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Show at lging the iron down, not uttering a sound but wildly, frantically wing at that glove to get it off. For a moment I wondered why, ;n I realized that the glove itself was burning hot Glove off and ng aside too, still not uttering a sound, he clasped his burned rid with the other, stuck both between his knees and rocked with in. I was just beginning to feel my part in it. Then he turned on me, his dark face almost black under the ide of his hat brim and with that wicked mustache looking like e Devil himself. "What were you doing!" he demanded in a tone it shriveled my insides. "What in the hell were you thinking of!" it there was still a hint of amazement in his voice which checked i full force, and it wasn't until he had stepped over and picked » his glove, his fancy-stitched glove, and rubbed his thumb over e palm of it and found the leather scorched and stiffened that his ice found its full outrage. It was his tone more than his words. He lied me a stupid goddamned fool of a boy and said he'd have en better off to have left me up at the house with the girls, but was his tone that burned through me and in me like the glowing i heat of one of those irons. And I took the look on his face like alow to my groin, feeling the shriveling, the ache like an amputa- >n. Then he pulled his glove back on, picked up the iron and rned to the calf. Henry glanced at me, then moved over to help him. From the ck, blue shirts and Levis, they looked remarkably alike. I turned jm them, walking stiffly across the corral, climbed the pole fence id crossed the barnyard, stooped through the wire fence and unged into the corn field. Going across the rows I twisted and rned through it until I was deep in and out of sight. Then I nod there quite a while, an aching nausea deep in me, feeling en that nothing more, certainly nothing worse, could ever happen me. That feeling settled and turned me hard and cold. I saw m without pity, betraying his friend, only a man. Coldly I looked J the row and through the corn to the peak of Mt. Sneffels and w only a mountain. That was all, but that was everything. At first I thought the nausea would do it, but it wasn't quite rong enough and so I leaned over and stuck my index finger down y throat. That didn't do it either, I was still too hesitant, and ith sudden deliberate cold force I used two fingers, my middle iger too, ramming them back down my throat until in one wave 237 |
