It was almost like a voice. Elbert turned his eyes to the empty cot. It was as if he could see Mr. Leadley looking over the certificate of registration and writing down that remark—not having any one to speak aloud to. A lot of talk about Mamie’s father—too much silence about old Clara, he had probably thought. A little later as Elbert touched a match to some papers in the fireplace, these brief but laborious lines caught his eye:
‘... On looking him over at your request, Bob, I don’t feel troubled about his honesty, but I’m not so sure he’s real bright.’
It was the letter he had brought up trail from Mort Cotton that first day at San Forenso. Another proof that Mr. Leadley had been thinking of sending him down into Sonora for Bart, before the accident in the shaft. He had asked his old partner’s judgment. This reminded Elbert of Mr. Cotton’s first fierce appraisal of him in San Forenso. A low nicker reached him from the corral and a flushed smile came to his face, as he moved out.
Somehow in lifting the wooden pin of the cedar gate, the sense came over him again of the quality of the man whom he had known so well—just a pin of manzanito to hold the gate, but there was an art about the way the knots were cut. The mare came up to him nodding and stepping high with her front feet. She seemed to say that this conspiracy to keep her in the dark had gone far enough; that the time had come for her to know what was going on.
‘... And you’re to be mine, Mamie—from now on!’ Elbert muttered. He had been trying to get used to it for days. ‘What do you think about that? Not very much, I guess.... Not much more than Mort Cotton did, probably.’
The mare wasn’t telling. She was friendly, however, nudging under the arm, nosing at his hands and pockets.
‘Oh, I know what you want—a piece of cake.’
He went back to the cabin. The strangest feeling came over him in the shadows. This was his place to come and go in, but the fact was slow to settle in him. He missed his old friend and didn’t feel quite up to the reality of possession. One man’s whole life—these things represented—and a mare that couldn’t be bought.... There might have been some hope, the doctor had repeatedly suggested, if Mr. Leadley could have been moved down to San Forenso, but the old man had refused to hear to that. He had to come to his own conclusion, apparently. Days of just sitting around—Mort Cotton there, the doctor riding up to the claim every day—about as hard days as the young man had lived through so far.
The last chest was locked, the last cabinet.