The Breaking Point - Page 110/275

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.