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Up to that time he had drifted, unable to set a course in the fog, but
now he could see the way, and it led him back to Norada. He would not
communicate with David. He would go out of the lives at the old house as
he had gone in, under a lie. When he surrendered it would be as Judson
Clark, with his lips shut tight on the years since his escape. Let them
think, if they would, that the curtain that had closed down over his
memory had not lifted, and that he had picked up life again where he
had laid it down. The police would get nothing from him to incriminate
David.
But he had a moment, too, when surrender seemed to him not strength but
weakness; where its sheer supineness, its easy solution to his problem
revolted him, where he clenched his fist and looked at it, and longed
for the right to fight his way out.
When smoke began to issue from the cook-house chimney he stirred, rose
and went back. He ate no breakfast, and the men, seeing his squared jaw
and set face, let him alone. He worked with the strength of three men
that day, but that night, when the foreman offered him a job as pacer,
with double wages, he refused it.
"Give it to somebody else, Joe," he said. "I'm quitting."
"The hell you are! When?"
"I'd like to check out to-night."
His going was without comment. They had never fully accepted him, and
comings and goings without notice in the camp were common. He rolled up
his bedding, his change of under-garments inside it, and took the road
that night.
The railroad was ten miles away, and he made the distance easily. He
walked between wire fences, behind which horses moved restlessly as he
passed and cattle slept around a water hole, and as he walked he faced a
situation which all day he had labored like three men to evade.
He was going out of life. It did not much matter whether it was to be
behind bars or to pay the ultimate price. The shadow that lay over him
was that he was leaving forever David and all that he stood for, and a
woman. And the woman was not Elizabeth.
He cursed himself in the dark for a fool and a madman; he cursed the
infatuation which rose like a demoniac possession from his early life.
When that failed he tried to kill it by remembering the passage of time,
the loathing she must have nursed all these years. He summoned the image
of Elizabeth to his aid, to find it eclipsed by something infinitely
more real and vital. Beverly in her dressing-room, grotesque and yet
lovely in her make-up; Beverly on the mountain-trail, in her boyish
riding clothes. Beverly.