He had told Bart that he was getting to like it, but that didn’t become wholly true until quite a number of days had passed. Again and again he felt his jaw hardening, his lips pressed together; gradually his fears fell away and the silence bit into the very center of his being. He became a part of the outer silence of the days, a part of the fierce still sunlight that slowly blackened his hands and face. He looked back upon his dreams in the room at home, remembering the things he had treasured there--Indian blankets, pictures, leather work--all had meant something. Out of these kid treasures and symbols, Cal and Slim had come to life, Heaslep’s, Nacimiento, San Pasquali; Bob Leadley, Bismo on the Rio Brava, Red Ante, the Dry Cache mine; Sonora, the cells, the corner of the wall, flight from the rurales, El Relicario. He could shut his eyes and think way back to the very beginning--hear the swish of motor cars from his bedroom window, the sound of the piano below, the sounds of his phonograph, and that last swung him swiftly across the continent to the Plaza at Los Angeles--‘Cuando sali--’ and the leather-store. All these a part of him now, but in the beginning there had only been a little room of books and pictures and yearnings--yearnings that finally drove him out to find his Crimson Foam. Something else he had found--that still room in Tucson. Not a symbol of that in his father’s house--oh, yes, of course, the alabaster bowl in the dining-room! His thin lips stretched into the beginnings of a smile. He had heard it said that each day brings to a man nine parts review and one part advance work. Everything seemed like review to him now--the whole circle rounded (at least, it would be when Bart and he were safely over the Border into the States) everything review, except that still room in Tucson. Very much advance work, that. His heart pumped so that he could actually hear its beat. Sometimes he felt, if he could get a little deeper into the silence, he would know all about--even that. Anyway, it began to dawn on him that everything would have been spoiled if he had rushed north alone, leaving Bart--that the greatest adventure of all lay right in the core of these days of solitude and silence. One night he felt like a different man altogether, as he started down toward El Relicario in the dusk. XXVII WORDS ‘YOU see, I was lazy--no two ways about it--lazy, from the very beginning,’ Bart said during one of the night-talks. ‘I can see how Dad felt now. I didn’t know any better than to think he was against me in those days. I got the feeling I was wronged, and that’s bad. It’s bad to let that wronged feeling pile up in a kid’s chest, until there is no seeing it any other way. The thing that hurt me most was about that horse--old Rat-tail from the Cup Q.’ Elbert kept still with effort. He knew the story of the rat-tail from Bob Leadley’s telling, almost as well as Bart did, but the latter got to talking too rarely to be interrupted.