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Updated: May 15, 2025
"Holley, I reckon you see clearer 'n me," said Bostil, plaintively. "'Pears as if I never had a hard knock before. Fer my nerve's broke. I can't hope.... Lucy's gone! ... Ain't there anythin' to do but wait?" "Thet's all. Jest wait. If we went out on Joel's trail we'd queer the chance of Creech's bein' honest. An' we'd queer Slone's game. I'd hate to have him trailin' me."
"CORDTS!" Bostil leaned forward in sudden, fierce eagerness. "Yes, Cordts.... His outfit run across Creech's trail an' we bunched. I can't tell now.... But we had hell! An' Cordts is dead so's Hutch an' that other pard of his.... Bostil, they'll never haunt your sleep again!" Slone finished with a strange sternness that seemed almost bitter. Bostil raised both his huge fists.
The meetings with Creech, the strange, sneaking actions of young Joel Creech, and especially the gossip of riders about the improvement in Creech's swift horse these things appeared to loom larger and larger and to augment in Bostil's mind the monstrous idea which he could not shake off. So he became brooding and gloomy.
The story of the poem, like most of my poems, is connected with my own story, and to give you the one, I must give you something of the other. I cannot boast of Mr. Creech's ingenuous fair dealing to me.
He could not understand why he was kept hanging on from month to month. This was a way of doing business quite new to him, and after being put off again and again he at last began to suspect that there was something wrong. He doubted Creech's solvency; doubted even his honesty. More than ever was he eager to be settled in life, and he fretted under commercial delays he could not understand.
Bostil's outward appearance and his speech and action never reflected all the workings of his mind. No one would ever know the depth of his bitter disappointment at the outcome of the race. With Creech's Blue Roan out of the way, another horse, swifter and more dangerous, had come along to spoil the King's chance.
And Lucy saw that at the sight of her like this something had come between Joel Creech's mad motives and their execution. Once he had loved her desired her. He looked vague. He stroked her shoulder. His strange eyes softened, then blazed with a different light. Lucy divined that she was lost unless she could recall his insane fury.
As he did so he thought of Creech and a blackness enfolded him. He forgot Creech's horses. Something gripped him, burned him some hard and bitter feeling which he thought was hate of Creech. Again the wave of fire ran over him, and his huge hands strained on the cables. The fiend of that fiendish river had entered his soul. He meant ruin to a man. He meant more than ruin.
"So help me Gawd I'm sorry!" was his broken exclamation. Slone had forgotten himself and possible revelation concerning him. But when Holley appeared close to him with a significant warning look, Slone grew keen once more on his own account. He felt a hot flame inside him a deep and burning anger at the man who might have saved Creech's horses.
No horse could outrun wind-driven fire in a dry pine forest. Slone had no hope of that. How perfectly fate and time and place and horses, himself and his sweetheart, had met! Slone damned Joel Creech's insane soul to everlasting torment. To think to think his idiotic and wild threat had come true and come true with a gale in the pine-tops!
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