“And such talk! ‘All men are created free and equal,’ ‘Nature’s noblemen,’ ‘Noble pioneers’ and all that kind of stuff about men just like me. Lordy, what a lot of big sounding words I had listened to when I was a kid. It used to make me sick to think of it sometimes later, when I was sitting up there behind Peter and to think that I had sometimes believed such bunk myself, I who had seen and known a lot of them same pioneers pretty intimately and should have known better than to listen. “As I say, I used to think about it and a lot of other foolishness I’d heard, when I was up behind Peter, and he with his head up so high and looking--say, he could walk past one of them grandstands and past all of them people like God Almighty himself might have walked! What I mean is, not giving the people or the other horses in the race or the other drivers or the judges up in the stand or me or anyone anything but his darned contempt. It was lovely to see. Sometimes when he’d see a mare he’d throw up his head and snort and sometimes there was a little quiet noise he made just as though he was saying to us ‘You worms, you worms,’ to all of us, all of the people in the world including myself. “Why, hell, no one ever knew how fast that Peter could trot. He got sick and died before he ever got to the grand circuit where horses of his own class usually raced,” the old man declared proudly. Jim Berners had taken his horses over into Ohio and with Peter had won a race at a place called Fostoria and then that night the horse was taken violently ill and lying down in his stall quietly died. His owner had been in at the death and after the stallion was dead had walked about the dark race course the rest of the night and had decided to give up racing. “I took a turn about the track,” he said, “and stood a long time at the head of the stretch thinking of the times I had made the turn up there, with Peter leading all the other horses, and not half extending himself at that, and of how proud I had been so many times, sitting behind him and pretending to myself I was doing the job. I wasn’t doing a darned thing but sitting still and riding home in front. It was only after Peter died I ever told myself the truth.” “I stood up at the head of the stretch, as I said, and the moon came out and Peter was dead now and I decided to go home. And I had some thoughts that night about most human beings, including myself, that I haven’t ever forgot. I thought a lot of us were swine and the rest a kind of half-baked lot, put us against a horse like Peter had been. ‘And so,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll quit racing and go home and try to keep my mouth shut a good deal of the time.’ And I haven’t been too much stuck on myself or anyone else ever since.” NOTE X