He drew back. He had forgotten. He turned away, head bowed. Both were fighting--fighting against love--everything. Then Sue drew a great breath and commenced to shiver.
“I was wrong. You must go to her,” she whispered. “She has the right of way. She has the right of way. Go, go,” she blazed, passion slipping up again. “Go before I forget honor; forget everything but that I love.”
Garrison turned. She never forgot the look his face held; never forgot the tone of his voice.
“I go. Good-by, Sue. I go to the girl up North. You are above me in every way--infinitely above me. Yes, the girl up North. I had forgotten. She is my wife. And I have children.”
He swung on his heel and blindly flung himself upon the waiting gelding.
That night Garrison left for New York; left with the memory of Sue standing there on the moonlit pike, that look in her eyes; that look of dazed horror which he strove blindly to shut out. He did not return to Calvert House; not because he remembered the girl's advice and was acting upon it. His mind had no room for the past. Every blood-vessel was striving to grapple with the present. He was numb with agony. It seemed as if his brain had been beaten with sticks; beaten to a pulp. That last scene with Sue had uprooted every fiber of his being. He writhed when he thought of it. But one thought possessed him. To get away, get away, get away; out of it all; anyhow, anywhere.
He was like a raw recruit who has been lying on the firing-line, suffering the agonies of apprehension, of imagination; experiencing the proximity of death in cold blood, without the heat of action to render him oblivious.
Garrison had been on the firing-line for so long that his nerve was frayed to ribbons. Now the blow had fallen at last. The exposure had come, and a fierce frenzy possessed him to complete the work begun. He craved physical combat. And when he thought of Sue he felt like a murderer fleeing from the scene of his crime; striving, with distance, to blot out the memory of his victim. That was all he thought of. That, and to get away--to flee from himself. Afterward, analysis of actions would come. At present, only action; only action.
It was five miles to the Cottonton depot, reached by a road that branched off from the Logan Pike about half a mile above the spot where Waterbury had been thrown. He remembered that there was a through train at ten-fifteen. He would have time if he rode hard. With head bowed, shoulders hunched, he bent over the gelding. He had no recollection of that ride.