So we would set off, going, not into the town to try to get in with some of the town girls, who might have taken up with us because we were strangers and race track fellows, but out into the country. Sometimes we got into a hilly country and there was a moon. The leaves were falling off the trees and lay in the road so that we kicked them up with the dust as we went along. To tell the truth I suppose I got to love Tom Means, who was five years older than me, although I wouldn’t have dared say so, then. Americans are shy and timid about saying things like that and a man here don’t dare own up he loves another man, I’ve found out, and they are afraid to admit such feelings to themselves even. I guess they’re afraid it may be taken to mean something it don’t need to at all. Anyway we walked along and some of the trees were already bare and looked like people standing solemnly beside the road and listening to what we had to say. Only I didn’t say much. Tom Means did most of the talking. Sometimes we came back to the race track and it was late and the moon had gone down and it was dark. Then we often walked round and round the track, sometimes a dozen times, before we crawled into the hay to go to bed. Tom talked always on two subjects, writing and race horses, but mostly about race horses. The quiet sounds about the race tracks and the smells of horses, and the things that go with horses, seemed to get him all excited. “Oh, hell, Herman Dudley,” he would burst out suddenly, “don’t go talking to me. I know what I think. I’ve been around more than you have and I’ve seen a world of people. There isn’t any man or woman, not even a fellow’s own mother, as fine as a horse, that is to say a thoroughbred horse.” Sometimes he would go on like that a long time, speaking of people he had seen and their characteristics. He wanted to be a writer later and what he said was that when he came to be one he wanted to write the way a well bred horse runs or trots or paces. Whether he ever did it or not I can’t say. He has written a lot, but I’m not too good a judge of such things. Anyway I don’t think he has. But when he got on the subject of horses he certainly was a darby. I would never have felt the way I finally got to feel about horses or enjoyed my stay among them half so much if it hadn’t been for him. Often he would go on talking for an hour maybe, speaking of horses’ bodies and of their minds and wills as though they were human beings. “Lord help us, Herman,” he would say, grabbing hold of my arm, “don’t it get you up in the throat? I say now, when a good one, like that Lumpy Joe I’m swiping, flattens himself at the head of the stretch and he’s coming, and you know he’s coming, and you know his heart’s sound, and he’s game, and you know he isn’t going to let himself get licked—don’t it get you Herman, don’t it get you like the old Harry?”