Yeah. Yeah. It was one of them things. After Ditsy—why, he kind of went haywire. I tried talking to him. Thought if he got to riding again it would take his mind off what it was brooding on. No, no, they never did catch whoever done it. I wish they had of. If I could of got just within reaching distance—
No, Jimmie would not pay no attention to me. He would just set there staring straight ahead and sometimes he would look at me like he could see clean through my backbone and out the other side.
"Do not bother none, Jacks," he would say. "You do not understand. It was my fault. I should of knowed."
And I would say, "Do not be like that. Them ... them kind of accidents is figured out statistical. You could not of knowed in a million years."
"I was wrong. I was the one who had the blind abscess. Not Ditsy," he would say. Morose, see. Only I thought he would snap out of it, eventual. But he does not. When he snaps, he snaps the other way.
I remember the night that he done it. I set up with him until midnight talking up Parvalu, which Colonel Crandall wanted him to ride in the Bay Shore. I says, "Look here, Jimmie, if you will just get out and mix around some, you will be O. K." And I says, "Do not forget what you always said: 'You can shake grief or sorrow, you can bury remorse—but you can't never lose the feel o' a horse.'"
"Yeah," he says, and he looks at me for the first time like he really sees me. "Yeah," he says, straightening up, "you can shake grief or sorrow, you can bury remorse ... bury remorse—"
"But you can't never lose the feel o' a horse," I finishes for him.
"Yeah," he says—slow. "Yeah, that is it."
So I goes home brightened up, thinking I has at last got him squared around and the next morning—it is in the papers.