingly
helpless, the look of a boy in trouble and at bay. The horseman came
into sight on the trail below, riding hard, a middle-aged man in a dark
sack suit and a straw hat, an oddly incongruous figure and manifestly
weary. He rode bent forward, and now and again he raised his eyes from
the trail and searched the wall above with bloodshot, anxious eyes.

On the turn below Dick, Bassett saw him for the first time, and spoke to
him in a quiet voice.

"Hello, old man," he said. "I began to think I was going to miss you
after all."

His scrutiny of Dick's face had rather reassured him. The delirium had
passed, apparently. Dishevelled although he was, covered with dust and
with sweat from the horse, Livingstone's eyes were steady enough. As
he rode up to him, however, he was not so certain. He found himself
surveyed with a sort of cool malignity that startled him.

"Miss me!" Livingstone sneered bitterly. "With every damned hill covered
by this time with your outfit! I'll tell you this. If I'd had a gun
you'd never have got me alive."

Bassett was puzzled and slightly ruffled.

"My outfit! I'll tell you this, son, I've risked my neck half the night
to get you out of this mess."

"God Almighty couldn't get me out of this mess," Dick said somberly.

It was then that Bassett saw something not quite normal in his face, and
he rode closer.

"See here, Livingstone," he said, in a soothing tone, "nobody's going to
get you. I'm here to keep them from getting you. We've got a good start,
but we'll have to keep moving."

Dick sat obstinately still, his horse turned across the trail, and his
eyes still suspicious and unfriendly.

"I don't know you," he said doggedly. "And I've done all the running
away I'm going to do. You go back and tell Wilkins I'm here and to come
and get me. The sooner the better." The sneer faded, and he turned
on Bassett with a depth of tragedy in his eyes that frightened the
reporter. "My God," he said, "I killed a man last night! I can't go
through life with that on me. I'm done, I tell you."

"Last night!" Some faint comprehension began to dawn in Bassett's mind,
a suspicion of the truth. But there was no time to verify it. He turned
and carefully inspected the trail to where it came into sight at the
opposite rim of the valley. When he was satisfied that the pursuit was
still well behind them he spoke again.

"Pull yourself together, Livingstone," he said, rather sharply. "Think
a bit. You didn't kill anybody last night. Now listen," he added
impressively. "You are Livingstone, Doctor Richard Livingstone. You
stick to that, and think about it."

But Dick was not listening, save to some bitter inner voice, for
suddenly he turned his horse around on the trail. "Get out of the way,"
he said, "I'm going back to give myself up."

He would have done it, probably, would have crowded past Bassett on
the narrow trail and headed back toward capture, but for his horse. It
balked and whirled on the ledge, but it would not pass Bassett. Dick
swore and kicked it, his face ugly and determined, but it refused
sullenly. He slid out of the saddle then and tried to drag it on, but he
was suddenly weak and sick. He staggered. Bassett was off his horse in
a moment and caught him. He eased him onto a boulder, and he sat there,
his shoulders sagging and his whole body twitching.