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.