“Sure he’s dead,” Bassett agreed, amiably.  “You found his horse, didn’t you?”

“Yes.  Dead.  And when you find a man’s horse dead in the mountains in a blizzard, you don’t need any more evidence.  It was five months before you could see a trail up the Goat that winter.”

Bassett nodded, rose and poured out another drink.

“I suppose,” he observed casually, “that even if Clark turned up now, it would be hard to convict him, wouldn’t it?”

The sheriff considered that, holding up his glass.

“Well, yes and no,” he said.  “It was circumstantial evidence, mostly.  Nobody saw it done.  The worst thing against him was his running off.”

“How about witnesses?”

“Nobody actually saw it done.  John Donaldson came the nearest, and he’s dead.  Lucas’s wife was still alive, the last I heard, and I reckon the valet is floating around somewhere.”

“I suppose if he did turn up you’d make a try for it.”  Bassett stared at the end of his cigar.

“We’d make a try for it, all right,” Wilkins said somberly.  “There are some folks in this county still giving me the laugh over that case.”

The next day Bassett hired a quiet horse, rolled in his raincoat two days’ supply of food, strapped it to the cantle of his saddle, and rode into the mountains.  He had not ridden for years, and at the end of the first hour he began to realize that he was in for a bad time.  By noon he was so sore that he could hardly get out of the saddle, and so stiff that once out, he could barely get back again.  All morning the horse had climbed, twisting back and forth on a narrow canyon trail, grunting occasionally, as is the way of a horse on a steep grade.  All morning they had followed a roaring mountain stream, descending in small cataracts from the ice fields far above.  And all morning Bassett had been mentally following that trail as it had been ridden ten years ago by a boy maddened with fear and drink, who drove his horse forward through the night and the blizzard, with no objective and no hope.

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.