Oh, it was fine. It was the happiest dream he had dreamed since he had set out. But it was more than a dream. It was a certainty—a whole, complete certainty, of which nothing short of death could rob him. With the first of to-morrow’s daylight he would set out for Calford. He should make it in two days. His old horse could do it. It would have to do it.
After awhile he rose again from the fire and replenished it with the remains of his fuel store. It was his final precaution. Then he rolled his blanket about his tough body, and, using his saddle for a pillow, stretched himself out as near to the fire as safety permitted. Far into the night he lay there, wakeful and thinking. But finally he slumbered with the dreamlessness of complete weariness.
Not for one moment had a single thought been given to the girl whose love he had so wantonly betrayed.
The trail lifted gently out of the valley. It was a trail Andy McFardell knew by heart. In one direction it led to the pleasant purlieus of Barney Lake’s hotel in Hartspool. In the other it lost itself somewhere behind him in the foothills he had learned to hate so cordially.
Somewhere up there, at the top of the incline, where a dense bush country reached out towards the wide undulations of the prairie beyond, the trail forked. And it was of that fork that the man was thinking, for the right-hand trail led to Calford, which was just now his whole object and purpose in life. He wanted to look once more upon the city from which he had so long been banished. He wanted to look on it with the eyes of a victor. For days now he had been living through a succession of wonderful anticipations. They had grown into almost grotesque proportions. He felt that his approach to Calford was in the nature of a triumphal progress.
His only anxiety now was for his horse. There was nothing else that could hold up the plans he had so carefully made. He had no sympathy for the well-nigh foundered creature. He cared not a jot that the poor thing was terribly saddle-galled. It meant nothing to him that its ribs looked as though the wind must blow through them, and its quarters were so lean and shrunken that the bones looked to be about to burst the skin covering them. He wanted to reach Calford. He intended to reach Calford. And his anxiety was for how the poor, wasted brute was to negotiate that last fifty miles still remaining. His mood was merciless. The horse would have to carry him till it dropped. After that? Well, after that, he would walk. That was all.
The dishevelled outfit topped the valley slope at last, and passed into something of shade from the brazen light of the sun. The road had entered a luxuriant spruce bluff that was wholly inviting, and stirred even the jaded spirits of the horse. The creature broke into a shuffling amble which by no effort of imagination could have been regarded as a lope.
The trail went on in its own peculiar winding fashion along the line of least resistance, and there was not a moment when the horseman could obtain a view for more than fifty yards ahead. But that was of no consequence. The road was perfectly familiar. Andy McFardell knew there was less than half a mile to the fork, and then——
The ambling horse stumbled. The man flung himself back in the saddle with a shout of blasphemy. With all the strength of arms and body he sought to keep the falling creature on its feet. It was a vain effort. The beast was too utterly weary to help itself or be helped. It had tripped badly over some unseen obstruction, and pitched headlong.