Candy and Lennie stood up and went toward the door.
Crooks called,
“Candy!”
“Huh?”
“’Member what I said about hoein’ and doin’ odd jobs?”
“Yeah,” said Candy. “I remember.”
“Well, jus’ forget it,” said Crooks. “I didn’t mean it. Jus’ foolin’.
I wouldn’ want to go no place like that.”
“Well, O.K., if you feel like that.
Good night.”
The three men went out of the door.
As they went through the barn the horses snorted and the halter chains rattled.
Crooks sat on his bunk and looked at the door for a moment, and then he reached for the liniment bottle.
He pulled out his shirt in back, poured a little liniment in his pink palm and, reaching around, he fell slowly to rubbing his back.
Tne end of the great barn was piled high with new hay and over the pile hung the four-taloned Jackson fork suspended from its pulley.
The hay came down like a mountain slope to the other end of the barn, and there was a level place as yet unfilled with the new crop.
At the sides the feeding racks were visible, and between the slats the heads of horses could be seen.
It was Sunday afternoon.
The resting horses nibbled the remaining wisps of hay, and they stamped their feet and they bit the wood of the mangers and rattled the halter chains.
The afternoon sun sliced in through the cracks of the barn walls and lay in bright lines on the hay.
There was the buzz of flies in the air, the lazy afternoon humming.
From outside came the clang of horseshoes on the playing peg and the shouts of men, playing, encouraging, jeering.
But in the barn it was quiet and humming and lazy and warm.
Only Lennie was in the barn, and Lennie sat in the hay beside a packing case under a manger in the end of the barn that had not been filled with hay.
Lennie sat in the hay and looked at a little dead puppy that lay in front of him.
Lennie looked at it for a long time, and then he put out his huge hand and stroked it, stroked it clear from one end to the other. And Lennie said softly to the puppy,
“Why do you got to get killed?
You ain’t so little as mice.
I didn’t bounce you hard.” He bent the pup’s head up and looked in its face, and he said to it, “Now maybe George ain’t gonna let me tend no rabbits, if he fin’s out you got killed.”
He scooped a little hollow and laid the puppy in it and covered it over with hay, out of sight; but he continued to stare at the mound he had made.
He said,
“This ain’t no bad thing like I got to go hide in the brush.
Oh! no.
This ain’t.
I’ll tell George I foun’ it dead.”
He unburied the puppy and inspected it, and he stroked it from ears to tail.
He went on sorrowfully,
“But he’ll know.
George always knows.
He’ll say,
‘You done it.
Don’t try to put nothing over on me.’
An’ he’ll say,
‘Now jus’ for that you don’t get to tend no rabbits!’”
Suddenly his anger arose.
“God damn you,” he cried. “Why do you got to get killed?
You ain’t so little as mice.” He picked up the pup and hurled it from him. He turned his back on it.
He sat bent over his knees and he whispered, “Now I won’t get to tend the rabbits.
Now he won’t let me.”
He rocked himself back and forth in his sorrow.