Had it extended far enough to involve David?  Had the hue and cry died away, or were the police still searching for him?  Could he even write to David, without involving him in his own trouble?  For David, fine, wonderful old David—­David had deliberately obstructed the course of justice, and was an accessory after the fact.

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.