Instinct and will took the place of thought, and whatever closed chamber
in his brain had opened, it clearly influenced his physical condition.
He bore all the stigmata of prolonged and heavy drinking; his nerves
were gone; he twitched and shook. When he got down the fire-escape his
legs would scarcely hold him.

The discovery of Ed Rickett's horse in the courtyard, saddled and ready,
fitted in with the brain pattern of the past.

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.