st have air and
movement.

It was dusk now. The wailing of the old women had ceased. Doubtless they
were being rewarded with supper. He began stripping off his clothes--his
white shirt and his new suit of black. Eagerly rummaging in the closet he
found his old clothes, which he wore on his trips to the mountains.

In the dim light he slipped out of the house, indistinguishable from any
Mexican boy that might have been about the place. He saddled the little
mare in the corral, mounted and galloped away--through Old Town, where
skinny dogs roamed in dark narrow streets and men and women sat and smoked
in black doorways--and out upon the valley road. There he spurred his mare
without mercy, and they flew over the soft dust. The rush of the air in
his face, and the thud and quiver of living flesh under him were
infinitely sweet.

He stopped at last five miles from town on the bank of the river. It was a
swift muddy river, wandering about in a flood plain a quarter of a mile
wide, and at this point chewing noisily at a low bank forested with
scrubby cottonwoods.

Dismounting, he stripped and plunged into the river. It was only three
feet deep, but he wallowed about in it luxuriously, finding great comfort
in the caress of the cool water, and of the soft fine sand upon the bottom
which clung about his toes and tickled the soles of his feet. Then he
climbed out on the bank and stood where the breeze struck him, rubbing the
water off of his slim strong body with the flats of his hands.

When he had put on his clothes, he indulged his love of lying flat on the
ground, puffing a cigarette and blowing smoke at the first stars. A
hunting owl flitted over his head on muffled wing; a coyote yapped in the
bushes; high up in the darkness he heard the whistle of pinions as a flock
of early ducks went by.

He took the air deeply into his lungs and stretched out his legs. In this
place fear of hell departed from his mind as some strong liquors evaporate
when exposed to the open air. The splendid healthy animal in him was again
dominant, and it could scarcely conceive of death and had nothing more to
do with hell than had the owl and the coyote that killed to live. Here he
felt at peace with the earth beneath him and the sky above. But one
thought came to disturb him and it was also sweet--the thought of a woman,
her eyes full of promise, the curve of her mouth.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} She was waiting for
him, she would be his. That w