He tried to orient himself in Bassett's story. A doctor. The devil's
irony of it! Some poor hack, losing sleep and bringing babies. Peddling
pills. Leading what Bassett had called a life of usefulness! That was a
career for you, a pill peddler. God!

But underlying all his surface thinking was still the need of flight,
and he was continually confusing it with the earlier one. One moment he
was looking about for the snow of that earlier escape, and the next he
would remember, and the sense of panic would leave him. After all he
meant to surrender eventually. It did not matter if they caught him.

But, like the sense of flight, there was something else in his mind,
something that he fought down and would not face. When it came up
he thrust it back fiercely. That something was the figure of Beverly
Carlysle, stooping over her husband's body. He would have died to save
her pain, and yet last night--no, it wasn't last night. It was years and
years ago, and all this time she had hated him.

It was unbearable that she had gone on hating him, all this time.

He was very thirsty, and water did not satisfy him. He wanted a real
drink. He wanted alcohol. Suddenly he wanted all the liquor in the
world. The craving came on at dawn, and after that he kicked his weary
horse on recklessly, so that it rocked and stumbled down the trail. He
had only one thought after the frenzy seized him, and that was to get to
civilization and whisky. It was as though he saw in drunkenness his only
escape from the unbearable. In all probability he would have killed
both his horse and himself in the grip of that sudden madness, but
deliverance came in the shape of a casual rider, a stranger who for a
moment took up the shuttle, wove his bit of the pattern and passed
on, to use his blow-pipe, his spirit lamp and his chemicals in some
prospector's paradise among the mountains.