It didn’t seem to be a deep matter to Mr. Leadley, his eyes were so pleasant. ‘They’re peaceful to be with, like cattle,’ he went on. ‘I lived on a farm back East when I was a boy, and my father and mother used to fight a whole lot--at supper, especially. I ’member often goin’ out in the barnyard, and how peaceful it was, after the supper table. I don’t mean Mexicans are cattle, you understand, only that they loll around and ruminate peaceful, like cattle.’ Elbert waited for more, and what came had a world of feeling in it that he didn’t understand. It seemed the night was chillier, but the gentle tone hadn’t changed. ‘We used to call ’em greasers and shoot ’em up a lot, not thinkin’ much about it. We used to hang ’em for hoss-thieves, when a sheriff wanted to make a showin’. Thought little more of ’em than a Chinee, only diff’rent. Young punchers and miners--we thought we was the people--’ The voice stopped so suddenly Elbert felt queer. ‘You didn’t tell me, why you have reason to remember “La Paloma,”’ he said, looking across at the red lights of ‘Estella Teatro.’ ‘I’ve got a boy about your size, I figure, somewhere south in Sonora--’ The words fanned to life the romantic pictures of Elbert’s private world--‘somewhere south in Sonora--’ ‘He used to like that song--used to whistle and sing it at all times. A dozen years since I saw him. He was under fifteen then--that would make him about your age now. You’re pretty good size, but I think he’d show up a speck taller by this time.’ ‘What’s your son doing down there?’ ‘Well, I only hear from him occasionally, through the papers. Must be excitin’ work, having to do with the rurales, mostly. Some calls it politics in Mexico.... Maybe they’ll play that again--if we sit down for a spell.’ And now Elbert was hearing the story of a boy, called Bart--no mother--life in a mining camp on the Rio Brava, Arizona--a sorry sort of helpless attachment in the father. ‘The very night Bart came to town, before even the old Mexican nurse let me in, I knew my job was cut out,’ Mr. Leadley said. Sentences like these stood out in the midst of detail: ‘I had everything mapped out for him, but he wouldn’t follow the map. That broke me, because I mapped so hard and set so much store.... Bit by bit Bart showed me he’d have his way--taking his whippings easy, looking white, but ready to laugh, and going his own way just the same afterward. I never seemed able to do the right thing by him; couldn’t let him alone; cared too much, I guess--the kind of care that hurts. Why, I’d get lonesome for him when he was right in the room, and flare up over things I’d never dream of getting sore about in any one else. Altogether, what I didn’t know in them days was so much, young man, that I’ve been fillin’ in ever since, and ain’t through yet.’ IV ‘ARE YOU DOOMED?’