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.