“You see, you’ve not only made a man’s place in the world, Clark, as I’ve told you.  You’ve formed associations you can’t get away from.  You’ve got to think of the Livingstones, and you told me yesterday a shock would kill the old man.  But it’s more than that.  There’s a girl back in your town.  I think you were engaged to her.”

But if he had hoped to pierce the veil with that statement he failed.  Dick’s face flushed, and he went to the door of the cabin, much as he had gone to the window the day before.  He did not look around when he spoke.

“Then I’m an unconscionable cad,” he said.  “I’ve only cared for one woman in my life.  And I’ve shipwrecked her for good.”

“You mean—­”

“You know who I mean.”

Sometime later Bassett got on his horse and rode out to a ledge which commanded a long stretch of trail in the valley below.  Far away horsemen were riding along it, one behind the other, small dots that moved on slowly but steadily.  He turned and went back to the cabin.

“We’d better be moving,” he said, “and it’s up to you to say where.  You’ve got two choices.  You can go back to Norada and run the chance of arrest.  You know what that means.  Without much chance of a conviction you will stand trial and bring wretchedness to the people who stood by you before and who care for you now.  Or you can go on over the mountains with me and strike the railroad somewhere to the West.  You’ll have time to think things over, anyhow.  They’ve waited ten years.  They can wait longer.”

To his relief Dick acquiesced.  He had become oddly passive; he seemed indeed not greatly interested.  He did not even notice the haste with which Bassett removed the evidences of their meal, or extinguished the dying fire and scattered the ashes.  Nor, when they were mounted, the care with which they avoided the trail.  He gave, when asked, information as to the direction of the railroad at the foot of the western slope of the range, and at the same instigation found a trail for them some miles beyond their starting point.  But mostly he merely followed, in a dead silence.

They made slow progress.  Both horses were weary and hungry, and the going was often rough and even dangerous.  But for Dick’s knowledge of the country they would have been hopelessly lost.  Bassett, however, although tortured with muscular soreness, felt his spirits rising as the miles were covered, and there was no sign of the pursuit.

By mid-afternoon they were obliged to rest their horses and let them graze, and the necessity of food for themselves became insistent.  Dick stretched out and was immediately asleep, but the reporter could not rest.  The magnitude of his undertaking obsessed him.  They had covered perhaps twenty miles since leaving the cabin, and the railroad was still sixty miles away.  With fresh horses they could have made it by dawn of the next morning, but he did not believe their jaded animals could go much farther.  The country grew worse instead of better.  A pass ahead, which they must cross, was full of snow.