It’s something in us that wants to be big and grand and important maybe and won’t let us just be, like a horse or a dog or a bird can. Let’s say Pick-it-boy had won his race that day. He did that pretty often that summer. Well, he was neither proud, like I would have been in his place, or mean in one part of the inside of him either. He was just himself, doing something with a kind of simplicity. That’s what Pick-it-boy was like and I got to feeling it in him as I walked with him slowly in the gathering darkness. I got inside him in some way I can’t explain and he got inside me. Often we would stop walking for no cause and he would put his nose up against my face. I wished he was a girl sometimes or that I was a girl and he was a man. It’s an odd thing to say but it’s a fact. Being with him that way, so long, and in such a quiet way, cured something in me a little. Often after an evening like that I slept all right and did not have the kind of dreams I’ve spoken about. But I wasn’t cured for very long and couldn’t get cured. My body seemed all right and just as good as ever but there wasn’t no pep in me. Then the fall got later and later and we came to the last town we were going to make before my owner laid his horses up for the winter, in his home town over across the State line in Ohio, and the track was up on a hill, or rather in a kind of high plain above the town. It wasn’t much of a place and the sheds were rather rickety and the track bad, especially at the turns. As soon as we got to the place and got stabled it began to rain and kept it up all week so the fair had to be put off. As the purses weren’t very large a lot of the owners shipped right out but our owner stayed. The fair owners guaranteed expenses, whether the races were held the next week or not. And all week there wasn’t much of anything for Burt and me to do but clean manure out of the stalls in the morning, watch for a chance when the rain let up a little to jog the horses around the track in the mud and then clean them off, blanket them and stick them back in their stalls. It was the hardest time of all for me. Burt wasn’t so bad off as there were a dozen or two blacks around and in the evening they went off to town, got liquored-up a little and came home late, singing and talking, even in the cold rain. And then one night I got mixed up in the thing I’m trying to tell you about. * * * * * It was a Saturday evening and when I look back at it now it seems to me everyone had left the tracks but just me. In the early evening swipe after swipe came over to my stall and asked me if I was going to stick around. When I said I was he would ask me to keep an eye out for him, that nothing happened to his horse. “Just take a stroll down that way now and then, eh, kid,” one of them would say, “I just want to run up to town for an hour or two.”