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. With the dawn still gray he heard a horse behind and below him on the trail up the cliff face. He stopped and sat waiting, twisted about in his saddle, his expression ugly and defiant, and yet touchingly helpless, the look of a boy in trouble and at bay. The horseman came into sight on the trail below, riding hard, a middle-aged man in a dark sack suit and a straw hat, an oddly incongruous figure and manifestly weary. He rode bent forward, and now and again he raised his eyes from the trail and searched the wall above with bloodshot, anxious eyes. On the turn below Dick, Bassett saw him for the first time, and spoke to him in a quiet voice. “Hello, old man,” he said. “I began to think I was going to miss you after all.” His scrutiny of Dick's face had rather reassured him. The delirium had passed, apparently. Dishevelled although he was, covered with dust and with sweat from the horse, Livingstone's eyes were steady enough. As he rode up to him, however, he was not so certain. He found himself surveyed with a sort of cool malignity that startled him. “Miss me!” Livingstone sneered bitterly. “With every damned hill covered by this time with your outfit! I'll tell you this. If I'd had a gun you'd never have got me alive.” Bassett was puzzled and slightly ruffled. “My outfit! I'll tell you this, son, I've risked my neck half the night to get you out of this mess.” “God Almighty couldn't get me out of this mess,” Dick said somberly. It was then that Bassett saw something not quite normal in his face, and he rode closer. “See here, Livingstone,” he said, in a soothing tone, “nobody's going to get you. I'm here to keep them from getting you. We've got a good start, but we'll have to keep moving.” Dick sat obstinately still, his horse turned across the trail, and his eyes still suspicious and unfriendly.