The Breaking Point (31 page)

"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 cut 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.

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.