The Breaking Point (30 page)

And with some small amplifications, that is all there was to it.

Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David
called Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.

"It is my hope," he said, "to carry on exactly as though Dick might walk
in to-morrow and take his place again. As I hold to my belief in God,
so I hold to my conviction that he will come back, and that before
I—before long. But our friends will be asking where he is and what he
is doing, and we would better agree on that beforehand. What we'd better
say is simply that Dick was called away on business connected with
some property in the West. They may not believe it, but they'll hardly
disprove it."

So the benevolent conspiracy to protect Dick Livingstone's name was
arranged, and from that time on the four of them who were a party to it
turned to the outside world an unbroken front of loyalty and courage.
Even to Minnie, anxious and red-eyed in her kitchen, Lucy gave the same
explanation while she arranged David's tray.

"He has been detained in the West on business," Lucy said.

"He might have sent me a postcard. And he hasn't written Doctor Reynolds
at all."

"He has been very busy. Get the sugar bowl, Minnie. He'll be back soon,
I'm sure."

But Minnie did not immediately move.

"He'd better come soon if he wants to see Doctor David," she said, with
twitching lips. "And I'll just say this, Mrs. Crosby. The talk that's
going on in this town is something awful."

"I don't want to hear it," Lucy said firmly.

She ate alone, painfully remembering that last gay little feast before
they started away. But before she sat down she did a touching thing. She
rang the bell and called Minnie.

"After this, Minnie," she said, "we will always set Doctor Richard's
place. Then, when he comes—"

Her voice broke and Minnie, scenting a tragedy but ignorant of it, went
back to her kitchen to cry into the roller towel. Her world was gone to
pieces. By years of service to the one family she had no other world, no
home, no ties. She was with the Livingstones, but not one of them. Alone
in her kitchen she felt lonely and cut off. She thought that David, had
he not been ill, would have told her.

Lucy found David moving about upstairs some time later, and when she
went up she found him sitting in Dick's room, on a stiff chair inside
the door. She stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder, but he
did not say anything, and she went away.

That night David had a caller. All evening the bell had been ringing,
and the little card tray on the hatrack was filled with visiting cards.
There were gifts, too, flowers and jellies and some squab from Mrs.
Sayre. Lucy had seen no one, excusing herself on the ground of fatigue,
but the man who came at nine o'clock was not inclined to be turned away.

"You take this card up to Doctor Livingstone, anyhow," he said. "I'll
wait."

He wrote in pencil on the card, placing it against the door post to do
so, and passed it to Minnie. She calmly read it, and rather defiantly
carried it off. But she came down quickly, touched by some contagion of
expectation from the room upstairs.

"Hang your hat on the rack and go on up."

So it was that David and the reporter met, for the first time, in
David's old fashioned chamber, with its walnut bed and the dresser with
the marble top, and Dick's picture in his uniform on the mantle.

Bassett was shocked at the sight of David, shocked and alarmed. He was
uncertain at first as to the wisdom of telling his startling story to an
obviously sick man, but David's first words reassured him.

"Come in," he said. "You are the Bassett who was with Doctor Livingstone
at Norada?"

"Yes. I see you know about it."

"We know something, not everything." Suddenly David's pose deserted him.
He got up and stood very straight, searching eyes on his visitor. "Is he
living?" he asked, in a low voice.

"I think so. I'm not certain."

"Then you don't know where he is?"

"No. He got away—but you know that. Sit down, doctor. I've got a long
story to tell."

"I'll get you to call my sister first," David said. "And tell her to
get Harrison Miller. Mr. Miller is our neighbor, and he very kindly went
west when my health did not permit me to go."

While they waited David asked only one question.

"The report we have had is that he was in a stupor in the hotel, and the
doctor who saw him—you got him, I think—said he appeared to have been
drinking heavily. Is that true? He was not a drinking man."

"I am quite sure he had not."

There was another question in David's mind, but he did not put it. He
sat, with the patience of his age and his new infirmity, waiting for
Lucy to bring Harrison Miller, and had it not been for the trembling of
his hands Bassett would have thought him calm and even placid.

During the recital that followed somewhat later David did not move. He
sat silent, his eyes closed, his face set.

"That's about all," Bassett finished. "He had been perfectly clear in
his head all day, and it took headwork to get over the pass. But, as I
say, he had simply dropped ten years, and was back to the Lucas trouble.
I tried everything I knew, used your name and would have used the young
lady's, because sometimes that sort of thing strikes pretty deep, but
I didn't know it. He was convinced after a while, but he was dazed, of
course. He knew it, that is, but he couldn't comprehend it.

"I was done up, and I've cursed myself for it since, but I must have
slept like the dead. I wakened once, early in the night, and he was
still sitting by the fire, staring at it. I've forgotten to say that he
had been determined all day to go back and give himself up, and the only
way I prevented it was by telling him what a blow it would be to you and
to the girl. I wakened once and said to him, 'Better get some sleep, old
man.' He did not answer at once, and then he said, 'All right.' I was
dozing off when he spoke again. He said, 'Where is Beverly Carlysle now?
Has she married again?' 'She's revived "The Valley," and she's in New
York with it,' I told him.

"When I wakened in the morning he was gone, but he'd left a piece of
paper in a cleft stick beside me, with directions for reaching the
railroad, and—well, here it is."

Bassett took from his pocket-book a note, and passed it over to David,
who got out his spectacles with shaking hands and read it. It was on
Dick's prescription paper, with his name at the top and the familiar Rx
below it. David read it aloud, his voice husky.

"Many thanks for everything, Bassett," he read. "I don't like to leave
you, but you'll get out all right if you follow the map on the back
of this. I've had all night to think things out, and I'm leaving you
because you are safer without me. I realize now what you've known all
day and kept from me. That woman at the hotel recognized me, and they
are after me.

"I can't make up my mind what to do. Ultimately I think I'll go back and
give myself up. I am a dead man, anyhow, to all who might have cared,
but I've got to do one or two things first, and I want to think things
over. One thing you've got a right to know. I hated Lucas, but it never
entered my head to kill him. How it happened God only knows. I don't."

It was signed "J. C."

Bassett broke the silence that followed the reading.

"I made every effort to find him. I had to work alone, you understand,
and from the west side of the range, not to arouse suspicion. They were
after me, too, you know. His horse, I heard, worked its way back a few
days ago. It's a forsaken country, and if he lost his horse he was in it
on foot and without food. Of course there's a chance—"

His voice trailed off. In the stillness David sat, touching with tender
tremulous fingers what might be Dick's last message, and gazing at the
picture of Dick in his uniform. He knew what they all thought, that Dick
was dead and that he held his final words in his hands, but his militant
old spirit refused to accept that silent verdict. Dick might be dead
to them, but he was living. He looked around the room defiantly,
resentfully. Of all of them he was the only one to have faith, and he
was bound to a chair. He knew them. They would sit down supinely and
grieve, while time passed and Dick fought his battle alone.

No, by God, he would not be bound to a chair. He raised himself and
stood, swaying on his shaking legs.

"You've given up," he said scornfully. "You make a few days' search, and
then you quit. It's easy to say he's dead, and so you say he's dead. I'm
going out there myself, and I'll make a search—"

He collapsed into the chair again, and looked at them with shamed,
appealing eyes. Bassett was the first to break the silence, speaking in
a carefully emotionless tone.

"I haven't given up for a minute. I've given up the search, because he's
beyond finding just now. Either he's got away, or he is—well, beyond
help. We have to go on the hypothesis that he got away, and in that
case sooner or later you'll hear from him. He's bound to remember you in
time. The worst thing is this charge against him."

"He never killed Howard Lucas," David said, in a tone of conviction.
"Harrison, read Mr. Bassett my statement to you."

Bassett took the statement home with him that night, and studied it
carefully. It explained a great deal that had puzzled him before; Mrs.
Wasson's story and David's arrival at the mountain cabin. But most of
all it explained why the Thorwald woman had sent him after Dick. She
knew then, in spite of her protests to David, that Jud Clark had not
killed Lucas.

He paced the floor for an hour or two, sunk in thought, and then
unlocked a desk drawer and took out his bankbook. He had saved a little
money. Not much, but it would carry him over if he couldn't get another
leave of absence. He thought, as he put the book away and prepared for
bed, that it was a small price to pay for finding Clifton Hines and
saving his own soul.

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.

He was very thirsty, and water did not satisfy him. He wanted a real
drink. He wanted alcohol. Suddenly he wanted all the liquor in the
world. The craving came on at dawn, and after that he kicked his weary
horse on recklessly, so that it rocked and stumbled down the trail. He
had only one thought after the frenzy seized him, and that was to get to
civilization and whisky. It was as though he saw in drunkenness his only
escape from the unbearable. In all probability he would have killed
both his horse and himself in the grip of that sudden madness, but
deliverance came in the shape of a casual rider, a stranger who for a
moment took up the shuttle, wove his bit of the pattern and passed
on, to use his blow-pipe, his spirit lamp and his chemicals in some
prospector's paradise among the mountains.

When Dick heard somewhere ahead the creaking of saddle leather and the
rattle of harness he drew aside on the trail and waited. He had lost
all caution in the grip of his craving, and all fear. A line of loaded
burros rounded a point ahead and came toward him, picking their way
delicately with small deliberate feet and walking on the outer edge of
the trail, after the way of pack animals the world over. Behind them was
a horseman, rifle in the scabbard on his saddle and spurs jingling. Dick
watched him with thirsty, feverish eyes as he drew near. He could hardly
wait to put his question.