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.