Did he mean in the mine or in his back?
‘Left me uncoupled. Too bad to spoil that vacation of yours this way.... Figured I could reach you by crawlin’—but played out—couldn’t make you hear in the night. Feared you might have gone back to town.’
Mr. Leadley couldn’t stand now, even with help. Elbert shouldered him at last; a long hard pull up to the cabin. No need for directions the latter part of the way, for a horse kept up an incessant nickering—like showers of gold coins falling upon a metal surface.
‘That’s Mamie. She ain’t been fed since yesterday mornin’,’ the old man apologized. ‘She never misses bestowin’ her welcomes, though it ain’t like her to be quite so noisy. She’s a real listener, too, Mamie is.’
A cabin in the midst of a group of great yellow pines. Elbert entered the open door, gasping with his burden. The old man’s tortured mouth still smiled up at him from the bunk. The room smelled like cigar-box wood. It was stuffed with chests, cupboards and cabinets—a hand-hewn room, with massive frame and heavy cedar shakes on the outside. Elbert brought water and started to unlace the nearest boot.
A ghost of the old chuckle and the words:
‘No, nothing for me, ’til you go feed Mamie. She ain’t used to bein’ treated like this—’
Half in a dream, Elbert went out to the little corral, lifting the wooden pin that let him in. The mare played curiously about him, but mainly kept her eyes to the cabin; her ears straight out for a voice from there. He only saw a bay butterball at first—shiny satin in the bright sunlight—a lot more rounded out than the wooden horse in the leather-store, not so tall as Cal Monroid’s Chester, which had stood in Elbert’s mind up to this moment as all that a horse could be.
He was thinking of the look he had seen in Bob Leadley’s face; and of the rock, too big for the small of a man’s back, and of feeding the mare before anything could be done. He dropped a measure of grain into the manger under the shed roof, but Mamie didn’t stay with it. She kept running up and down the corral, nickering softly, listening, her head cocked toward the cabin, her ears held forward pointing to the open door. She seemed appareled in sunshine.