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Dick had written his note, and placed it where Bassett would be certain
to see it. Then he found his horse and led him for the first half mile
or so of level ground before the trail began to descend. He mounted
there, for he knew the animal could find its way in the darkness where
he could not.
He felt no weariness and no hunger, although he had neither slept nor
eaten for thirty-odd hours, and as contrasted with the night before his
head was clear. He was able to start a train of thought and to follow it
through consecutively for the first time in hours. Thought, however, was
easier than realization, and to add to his perplexity, he struggled
to place Bassett and failed entirely. He remained a mysterious and
incomprehensible figure, beginning and ending with the trail.
Then he had an odd thought, that brought him up standing. He had only
Bassett's word for the story. Perhaps Bassett was lying to him, or mad.
He rode on after a moment, considering that, but there was something,
not in Bassett's circumstantial narrative but in himself, that refused
to accept that loophole of escape. He could not have told what it was.
And, with his increasing clarity, he began to make out the case for
Bassett and against himself; the unfamiliar clothing he wore, the pad
with the name of Livingstone on it and the sign Rx, the other contents
of his pockets.
He tried to orient himself in Bassett's story. A doctor. The devil's
irony of it! Some poor hack, losing sleep and bringing babies. Peddling
pills. Leading what Bassett had called a life of usefulness! That was a
career for you, a pill peddler. God!
But underlying all his surface thinking was still the need of flight,
and he was continually confusing it with the earlier one. One moment he
was looking about for the snow of that earlier escape, and the next he
would remember, and the sense of panic would leave him. After all he
meant to surrender eventually. It did not matter if they caught him.
But, like the sense of flight, there was something else in his mind,
something that he fought down and would not face. When it came up
he thrust it back fiercely. That something was the figure of Beverly
Carlysle, stooping over her husband's body. He would have died to save
her pain, and yet last night--no, it wasn't last night. It was years and
years ago, and all this time she had hated him.
It was unbearable that she had gone on hating him, all this time.