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Show "You said to." /Q9 "Don't talk like a fool.' You don't just up and shoot something that's worth money." Davy stuck to it, dogged and sullen: he had been told to. In the deadlock we all looked back to the mule, his body looming tin ere upon the dull dust and manure of the corral, a thing which a few minutes before had pulsed with life now looking like something dead washed up on the beach. Davy shifted uncomfortably, feeling remorse, and Dad looked at that mule furiously, as if reminded of his own mortality. I was out of it, of course, until as I watched the ga the relies, one settled and walked over an eyeball. I felt a deep bone-numbing shock. In my very marrow I realized that my father, my brother, myself -- all of us would that completely die and rot to nothing. The pale horse galloped past, silent, awesome. After supper, after the chores that evening, I got a handful of oats and walked down along the creek to Beauty in her pasture, she oblivious to the death of her colt a few hundred yards away, and while she delicately lipped the oats up out of the grass I stroked her smooth sun-warmed shoulder, the glossy hide, sadly stroking her as if I could console her. Probably I was enjoying the melancholy of that moment, wizka with the sun turning the western sky brilliantly orange before it sank into darkness, and across the creek a ripe wheat field in that light was never more richly golden. Yet beneath m any assumed sadness was something real, something I felt much deeper and felt truly*^ trespassing of all things, the slow turning of seasons, the drift of years, the sands of centuries. There was going to be a war for the United States. Pat Donahue had joined up, Henry was talking of it and I supposed that I would follow soon. was married, out of my life. For two years now Henry had been working and living in town, my sister Tina was away in Pueblo teaching school, Fanny had been married for three years, I was leaving for college in the fall. I would go |