The Breaking Point - Page 149/275

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.