Like one who enters a room for the first time, to find it already familiar, for a moment he felt that this thing that he was doing he had done before.  Only for a moment.  Then partial memory ceased, and he climbed into the saddle, rode out and turned toward the mountains and the cabin.  By that strange quality of the brain which is called habit, although the habit be of only one emphatic precedent, he followed the route he had taken ten years before.  How closely will never be known.  Did he stop at this turn to look back, as he had once before?  Did he let his horse breathe there?  Not the latter, probably, for as, following the blind course that he had followed ten years before, he left the town and went up the canyon trail, he was riding as though all the devils of hell were behind him.

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.