Elbert moved to the door, his eyelids narrowed by the sunlight. He was ill, intolerably shaken, but the weary voice followed him. ‘I know it ain’t pleasant to hear, young man. It ain’t been pleasant to live through--that night, nor for a dozen years. It don’t get no better, but you’ve got to know. And there’s only a little more--’ Elbert braced for the rest. What called his will-power to bear it was that he was only listening to a story a dozen years later, and this man had lived through the action of it--had heard the sounds--had lost his boy--just a note pinned to the saddle, all that was left. The old man turned his face away. ‘I guess that’s about talk enough from me right now,’ he said after a moment, ‘only that when we got back to Bismo, they entered a murder charge against Bart. ‘Mebbe it was murder Letchie,’ Mort Cotton said at the hearin’, ‘but the most merciful bullet I ever heard fired, was that one of Bart’s just ’fore he rid out of Red Ante.’ But no words of Mort’s or mine did any good.... You can go down trail now. Mort’ll tell you the rest, if I don’t get to it--’ VI THE LISTENING MARE TWO weeks later Elbert was closing up the cabin. He had been through all the papers. There was one having to do with the lineage of Ganopol, a running horse, with lines tracing back to Europe and the Near East, and the days when man and horse were mates of the world. Names--feminine names of the desert like those of the Old Testament, for the horse-lines of Araby were kept from mother to daughter and not from father to son--‘The Listening Mares.’ There were sweet meadow names of England ... there was a remark in pencil on one corner of the big sheet: ‘Her pedigree isn’t any longer than a piece of burnt string, and where she got herself from, I’m not prepared to state, but for a horse to sit on and come across with good sense, little Mamie’s mother, old Clara, was sure a triumph of breeding--’ It was almost like a voice. Elbert turned his eyes to the empty cot. It was as if he could see Mr. Leadley looking over the certificate of registration and writing down that remark--not having any one to speak aloud to. A lot of talk about Mamie’s father--too much silence about old Clara, he had probably thought. A little later as Elbert touched a match to some papers in the fireplace, these brief but laborious lines caught his eye: ‘... On looking him over at your request, Bob, I don’t feel troubled about his honesty, but I’m not so sure he’s real bright.’ It was the letter he had brought up trail from Mort Cotton that first day at San Forenso. Another proof that Mr. Leadley had been thinking of sending him down into Sonora for Bart, before the accident in the shaft. He had asked his old partner’s judgment. This reminded Elbert of Mr. Cotton’s first fierce appraisal of him in San Forenso. A low nicker reached him from the corral and a flushed smile came to his face, as he moved out.