I can’t, of course, figure out what you try to think about when you are as desolate as I was that night. Maybe you are like me and inclined to think of women, and maybe you are like a man I met once, on the road, who told me that when he was up against it he never thought of anything but grub and a big nice clean warm bed to sleep in. “I don’t care about anything else and I don’t ever let myself think of anything else,” he said. “If I was like you and went to thinking about women sometime I’d find myself hooked up to some skirt, and she’d have the old double cross on me, and the rest of my life maybe I’d be working in some factory for her and her kids.”
As I say, there I was anyway, up there alone with that horse in that warm stall in that dark lonesome fair ground and I had that feeling about being sick at the thought of human beings and what they could be like.
Well, suddenly I got again the queer feeling I’d had about him once or twice before, I mean the feeling about our understanding each other in some way I can’t explain.
So having it again I went over to where he stood and began running my hands all over his body, just because I loved the feel of him and as sometimes, to tell the plain truth, I’ve felt about touching with my hands the body of a woman I’ve seen and who I thought was lovely too. I ran my hands over his head and neck and then down over his hard firm round body and then over his flanks and down his legs. His flanks quivered a little I remember and once he turned his head and stuck his cold nose down along my neck and nipped my shoulder a little, in a soft playful way. It hurt a little but I didn’t care.
So then I crawled up through a hole into the loft above thinking that night was over anyway and glad of it, but it wasn’t, not by a long sight.
As my clothes were all soaking wet and as we race track swipes didn’t own any such things as night-gowns or pajamas I had to go to bed naked, of course.
But we had plenty of horse blankets and so I tucked myself in between a pile of them and tried not to think any more that night. The being with Pick-it-boy and having him close right under me that way made me feel a little better.
Then I was sound asleep and dreaming and—bang like being hit with a club by someone who has sneaked up behind you—I got another wallop.
What I suppose is that, being upset the way I was, I had forgotten to bolt the door to Pick-it-boy’s stall down below and two negro men had come in there, thinking they were in their own place, and had climbed up through the hole where I was. They were half lit up but not what you might call dead drunk, and I suppose they were up against something a couple of white swipes, who had some money in their pockets, wouldn’t have been up against.
What I mean is that a couple of white swipes, having liquored themselves up and being down there in the town on a bat, if they wanted a woman or a couple of women would have been able to find them. There is always a few women of that kind can be found around any town I’ve ever seen or heard of, and of course a bar tender would have given them the tip where to go.