About three hundred yards away the stable stood.
It was falling down and there had not been a horse in it in thirty years, yet it was toward the stable that he went.
He was walking quite fast.
He was thinking now, aloud now,
‘Why in hell do I want to smell horses?’
Then he said, fumbling:
“It’s because they are not women.
Even a mare horse is a kind of man.”
He slept less than two hours.
When he waked dawn was just beginning.
Lying in the single blanket upon the loosely planked floor of the sagging and gloomy cavern acrid with the thin dust of departed hay and faintly ammoniac with that breathless desertion of old stables, he could see through the shutterless window in the eastern wall the primrose sky and the high, pale morning star of full summer.
He felt quite rested, as if he had slept an unbroken eight hours.
It was the unexpected sleep, since he had not expected to sleep at all.
With his feet again in the unlaced shoes and the folded blanket beneath his arm he descended the perpendicular ladder, feeling for the rotting and invisible rungs with his feet, lowering himself from rung to rung in onehanded swoops.
He emerged into the gray and yellow of dawn, the clean chill, breathing it deep.
The cabin now stood sharp against the increasing east, and the clump of trees also within which the house was hidden save for the single chimney.
The dew was heavy in the tall grass.
His shoes were wet at once.
The leather was cold to his feet; against his bare legs the wet grass blades were like strokes of limber icicles.
Brown had stopped snoring.
When Christmas entered he could see Brown by the light from the eastern window.
He breathed quietly now.
‘Sober now,’ Christmas thought. ‘Sober and don’t know it.
Poor bastard.
He looked at Brown.
‘Poor bastard.
He’ll be mad when he wakes up and finds out that he is sober again.
Take him maybe a whole hour to get back drunk again.’
He put down the blanket and dressed, in the serge trousers, the white shirt a little soiled now, the bow tie.
He was smoking.
Nailed to the wall was a shard of mirror.
In the fragment he watched his dim face as he knotted the tie.
The stiff hat hung on a nail.
He did not take it down.
He took instead a cloth cap from another nail, and from the floor beneath his cot a magazine of that type whose covers bear either pictures of young women in underclothes or pictures of men in the act of shooting one another with pistols.
From beneath the pillow on his cot he took his razor and a brush and a stick of shaving soap and put them into his pocket.
When he left the cabin it was quite light.
The birds were in full chorus.
This time he turned his back on the house.
He went on past the stable and entered the pasture beyond it.
His shoes and his trouser legs were soon sopping with gray dew.
He paused and rolled his trousers gingerly to his knees and went on.
At the end of the pasture woods began.
The dew was not so heavy here, and he rolled his trousers down again.
After a while he came to a small valley in which a spring rose.
He put down the magazine and gathered twigs and dried brush and made a fire and sat, his back against a tree and his feet to the blaze.
Presently his wet shoes began to steam.
Then he could feel the heat moving up his legs, and then all of a sudden he opened his eyes and saw the high sun and that the fire had burned completely out, and he knew that he had been asleep.
‘Damned if I haven’t,’ he thought. ‘Damned if I haven’t slept again.’
He had slept more than two hours this time, because the sun was shining down upon the spring itself, glinting and glancing upon the ceaseless water.