He got to a chair and dropped into it, sweat-bathed, feeling as if cold airs were blowing on his damp skin. Sunk against the back, his legs stretched before him, his arms hanging over the sides, he lay shattered. His mind tried to focus on what he had heard and fell back impotent, eddying downward through darkling depths like a drowning swimmer. A vast weakness invaded him, turning his joints to water, giving him a sensation of nausea, draining his strength till he felt incapable of moving his eyes, which stared glassily at the toes of his shoes.
Presently this passed; he raised his glance and encountered the clock face on the mantelpiece. He held to it like a hand that was dragging him out of an abyss; watched it grow from a circular object to a white dial crossed by black hands and edged by a ring of numerals. The hour marked slowly penetrated to his consciousness--a quarter to four. He drew himself up and looked about; saw his notes on the desk, his hat on the table, the matchsafe with a cigarette stump lying on its saucer. They were like memorials from another state of existence, things that connected him with a plane of being that he had left long ago. He had a vision of himself in that distant past, packing his trunk, making brisk, satisfactory jottings on a sheet of hotel paper, standing on the hearth looking into Lorry Alston's angry eyes.
Groaning, he dropped his head into his hands, rocking on the chair, only half aroused. He was aware of poignant misery without the force to combat it, and knowing he must act could only remember. Irrelevant pictures, disconnected, having no point, chased across his brain--the saloon in Fresno where he had cleaned the brasses, and, jostling it, Chrystie's face, just before she had wept, puckered like a baby's. He saw the tules in the low sun, the green ranks, the gold-glazed streams, Mark Burrage coming down the long drawing-room eyeing him from under thick brows, Lorry's hand with its sparkle of rings holding out the letter.
That last picture shook him out of his torpor. He lifted his head and knew his surroundings for what they were--four walls threatening to close in on him. The necessity to go loomed suddenly insistent, became the obsessing matter, and he staggered to his feet. Flight suggested disguise and he went to the bedroom and clawed about in the bottom of the cupboard for the old suitcase which held the clothes he had worn on his Sacramento trips. As he pulled it out he remembered the side entrance of the hotel accessible by a staircase at the end of the hall; he could slip out unseen. There would be early trains, locals, going south; an express to be caught somewhere down the line. By the next night he could be across the Mexican border. It was the logical place, the only place--he knew it himself and the voice had said so.