‘What you need is hardenin’, young feller, and that comes gradual. You’ve been sittin’ on cushions all your life and a stock-saddle ain’t like that. The soft side of a stock-saddle is placed next to a horse. You got to learn to fit to it, because it’s made not to give. After that, you’ve got to learn to ride easy. It ain’t like sittin’ on a box in a grocery store. You can always tell a man with no sense to a horse, sitting up and takin’ it for granted, that a horse is meant to carry him. A man’s weight’s got to be alive--part of his horse--not a dead weight like a pack-mule carries. Bob Leadley used to say a good deal at the last that there’s plenty of good “riders” but only one in a hundred real horsemen.’ ‘I’ve heard him say that,’ said Elbert. Times like this, he wished Mort Cotton wouldn’t stop. The old cattleman was altogether unlike Mr. Leadley, but the two had been so much together, that a feeling of closeness to Bart’s father came to him as he talked and rode with Mort. There was much still he needed to know about the old days. ‘... I wasted a lot of time hatin’ Letchie Welton,’ Mort Cotton once said. ‘But there’s no good in that. Old Bob found that out, too. You wouldn’t fancy him a fightin’ man, but I saw him flare up. Letchie Welton can thank me that he lived for Lon Bimlock to kill him. It was at the hearin’ back in Bismo, and Letchie was tellin’ our fellow townsmen that he had a suspicion right at the beginning that Bart was in with the other three in the murder of old Batten. That, he said, was why he insisted on Bart bein’ allowed to ride on with the posse--so he could watch him. As it happened Bart got away. No question in his mind, Letchie Welton gave down at the hearin’, but that Bart had killed Palto to prevent him squealin’, before ridin’ out to connect up with his share of the loot. “Didn’t he want to stay up all night in order to let Palto go free?” Letchie wanted to know.... As I say, I had my work cut out to keep old Bob from killin’ our deputy sheriff that day. ‘... No, sir, we weren’t exactly right--never have been, Bob and me, since that night in Red Ante,’ Mr. Cotton observed, another time. ‘They talk of shell-shock these days. It wasn’t shells that got us, but we were shocked men just the same. It worked this way: We never could stay long where men were--never could get along in the settlements any length of time. We took up prospectin’ to get up into the mountains alone, but we couldn’t be too close, even to each other, for very long. I’ve seen Bob go apart to smoke of an evenin’, after we’d worked separate ridges all day, and I’ve felt the same way. It was quite a while before we came to know we were so different. I began to see it in Bob, and gradually it worked out that he could see it in me.